A Fiery Baptism

Hard cynicism curved his chiselled mouth. Nobody could stare like Rafael. You got the feeling that he could see right into you, strip away the concealing layers and pretences until only the inner self remained. ‘Shall I call a taxi?’ She couldn’t bear the silence any longer.

‘When I wish to leave, I will leave.’ He loosed a hard, humourless laugh. ‘I know why I am here. You will think me quite the sentimentalist. But I have this one question and it is not at all…nice.’

‘I’d sooner not hear it, then.’

An ebony brow arched and she was suddenly, shockingly aware of the raw tension in his lean, powerful body. ‘But you will,’ he asserted fiercely. ‘Did you ever regret it?’

‘Regret what?’

Something akin to naked violence seethed in his brooding gaze, setting up tiny ripples of fear in the pulsing atmosphere. ‘The price of family forgiveness. Is that how you thought of it?’ he slung at her harshly. ‘If God has given you a night of uninterrupted sleep in five years, he has been too good to you!’

In bewilderment, she muttered, ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You know what I am saying,’ he bit out, if it was possible with even greater ferocity. ‘Did it mean so little to you? A brief stay in some discreet clinic where I couldn’t find you? It was against the law…it must have been somewhere very expensive. But what is expense to your parents when they find it within their power to destroy the last evidence of your most unfortunate marriage? Ah…you go pale. Did you think I would have forgotten so easily? How could I forget? It was an act of revenge. You did it to punish me!’

‘Rafael, I—’ she began, lost in the welter of demands that she didn’t understand.

‘You murdered my unborn child and I curse you for it. You did not have the right to make that choice. I will never forgive this nor will I ever forget it,’ he swore in implacable condemnation. ‘You did not want my child but I would have taken him, I would have brought him up…’

Sarah’s perception of reality was rocking on its axis. A tiny sound dragged her glazed eyes from Rafael. Gilly was peering round the door, her pixie face screwed up against the intrusion of the light. She came stumbling across the room, powered by sudden noisy sobs. ‘Ben tol’ me the spider’s gonna get me and eat me up!’ she wailed, clutching at Sarah’s skirt. ‘And it was in my dream. Mummy, make it go away or give it to Ben. It’s his spider!’

Rafael mumbled something incomprehensible in Spanish.

Sarah bent down to lift her daughter, smoothing a hand over her tousled black curls. Gilly pressed her face into her mother’s shoulder. ‘Who’s dat man?’

‘Never mind.’ Curving protective arms tightly round Gilly’s hot little body, she attempted to brush past Rafael.

A bruising set of fingers closed over her shoulder. ‘She called you Mama. Who does she belong to? Es imposible. Speak!’ he pressed fiercely.

Tearing free of his punishing hold, Sarah sped into the hall. Her sole concern was Gilly. Gilly must not be exposed to Rafael. She’d sink a knife between his ribs before she’d let him come within twenty feet of either of her children! He had accused her of aborting their child. Of course, he couldn’t believe that! A piece of nonsense, that was what it was! Some sly, sneaky gambit aimed at explaining away a four-year uninterest in fatherhood? He must think she was mentally deficient. Well, she wasn’t and where her children were concerned she would fight like a lioness. Had natural curiosity finally pierced his tough hide? Well, it was too late. He was nearly five years too late. He wasn’t walking in here now to exercise rights he had surrendered of his own free will…no way was he doing that!

Her hands were shaking so violently that she had trouble in covering Gilly up again. Her daughter was much too sleepy to notice the state she was in. ‘Is it gone away?’ she mumbled.

‘Far, far away,’ Sarah soothed tremulously, scanning the other single bed with frightened eyes. Ben was just a bump under the duvet, not a centimetre of him in sight. In sleep, Ben was a burrower. Gilly was a sprawler, kicking the bedding off while she slept.

Rafael was blocking her exit from the bedroom. She raised her hands. ‘You can’t come in here.’

He wasn’t moving anywhere. Neither forward nor back. ‘Madre de Dios,’ he muttered weakly, lapsing into Spanish, accented syllables rising and falling disjointedly.

Her palms planted against his broad chest. She thrust him bodily from the room, hauling the door closed behind her, denying him even the view. In none of these instinctive reactions did she recognise herself. Fear and rage were consuming her in equal parts. ‘Go!’ she gasped. ‘I don’t want you here!’

