Exotic Affairs(126)

‘That is a lie!’ he barked. The car swerved precariously. Caroline’s heart leapt to her throat and stayed there while she clung on for dear life.

Don’t argue with him! she told herself frantically. Ignore him and just let him get you down this wretched mountain in one whole piece!

But she couldn’t seem to stop the words from coming. They burst forth from the cold dark place she had been keeping them hidden ever since she had read the full horrible truth about the Vazquez family.

‘A few months later your mother married Don Carlos—with her lover’s child already spawned in her belly. That child was you, Felipe,’ she persisted, quoting almost verbatim Luiz’s father’s own wretched words. ‘Your real father was Don Carlos’s best friend. His married friend!’ she declared. ‘And the moment you opened your eyes on the morning you were born he saw his best friend looking back at him and knew—knew he had been tricked and used and betrayed by your mother to secure her own future at the expense of her sister’s! Since that same day Luiz has always been his father’s heir and you have never been led to think otherwise!’

‘How the hell do you know all of this?’ Felipe rasped, beginning, for the first time, to sound choked by his own wretched lies.

‘From Don Carlos himself,’ she said. ‘He kept detailed diaries of everything that happened, including the years he spent looking for Serena and his true son and the fact that he never kept any of this secret from you.’

‘I hated the bastard,’ Felipe gritted. ‘He spent thirty-four years of my life mourning a son he never knew while I was right there, waiting to be loved if he could only see it!’

‘He was wrong to treat you like that,’ Caroline acknowledged. ‘But two wrongs don’t make a right, Felipe! And what you are doing here now is wrong—can’t you see that?’

She hoped she was getting through to him. She hoped that she could make him see sense, maybe even turn them around and take her back again!

But he suddenly growled out the kind of curse that said a monster had taken over his soul right now, and with a lurch he threw them round another corner, sending the headlamps scanning out across a terrible nothingness that locked a silent scream into Caroline’s throat.

They hit a deep rut in the road. The scream found full voice as Felipe began to struggle with the wheel. He was cursing and cursing, and she was screaming, and the car was careering all over the place.

They were going to die; she was sure of it! They were going to tumble off the edge of the cliff and never be found! Sheer terror made her grab hold of the handbrake. Sheer terror made her yank it on hard. On a squeal of hot rubber the car gave a lurch, then began skidding sideways while she sat there and watched in open-eyed horror as they slid closer and closer to the edge of the ravine.

Then they hit something solid—a rock on the edge? She didn’t know, but they began lurching back the way they had come. Then, just when she thought the car was going to stop safely, it hit something else, made a terrible groan and toppled very gently onto its side.

Shocked and dizzyingly disorientated, Caroline sat for a few moments, not actually remembering where she was. Then her head began to hurt, and it all came flooding sickeningly back as she lifted her fingers to gently touch the sore area by her temple, realising that she must have hit her head and been knocked out for a while.

Most definitely frightened of what she might find, she turned to look at Felipe. He was at the very least unconscious, sitting hunched over the steering wheel and slightly below her because of the drunken angle of the car.

Carefully, fearfully almost, she reached out and touched her fingers to his neck. She could feel living warmth there and a shimmer of a pulse. ‘Oh, thank God,’ she breathed out shakily. She closed her eyes and said it again. ‘Thank God.’

What now? Where are we? How badly placed are we regarding the ravine? What do I do?

It was then she realised that the car headlights were still burning. With the greatest of care she tried edging herself forward so she could peer out of the car windscreen. It was a miracle it hadn’t shattered, she supposed. Beyond it she could just make out in the lights good solid road and the ravine edge, way over to her right.

They must have keeled over into a ditch near the mountain, she realised. And it was such a relief to know it that she relaxed back in the seat with a sigh and took a few moments to let her heart-rate steady before she attempted to get out.

Felipe had locked the doors, she remembered. But surely there was something somewhere she could pull or push to make them unlock again? With shaky fingers scrambling over pitch black metal and leather, she managed to find something on the door that felt as if it would pull up, tugged it and heard the lock spring free.