A Fiery Baptism

Karen’s voice exploded in her ear. ‘Why aren’t you circulating?’

Karen wasn’t real. Gordon wasn’t real. The only reality was Rafael, even when Karen was blocking her view. He had not needed to speak to brutally intimate his savage contempt for her as a woman. He only had to sit there letting that tramp practically make love to him in public! She read the message like the banner he intended it to be and she felt ill, cornered.

‘Por dios, this world is truly a small place.’ Sarah’s head jerked up, a row of spectral toothmarks biting into her jangled nerves, her pallor pronounced.

Rafael had moved. He stood over her now, casting a long dark shadow before he crouched down in front of her with a natural athlete’s grace. So close, so unexpected was it that it took every atom of will-power she possessed not to rear back. Somewhere Karen was loudly proclaiming an introduction.

‘Sarah and I know each other.’ He said it to her, nobody else, his tiger’s eyes a golden threat on her white immobility.

‘You know each other?’ Karen positively squealed, hanging over the back of the sofa. ‘Where from?’

A smile slashed Rafael’s expressive mouth. A long brown forefinger skated over Sarah’s fiercely clenched hands, a mountain cat taking a first playful swipe at a trapped prey, frozen with fear. ‘Where from?’ he prompted silky soft. ‘Am I so easily, so quickly forgotten?’

Only desperation came to her rescue. ‘Paris, wasn’t it?’ she managed tautly.

‘When I was still starving in my garret, although not alone,’ he mocked, velvety smooth, smiling again as her trembling fingers snaked jerkily back out of reach. ‘I believe I was part of the Francophile experience.’ Slowly he sprang upright again, still ignoring Gordon. ‘Es verdad?’

‘Boy, have you got some explaining to do!’ Karen snapped painfully close to her eardrum as he walked away. ‘Give me an inch, Gordon, there’s a love. This is girl-talk, utterly beneath your notice. Sarah, you couldn’t possibly have forgotten him!’

‘To think that I once believed that the Spanish were a uniquely courteous race,’ Gordon drawled. ‘Shall we sample supper?’

Karen cut in on him, ‘Sarah, tell me—’

‘You don’t need a public address system, do you?’ Gordon detached Sarah’s numbed arm from Karen’s over-enthusiastic grip. They were a hair’s breadth from fighting over her, Sarah realised on the brink of hysteria. Rafael’s behaviour had shocked her into dumb stupidity. She couldn’t have made small talk to save her life.

‘Paris,’ said Karen and suddenly she burst out laughing. ‘Of course! He was one of Margo’s and you never did tell tales.’

Karen had herded them both into the dining-room. She was chatting nineteen to the dozen now, glad to have solved the mystery so easily. ‘We all thought it was a scream when Sarah’s parents let her go and stay in Paris with Margo. Easter in Upper Sixth, wasn’t it?’

Gordon passed out plates. ‘Margo?’ he prompted obediently.

Sarah parted bone-dry lips. ‘Margo Carruthers. Her father had an engineering business in Paris.’

‘Sarah used to sleep in French class,’ Karen took up impatiently. ‘And her parents put French on a level with flower arranging and good carriage.’

‘I went to Paris to improve my French.’ Sarah had to fight to keep her voice level on the unnecessary explanation.

Karen was giggling like a drain.

‘I’m afraid I don’t see the joke,’ Gordon imparted.

Karen gave him a ‘you-wouldn’t’ look. ‘Margo was sex mad. Anything in trousers,’ she emphasised. ‘But she acted like a little novice nun round parents. You must know what the Southcotts are like. If they’d had a clue what Margo’s favourite pursuit was, they’d never have let Sarah within a mile of her exclusive company!’

‘Teenagers are very vulnerable,’ Gordon said coolly.

‘You can’t know the Southcotts very well. When there was a flu outbreak at school, they kept Sarah home for a whole six weeks!’ Karen sent Sarah’s shuttered face a guilty glance. ‘Sorry, forgot you were there. Where are you in this conversation, anyway?’

Karen’s sister came up and whispered something. ‘No!’ Karen exclaimed in angry vexation. ‘Excuse me. Someone’s been in my dark-room.’

‘I hope we can assume that the interrogation is over,’ Gordon said grimly. ‘Alejandro had one hell of a nerve forcing himself on you like that. But then what can you expect from a gypsy?’