A brown hand collided abruptly with her shoulder, forcing her back to the wall. ‘My daughter…she’s got black hair. She has to be mine. She has to be!’ he grated.

‘Not yours. Not unless you can call basic biology paternity!’

Hooded tiger’s eyes bore down on her. ‘And the other one?’

‘Twins!’ she snapped.

A flaring, incredulous fury had entered his dark features. Before she could retreat, he slammed a hand to the wall an inch or two from her ear. The reverbation tremored through her pounding temples. He frightened her half out of her wits. ‘So you lied to me. All of you lied! The abortion story? A lie. Por dios, a lie!’ he vented in the soaring crescendo of all-encompassing black fury. ‘All this time, all these years a lie to enable you to steal my children from me. You think you can do this with impunity? You think I would let a frozen vixen raise my own flesh and blood? For this you will pay. You will lose them. I will take them away.’

Sarah was beyond understanding a tithe of what was happening to her. She grasped only that final, searing threat. ‘You can’t do that!’

He withdrew his hands. ‘I will see you and your family in court. I have papers. There is no reference to my children. I have proof of what has been done to me. No judge will award custody to a woman who is both a liar and a cheat!’

Sarah gazed at him in horror. He wasn’t even looking at her. He was heading out of the door. She raced after him, heedless of her bare feet. In panic she clutched at the sleeve of his jacket and he shook her off in violent repudiation. ‘Liar!’ he roared at her loud enough to wake the entire building.

But still she skidded in his wake. The instinct to pursue was her only driving purpose. When the lift doors slotted closed, she fled down the stairs two at a time, round and round and round again until she charged dizzily across the small, polished foyer.

‘Mrs Southcott!’ The security man exclaimed, jumping out of his seat to follow her.

A black Lamborghini raked off down the street with the speed of a jet on a runway. Sarah stood in the centre of the pavement, strands of pale hair falling round her fevered cheeks.

‘What happened?’

Dumbly she faced the anxious guard, not at all sure what she was doing outside in the evening air. ‘Nothing…nothing,’ she said again.

Shivering, she stepped into the lift. Angela’s mother was standing at her flat door, peering in. ‘I heard someone shouting. My goodness, you look dreadful! My dear,’ she gushed.

‘I’m sorry if you were disturbed.’ Sarah backed hurriedly into her own flat and shut the door.

How had her tranquil world suddenly exploded into a nightmare? Rafael had uttered insane threats. Why had she panicked? But questions without viable answers were circulating in her spinning head. Rafael did not tell lies. Not even social lies. In times gone by he had used blunt candour as a weapon against her parents, watching them reel in civilised shock from the stinging bite of unapologetic honesty.

A monstrous suspicion was growing in her mind. She relived Rafael’s shattered response to Gilly’s appearance, his floundering speech…his silence. She remembered the documents she had signed unread almost five years ago. I have proof, Rafael had hurled in challenge. And if that was true, it meant that her father had deliberately concealed the twins’ birth by ensuring that no mention of them appeared on paper. That thought plunged her into a black hole and spawned other thoughts that brought her out in a cold sweat of fear.

Had Rafael ever received her letter? No matter what her father had done, she had still had faith in her mother. What choice had she had? When you were ill, you were dependent on others. A damp chill enclosed her body. Tomorrow she would have to tackle her parents. There had to be some reasonable explanation, there just had to be. Somewhere along the line a misunderstanding had occurred and Rafael had been the victim. But as she lay sleepless in her bed, her mind revolving in frantic, frightened circles, she failed to see just how such a gross misinterpretation of past events could innocently have taken place.

And try as she might she could not help but remember that fateful three weeks in Paris. A tide of colourful, unforgettable impressions was surging back to her. The intriguing bookstalls on the corner of the Pont au Double; the evocative scent of the mauve blossoms weighting the empress trees on the Rue de Furstenberg; the dazzling array of fresh fruit and vegetables at the Mouffetard market; the sinfully sweet taste of Tunisian honey cakes from the Rue de la Huchette…

In her final year at school, she had been lonely and isolated, too quick to grasp at any overture of friendship. She had blocked out the awareness that her classmates thought Margo a spiteful, unpleasant girl. Margo’s invitation had been a much-needed confidence booster, her subsequent behaviour a painful slap on the face.