An extraordinary urge to slap the complacent superiority from Gordon’s well-bred features assailed Sarah. Karen’s assumption that Rafael had been one of Margo’s men had filled her with embittered humour. Even her closest friend couldn’t imagine any more intimate connection between them. Only the devil’s idea of a black joke could have matched two such radically different personalities. And why had she had to go to hell and back to discover what was so obvious to everyone else? The North Pole and the equator did not meet.

Gordon hailed a familiar face with relief. Another dinner-jacket and bow-tie. A man with a thin blonde on his arm shook her hand, spoke, and she must have spoken back. The dialogue roamed from government cuts to the Booker Prize on to Wall Street. Gordon was in his element. They worked their passage slowly back to the lounge, a comfortable part of a foursome, but shock was still curdling Sarah’s stomach. Nervous tension always made her feel sick.

Rafael was leaning back against the wall. He didn’t have a restful bone in his superbly built body. He was never still even when he was working. Oh, God…oh… In despair, she struggled to suppress the memories chipping away at what little remained of her poise. As people pushed past, propelling her uncomfortably closer to Rafael, Gordon draped an unexpected arm round her narrow shoulders. Rafael’s lady friend was tugging at his sleeve, her other hand resting on his chest. Sarah was reminded of a red setter bouncing up and down with a lead in its mouth, begging for a walk. Repulsion slithered through her. Some cruel fate had decided to punish her tonight.

‘I think it’s time we went home.’ It was Gordon’s clipped drawl.

‘Yes, it’s getting late.’ She had no idea what time it was, how long it might have been since she had finally contrived to wrench her magnetised attention from Rafael.

Gordon steered her out to the hall with surprising speed. ‘I’ll collect your coat.’

A chill was spreading along her veins. She would phone Karen tomorrow. In all likelihood, Karen would not even recall that she had left without speaking to her. Before she could take refuge in that hope, Karen emerged from the lounge and hurried over to her.

‘Will someone please tell me what was going on in there?’ she hissed.

‘Sorry, I don’t…’

‘Gordon and Rafael Alejandro. For a minute I thought there might be a punch-up but Gordon predictably opted for the diplomatic retreat. Talk about instant antipathy and not a word exchanged!’ Karen giggled. ‘You don’t mean to say you didn’t notice all that silent flexing of male egos? You’re blind, Sarah.’

Gordon appeared in the midst of these unwelcome confidences. Smoothly cutting in on Karen, he mentioned an early morning meeting with just the right touch of polished regret.

‘Phone me when you get home,’ Karen mouthed, unimpressed.

There was silence in the lift. Her high heels clicked noisily over the pavement. Gordon unlocked the passenger door of his Porsche. Her hands were trembling. She clasped them together on her lap. When a taxi cut in front of them, Gordon cursed, which was most unlike him.

‘It was you in Paris with Alejandro,’ he murmured flatly, abruptly.

Sarah shut her eyes. ‘Yes.’

Silence stretched but mentally she imagined that she heard the crash as she fell off her ladylike pedestal.

‘Just yes?’ Gordon queried, crunching the gears at the traffic lights. He was revealing a flip side character unfamiliar to her. ‘It’s none of my business, but he upset you.’

She straightened out her coiled fingers, rearranging her hands with the care of a small child mindful of adult appraisal. ‘I’m not very good with surprise encounters. I didn’t expect to ever see him again.’

‘You were still at school! What kind of a…?’ His voice broke off harshly.

Sooner or later, Gordon and Karen would both add two and two and make four. She had fallen in love when she was eighteen. Love had sent her off the rails. Love had plunged her into a kind of compulsive insanity that had left her at the mercy of emotions she could neither understand nor control.

For the first time in her life, someone had had more power over her than her parents. The Southcotts had been faced with someone as strong-willed, as ruthlessly manipulative and possessive as they were themselves. Battle had commenced with a vengeance. Stranded in the middle of the war zone, already sinking beneath the pressures of a relationship in which she was hopelessly out of her depth, Sarah had slowly been torn in two.

Rafael was the estranged and unrepentantly unfaithful husband who had had the unmitigated gall to refuse her a divorce. The high-powered lawyer her father had hired had tried repeatedly to break the deadlock. He had failed. Had Sarah been prepared to prove Rafael’s adultery, she would not have required his consent to a divorce. But Sarah had not been prepared to grasp that stinging nettle. Indeed she had shrunk from the threat of the publicity that would have accompanied a contested case. And three months from now the five-year time limit would be up. Technical freedom would be hers once more.