Margo had invited her to Paris solely to please her widowed father. On the day of her arrival, the other girl had made it resentfully obvious that Sarah would not have been her choice of a holiday companion.

‘Dad thinks you’ll cramp my style but he’s wrong,’ Margo had asserted sullenly. ‘I have a boyfriend at the Sorbonne. I’ve got better things to do with my time than trail you around like a third wheel!’

She should have flown home again but she had had too much pride. Having pleaded with her parents to let her accept the invitation, she had shrunk from admitting that she had made a mistake. Margo’s father had been a successful businessman, very rarely at home and far too busy to concern himself with her entertainment. He had assumed that his daughter was showing her guest round Paris. It had not occurred to him that Sarah might be left to show herself around.

She had been free as a bird for the very first time in her life. Nobody had had the slightest interest in where she went or what she did. Venturing out with a very boring guidebook, she had been intimidated by the seething anonymity of the crowds and the incredible traffic. On the third day, while she was standing at a busy intersection trying to make sense of a map, disaster had struck. A youth on a motorbike had whizzed past at speed, snatching her shoulder-bag and sending her sprawling into the gutter. Rafael had come to her assistance.

In that split second, the entire course of her future had changed. He had helped her to her feet, asking her in fluent French if she was hurt. He had switched to equally polished English in receipt of her stammering attempts to express herself in a foreign language. She had looked up into dark golden eyes in an arrestingly handsome face and time had stood still. When the clock started ticking again, everything had undergone a subtle transformation. The sun had been brighter, the crowds less stifling, and the loss of her bag had inexplicably become an annoying irritation rather than an overwhelming tragedy.

Do you believe in love at first sight? she had once been tempted to ask Karen, only she had been very much afraid that Karen would laugh. But something reckless and exhilarating and frightening had seized hold of her in that instant.

Meeting Rafael had been like colliding with a meteor and falling back into bottomless space, completely dazed by the experience. Louise Southcott’s daughter, who was very careful never to speak to strangers, had let herself be picked up in the street and in a terrifyingly short space of time Rafael had become the centre of her universe.

‘You’re so quiet…so mysterious,’ he had once teased, running a long finger caressingly across her lips, smiling when she skittishly pulled her head back. He had never doubted his ability to awaken her to an answering sensuality when he so desired.

But then Rafael had not seen a desperately insecure teenager. He had seen a young woman, expensively clothed, her features matured by expertly applied cosmetics. Superficially, she had possessed considerable poise. Rafael had fallen in love with her face, the face that he had been unable to capture to his own satisfaction on canvas.

And Sarah? Sarah had been drawn, entrapped and finally mesmerised by his emotional intensity. Passion was the mainspring of Rafael’s volatile temperament. He loved with passion, he created hauntingly beautiful works of art with passion and, she realised now on a tide of pain and regret, he hated with passion as well…

* * *

‘Who was dat man?’ Gilly asked sullenly over breakfast.

‘What man?’ Sarah muttered evasively.

Gilly frowned. ‘That man,’ she said louder.

‘What man?’ Ben picked up the refrain.

Sarah stood up, sliding her untouched toast surreptitiously into the bin. ‘He was someone I met at the party last night.’

‘You look funny, Mummy,’ Ben said thoughtfully.

‘Funny Mummy,’ Gilly rhymed and giggled, as ever mercurial in her moods.

She phoned Angela and asked if she would babysit for her again. Since Sarah paid well, the teenager was more than willing to oblige. But naturally she was surprised. On Saturdays, Sarah always took the children to see their grandparents. It was an arrangement that was religiously observed but not one, Sarah reflected, that was of any real satisfaction to any of them. Her parents complained bitterly about the small amount of time she allowed them to spend with their grandchildren and Sarah always found the visits a strain. The twins had all the boundless exuberance and vitality of their father. Within an hour of their arrival, little looks would be exchanged by her parents, cold criticisms of her methods of child-rearing uttered, and the twins would go horribly quiet as the atmosphere became repressive and disapproving.

It was a bright beautiful morning with clear skies and sunlight. The promise of early summer was in the air. Normally she enjoyed the drive to Southcott Lodge. She rarely used her car except at weekends. It had belonged to her great-aunt and, having been well maintained, was mercifully still going strong in spite of its age. When the car did develop problems, she doubted that she would be able to replace it.