And what difference would it make to her? Sarah had stopped feeling married in the white-walled prison of a luxurious private clinic while she had waited…and she waited for a man who never arrived. What did it do to a woman when she offered understanding, if not forgiveness, and even understanding was rejected? Why had she even bothered to write to him? Time and time again she had asked herself that question. In her darkest hour she had offered an olive branch…in her own parlance, she had crawled. Her husband had committed adultery. And she had crawled. For nothing. That was what was still burned into her soul. She had put her pride on the line for nothing.

It was a blessing that nobody knew his identity. Her parents had gone to great lengths right from the beginning to bury all the evidence. When she had failed to return from Paris, they had told the school that she was ill and when time wore on that she was convalescing abroad. Rafael’s starburst ascent from impoverishment to success beyond anyone’s wildest dreams was a savage irony. ‘An offence against good taste,’ her mother had called it.

She rested her aching head back while Gordon drove her home to her small Kensington flat. ‘I wish you’d talk to me,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry.’

At the door of her flat, he caught her wrist between his fingers. Suddenly he was kissing her, the pressure of his mouth warm and practised on hers. She endured the embrace passively. Unmoving, unresponsive. To respond you had to feel something. Sarah felt nothing beyond an awkward sense of embarrassment.

Gordon drew back, a faint flush on his cheekbones. ‘I don’t win any prizes for timing, do I?’ But he smiled down at her, restored to his normally even temper. ‘I’ll call you.’

Karen had once told her that no man ever believed his interest might be unwelcome to a woman. And Gordon was a very confident man, calmly proving the concept. At the start of the evening the mere idea of Gordon kissing her would have been enough to alarm Sarah, but Rafael had already sent her crashing through the shock barrier.

‘I’ll be very busy this week,’ she replied.

His mouth quirked but he said nothing, standing there until she was safely indoors. Dropping her coat on the hall chair, she kicked off her shoes and walked into the lounge.

Her babysitter was already bundling up her books. ‘You’re early. I didn’t expect you for ages yet.’

‘I was tired.’ Sarah dug into her purse and paid the teenager, who lived just across the corridor. ‘Any problems?’

‘Oh, no!’ Angela grinned, digging the notes deep into the pocket of her skin-tight jeans. ‘I let them watch the late film with me,’ she then conceded carelessly. ‘I’ll let myself out.’

Sarah wandered over to the sideboard and withdrew the bottle of brandy which she kept for her father’s occasional consumption. She was pouring a measure into a crystal glass when she thought she heard Angela speaking to someone. With a frown she lifted her head just as the front door rocked on the teenager’s noisy slam, making her wince.

Angela was trustworthy and sensible but she had a soft-hearted tendency to give way to Gilly and Ben’s pleas to get back out of bed. Give the twins an inch and they took a mile. Tomorrow they would be overtired and cross. Tomorrow…her hand shook and she curved an arm over her stomach. Damn him, damn him…damn him.

‘Dios mio.’ It was a purred intervention in the quiet. ‘I should think you would need to drain the bottle to sleep tonight.’

Incredulously, she whirled round. The glass slid between her fingers and fell with a soft thud, spilling out an amber pool of liquid in a slowly spreading stain on the carpet.

CHAPTER TWO

‘LO SIENTO. I’m sorry. Did I startle you?’ Grimly amused by the entrance he had achieved, Rafael uncoiled his lean length from the doorway. He executed the motion with inherent animal grace, strolling soundlessly into the lamplight out of the shadows. From beneath luxuriant black lashes that a woman would have killed to possess, narrowed tiger’s eyes inspected her. ‘It is so unlike you to be clumsy.’

Her tongue unglued from the roof of her mouth. ‘How did you get in?’

‘The girl was leaving. I told her I was awaited. She was surprised but very trusting.’ Even white teeth flashed against golden skin. ‘You have this one trait which I can appreciate now. There was no risk that I would be breaking up a private party for two. You really should tell that pretty tailor’s dummy that he’s on to a very bad bet; I might almost find it within my heart to pity him.’

She could barely follow what he was saying to her. Over four years of silence and then this? Why should Rafael come here now? It made no sense. Her violet eyes were huge against her pallor. ‘How did you find out where I lived?’

‘That wasn’t difficult.’ His hard mouth twisted.

‘What do you want?’ she demanded shakily.

A broad shoulder sheathed in butter-soft leather shifted in an infinitesimal shrug. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I was curious.’

‘Curious?’ she echoed, her voice rising steeply.

He glanced round the small, pleasantly furnished room. ‘This is not how I pictured you living,’ he admitted. ‘I would picture you in the drawing-room at your parents’ home, a butterfly safely preserved behind glass.’

Dialogue with Rafael had never been straightforward. He had a disorientating habit of leaping back and forth, voicing exactly what passed through his agile mind. Jerkily she folded her arms. He bent a long-fingered hand down to the corner of the armchair beside him, twitching up something that had caught his attention. It was a cookery book. ‘You use this?’ he asked, much as if it were a mechanic’s wrench.

Perspiration was dampening her skin. Hysteria was clawing at her. She was too afraid to make sense of his sudden impulsive appearance. ‘Any reason why I shouldn’t?’ she enquired defensively.

Casting the item carelessly aside again, he straightened to his full six feet two inches. ‘When you stand like that, you look like a little fishwife. Mama wouldn’t like it,’ he said cruelly. ‘Who takes care of you here?’

The blood rushed hotly to her cheeks. ‘Nobody.’

‘You have learnt to cook and clean? You astonish me.’

‘If you don’t get out of here, I’ll call the police!’ she threatened in a wild rush.

Rafael dealt her an unmoved glance of contempt. ‘I am still your husband. If I want to be here, I have the right to be here.’

‘No! You do not have that right!’

‘You should be calm. One may have the right without the desire to exercise it for very long,’ he sliced back. ‘Why do you live in a place like this? Don’t tell me—Papa’s finally been caught insider dealing!’

Agonising tension was squaring her slight shoulders. ‘I meant what I said. If you don’t leave, I’ll—’

Rafael bit out a sardonic laugh. ‘Why not? Call the police and entertain me. It is the emptiest threat of all and you know it. You would not court the publicity.’

‘Wouldn’t I?’ He had moved slightly closer and she took a tiny uncertain step backwards, her pale head gradually lowering in defeat. ‘No, I wouldn’t.’

‘I don’t understand why you should be so afraid.’ He paused, brilliant golden eyes clashing with her upward glance in naked enmity. ‘What a lie! You have the intelligence to be afraid. But what of? Violence may be what I feel but it would put me in prison and I have no love of small, closed places. And some couples may celebrate an approaching divorce with a farewell tumble between the sheets but when I become that desperate for a woman I will become celibate,’ he spelt out with brutal candour.

Humiliation pierced her like a knife-point. A primitive need to claw him for that unnecessary taunt charged her but a moment later she wanted to curl up and die. The condemned woman, branded a failure, finally scorned and cast aside. ‘I hate you,’ she framed strickenly.

‘Then it is more than you felt for me before. Even hatred—it is something. There is hope for you yet,’ he responded unfeelingly. ‘Who was the man you were with?’

She spun away, savaged by him as she had been so often before. Only this time she was tormentingly aware that she was betraying her reactions and Rafael was receiving a vulture’s satisfaction from her apparent new vulnerability. Her composure had cracked wide open earlier tonight. Now she was bare, stripped of all poise. ‘Why should you want to know?’

‘It amuses me to ask. It is so liberated to ask such a question of one’s wife.’ Provocation quivered through every accented syllable. ‘Though perhaps not in your case. Hell will freeze over before you invite him into your bed!’

Outraged by his derision, she swung back. ‘Are you so sure?’

Rafael stilled, straight ebony brows lowering over piercing tawny eyes.

‘You and your bloody ego!’ she gasped. ‘Yes! That idea really gets to you, doesn’t it? You can let some trollop crawl all over you six feet from me but—’

‘Trollop?’

‘Puta!’ she spat, her emotions spinning into a fierce spiral of rage and mortification.

‘No es,’ Rafael fielded smoothly. ‘I have never had to stoop to payment, muneca mia.’

‘Don’t call me that!’ she shrieked at him. ‘I am not a doll!’

As he tilted his head to one side, his whole concentration unnervingly pinned to her, light glistened over the black silk luxuriance of his gleaming hair. ‘You are arguing with me. Increible. You are answering back,’ he breathed in wonderment. ‘You are even shouting.’

His response drained the wild, unfamiliar anger from her, leaving her weak and badly shaken up. ‘Please go,’ she whispered.