Inflation had considerably reduced the value of the income she received from a small trust fund set up by her late grandmother. Five mornings a week she worked as a receptionist in a large insurance company while the twins were at nursery school. The flat was her one asset and already it was becoming cramped.

Her family home was an elegant red-brick Georgian house set in spacious, landscaped grounds. Even the lawns looked manicured. The exterior was as picture perfect as the interior. The innate tidiness of her parents’ lives was matched by their surroundings.

The housekeeper, Mrs Purbeck, opened the front door. Her brow creased as she noted the absence of the twins. ‘Your parents are in the conservatory, Miss Southcott.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Purbeck.’ Sarah crushed back a ludicrous desire to laugh. On Saturdays, in spring and summer, her parents always breakfasted in the conservatory. Her father would be reading his morning paper at one end of the table and at the other her mother would be staring into space. Neither would find it necessary to speak to the other unless something of importance arose.

‘Sarah…you’re early.’ Folding his paper into precise folds, Charles Southcott rose to his feet, a tall, distinguished man in his late fifties, his blond hair greying, his eyes ice-blue chips of enquiry in his long, thin face.

Her mother frowned. ‘Where are the children?’

Sarah took a deep breath. ‘I haven’t brought them.’

An anxious pleat-line formed between Louise’s pencilled brows.

‘You see, I needed to talk to you privately,’ Sarah confided tensely.

Her father appraised her pale face and taut stance. ‘Is there something wrong, Sarah? Sit down and we’ll talk about it calmly.’ Although she had yet to do or say anything that was not calm, there was a cold note of warning to the command.

Sarah swallowed hard. ‘I saw Rafael last night.’

Her mother turned a ghastly shade beneath her well-applied make-up. Her father was not so easily read. He continued to watch her without visible reaction. The silence threatened to strangle Sarah, forcing her to keep on talking. ‘Gordon took me to a party and he was there.’

‘What sort of people are you mixing with these days?’ Louise’s voice betrayed the shaky undertones of stress.

‘Afterwards, he came to the apartment.’

Charles Southcott showed his first response in a chilling narrowing of his gaze. ‘At your invitation?’

Her mother looked at him with reproach. ‘Sarah wouldn’t have invited him into her home.’

‘He didn’t know about the twins,’ Sarah advanced stiffly. ‘He said that he thought I…I had had a termination. He said that that was what he was told.’

A dragging quiet lay over the room. Louise studied her clasped hands, still as a statue. Her father’s features were shuttered, a tiny nerve pulling at the edge of his flattened mouth.

‘I mean…that’s just so ridiculous.’ Sarah was wretchedly conscious of the high-pitched note that had entered her voice.

Charles Southcott expelled his breath shortly. ‘Sit down, Sarah. We don’t want a scene.’

She was feeling sick, shaky. Facing up to her father still had that effect on her. She sank down reluctantly into an elaborately cushioned wickerwork chair, her back a ramrod-straight rejection of its comfortable embrace.

‘Let me make one point clear in advance. We were solely responsible for your welfare,’ her father delivered with an air of strong censure. ‘When Alejandro went to New York and left you here with us, we were extremely concerned about you. Your marriage was destroying you.’

‘He was destroying her,’ her mother chipped in, tight-mouthed with bitterness. ‘He turned you into a stranger. We lost you and you never came back to us.’

Sarah’s throat was closing over, hurting her. ‘He was my husband and I loved him.’

Charles Southcott released a cutting laugh. ‘You didn’t love him, Sarah. You were obsessed by him. It was a sick obsession and you needed help…’

‘Help?’ Sarah repeated chokily. ‘You call locking me up helping me?’

‘Sarah,’ Louise whispered pleadingly. ‘Please…’

‘It was for your own good. I didn’t want to hurt you. I wanted to bring you to your senses,’ her father continued coldly. ‘When Alejandro had the impertinence to show up here again…’

Sarah froze. ‘Rafael came here?’ she prompted in disbelief.

Her mother murmured, ‘We had to keep him away from you, Sarah. You weren’t well. You might have had a miscarriage. We didn’t really lie to him. He jumped to conclusions and we didn’t contradict him.’

An unpleasant smile that was no smile at all had formed on her father’s narrow mouth. ‘I believe it’s relatively common for Latins to believe that sin is inevitably followed by some holy form of retribution,’ he scoffed. ‘I confirmed his suspicions.’

Sarah was leaning dizzily forward. ‘Oh, dear God, how could you do that to him?’ she gasped in horror.

‘Naturally I saw that the letter you intended to send was destroyed,’ he added icily. ‘While it was unhappily not within my power to prevent you from making a fool of yourself over him for two years, it was within my power to prevent you from doing so on paper.’

Sarah shuddered under the lash of his contempt.

‘I loved him,’ she whispered abstractedly. ‘And at the beginning I trusted you. He blames me and he’s right to blame me,’ she vented with a shaken gasp. ‘Nobody has any excuse to be that naive. You made me believe that he had just cut me out of his life as if I didn’t exist. You didn’t care what that did to me. But then you didn’t care what you did to me by putting me in that place…’

‘It was our duty to protect you from yourself.’

‘You took your chance when I was in no fit state to know what you were doing,’ Sarah condemned. ‘You hadn’t been able to buy him off. You hadn’t been able to scare him off. So you lied to him and you lied to me and nothing you can say will change those facts!’

‘Why are we arguing about something that was finished most conclusively five years ago?’ Charles Southcott surveyed her with sharp distaste. ‘I did you a favour. You were well rid of him.’

Sarah sprang upright on a wild surge of anger. ‘What did you know about our marriage? Did it ever occur to you that I wasn’t the perfect wife? Why did you assume that I was such a precious gift?’ she demanded strickenly. ‘And at least Rafael didn’t treat me the way you treat my mother!’

She dashed a trembling hand across her streaming eyes. Until that moment she hadn’t realised that she was crying. The silence was so familiar, chilling, suffocating. ‘I should have known,’ she framed tremulously, defying the icy silence to the last. ‘I should have known.’

She walked out and they let her go as she had known they would. They would give her time to calm down and in a few days they would approach her, expecting family loyalty to have haltered her out-of-control emotions. Only this time that wouldn’t happen. Sarah only visited for her mother’s sake. She had always made excuses for her mother but now she had to face the fact that Louise had been in full collusion and agreement with her husband and she was nauseated by the knowledge that her parents had deliberately set out to break up her marriage and continued to rejoice in their success. Neither of them was remotely concerned about the high costs she had had to pay five years ago.

She sat in her car in the driveway for several dazed minutes. Her brain was roving off in a dozen different directions until it abruptly settled on one overwhelming necessity, a thread of seeming sanity in the nightmare of confusion. She had to find out where Rafael was staying. She had to see him, speak to him.

Karen answered her phone with a grumbling yawn. ‘Sarah,’ she muttered. ‘Why are you using a callbox?’

‘Do you know where Rafael Alejandro is staying?’ In the lengthy quiet that settled on the line, Sarah regretted her impetuosity and improvised awkwardly, ‘Someone I know needs to get in touch with him urgently.’

‘And you need to see a man about a dog.’ Karen was suddenly sounding very alert. ‘Actually I do know. Elise let it drop last night in a temper.’

‘Elise?’

‘The lady who brought him. Or should I say, the lady he allowed to bring him?’ Karen extended with irony. ‘I think we need a trade-off here, Sarah, my pet. Information for information.’

‘Karen, please!’ Sarah said impatiently.

Karen surrendered with bad grace and supplied the address.

‘Thanks. Thanks!’ Sarah said again. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

It was a small but exclusive apartment block in Belgravia. Pushing a nervous hand through the damp hair adhering to her forehead, Sarah stepped into the lift. She felt hot and bothered, utterly bereft of her usual cool. A little belatedly, she was wondering what she intended to say to Rafael and whether, in the heat of the moment, she might have been too hasty in her urge to immediately seek him out. She flinched when the lift doors whirred back and then she walked uncertainly along a corridor floored with a soft, deep carpet. The nasty suspicion that she might be about to make a gigantic fool of herself increased her reluctance.

A vase of beautifully arranged flowers sat in an alcove to one side of the entrance. Did Rafael own this place? Rent it? Whichever, this luxury was a far cry from the sort of flats they had once shared. She smoothed moist palms down over the tailored navy jacket and straight skirt she wore. Rafael hated navy. Frowning at the irrelevancy that her subconscious had served up, she pressed the bell.