‘Who taught you to shout?’ he prompted. ‘It is a very healthy sign. I like it.’

Her hands flew up, covering her ears. ‘You are driving me out of my mind!’

‘That is what you did to me. You threw my heart back at my feet and trampled on it. Two years of torture on this earth,’ Rafael intoned rawly, his sensual mouth compressed into a white line. ‘I gave you everything. You gave me nothing. You had the generosity of a miser. No woman has ever done to me what you dared to do. Por dios, when I think of how I suffered, I marvel that I stand here now and keep my hands from you…’

Involuntarily a hollow laugh escaped her. ‘The sole saving grace of your visit is that you now possess that capability.’

Dark colour scorched his high cheekbones. ‘You throw that in my teeth?’

She knew that intonation. Her tongue moistened her dry lips. It was the untrustworthy quiet before the storm.

‘You think I made unnatural demands of you?’ he raked at her between clenched teeth. ‘Every time I touched you, I was made to feel like an animal. You lay like a block of ice beneath me, tolerating my filthy desires!’

Sarah was the one reddening now, spinning away to present him with a defensive back. ‘Do you have to be so crude?’

He vented a stifled expletive. ‘You are the only woman who has ever called me this…that,’ he corrected in a driven undertone. ‘To think that I was once enslaved by you…it makes me shudder.’

‘The feeling is mutual.’ Waves of pain were tearing at her. Rafael had not lost his impassioned powers of picturesque speech.

‘Crude,’ he repeated again.

Sarah went white, strangely ashamed of herself. On some crazy level she was attuned to the awareness that she had drawn real blood. A lean hand was clenched into a fist at the insult. Her eyes stung. He had never been crude. Indeed, for someone afflicted with his hot-blooded, over-sexed temperament, he had been extraordinarily gentle and patient and kind. Only it hadn’t helped. Her inhibitions had proved insurmountable.

Sex. Just a small thing, not of great importance, something she could endure when she had to as no doubt other women had endured from the beginning of time. The sheer stupidity of her reasoning before their marriage tormented her now. Then she had been secretly flattered by the intensity of the hunger she roused in Rafael. Afterwards she had learnt to be afraid of that hunger, jerking away at his slightest touch.

It was typical of Rafael to be so gloriously and unashamedly wrapped up in his own sufferings, as he called them, she thought bitterly. Had he ever really thought of what it was like for her? To be married to a male so extravagantly gorgeous and innately virile and know you were a disaster in his bed? To live day in, day out with the knowledge that you were losing a little more of him by the hour? And finally to sink so low in a sense of utter inadequacy that she had taken his infidelity for granted. Closing her eyes, refusing to see. Anything just to keep him, anything so long as he stayed, a lesson learnt well at her mother’s knee with a father whose extra-marital affairs were as numerous as they were well known.

Rafael was splashing brandy into a glass, throwing it back. Strong muscles worked in his brown throat. ‘Tonight I will get drunk.’

‘Are you driving?’ The question fled her strained lips, inspired by an instinctive practicality and concern.

He shot her a gleaming, killing glance. ‘So prosaic, so sensible, so much the lady. Your hair up like a royal princess, the not too revealing dress. This is what I lived with. The patronising smiles, the small talk when our marriage was dying. We must not notice. We must not talk about these personal, private things. It is not nice. That is the word.’

She was trembling. Oh, dear God, why had he had to come here to destroy her all over again? Look forward, never back, her great-aunt Letitia had once told her. Until now it had been excellent advice. Without Letitia’s brusque and unsentimental support, Sarah wasn’t entirely sure that she would have been here today, a completely different Sarah from the mixed-up, desperately unhappy girl she had been in her teens. She had come through a baptism of fire to find her own security. She no longer endured agonies of guilt over her parents’ emotional blackmail. She no longer attempted to twist herself into something that she wasn’t to please other people. In the year since she had made her home in London, Sarah had gone from strength to strength. But now, all of a sudden…horrifyingly, it was as though she had been catapulted back in time.

Why was Rafael behaving as if he were the innocent party? Innocence had deserted Rafael in his cradle. But conversely an image of him on a hot, dusty pavement laughingly bestowing flowers on a Parisienne baglady chose to surface in her mind’s eye. Rafael, exuberantly, indescribably happy and wanting to share it with the world. In those days there had still been a streak of the child in Rafael. And now it was gone.