Crime Of Passion

She bent her head, her empty stomach rumbling. ‘Do you think you could feed me while you lecture me?’

‘Feed you?’

‘I haven’t eaten since breakfast yesterday.’

‘Por Dios,’ Rafael grated with raw impatience. ‘Why did you not say so?’

A microwaved meal arrived at speed. Georgie ate, grateful for any excuse not to have to speak while she attempted to put her thoughts in order. ‘I am taking you home with me,’ he had said, as if she was a stray dog or cat. ‘Home’ was the ancestral estancia on the vast savannah bounded by the Amazon. And the concept of Rafael taking her back there quite shattered Georgie. Even when she had been Maria Cristina’s best friend at school, Rafael had blocked his sister’s every request to bring Georgie out to stay on the estancia with them during the holidays.

Memory was taking her back, although she didn’t want it to. Georgie had won a fee-assisted place at an exclusive girls’ school to study for her A levels. She had met Maria Cristina in the lower sixth. At half-term, she had invited her friend home for the weekend but, in some embarrassment, the Bolivian girl had explained that her brother, Rafael, who was her guardian, would not allow that unless he had first met Georgie and her parents.

Georgie’s father had been amused when he received

a phone call from Rafael, requesting permission to take Georgie out for the afternoon in company with his sister.

‘Charming but very formal for this day and age,’ he had pronounced. ‘You’d better mind your “p"s and “q"s there, my girl. I think you’re about to be vetted.’

Georgie still remembered coming down the steps in front of the school as the limousine swept up. She had guessed just by the way Maria Cristina talked that her friend was from a wealthy background, but she had not been prepared for a stretch limousine complete with chauffeur and security men. Then Rafael appeared and Georgie had been so busy looking at him that she had missed the last step and almost fallen flat on her face.

He had reached out and caught her before she fell, laughing softly, dark eyes rich as golden honey sweeping her embarrassed face. ‘My sister said you were accident-prone.’

As Maria Cristina introduced them, his hand had lingered on hers, his narrowed gaze oddly intent until rather abruptly he had stepped back, a slight flush accentuating his hard cheekbones.

He had taken them to the Ritz for afternoon tea. Georgie had been quieter than she had ever been in her life before and painfully shy, a condition equally new to her experience. Right from that first moment of meeting, Rafael had attracted her to a frighteningly strong degree. And Georgie hadn’t known how to handle that attraction. It had come out of nowhere and swallowed her alive, draining her of self-will. She had sat there on the edge of her seat, barely able to take her eyes off him, terrified he would notice.

After the Ritz, he had taken them shopping in Harrods. Maria Cristina had casually spent an absolute fortune on trifles, and when Rafael had bought his sister a gold locket he had insisted on buying one identical for Georgie, smoothly dismissing her protests. Then he had ferried them back to her parents’ home where he had been invited to stay to dinner.

Newly conscious of just how rich her friend and her brother were, Georgie had been uncomfortable at first, fearfully watching for any signs of snobbish discomfiture from either of them. Her father was a primary schoolteacher and her stepmother, Jenny, a post-office clerk. Their home was a small, neat semi-detached. Half the neighbourhood had come out to stare at the stretch limousine. But Rafael and Maria Cristina had made themselves perfectly at home with her family… Steve hadn’t been there that first time, Georgie recalled absently.

‘Do you want to know the only thing Rafael asked about you?’ Maria Cristina had laughed after her brother had gone, shaking her head in wonderment. ‘Is that hair natural?’

For the remainder of her time at school, Georgie had been included in all of her friend’s term-time outings with her brother. Gradually she had lost her awe of Rafael, learning to judge her reception by the frequency of that rare and spontaneous smile of his that turned her heart inside out, but also learning to accept that he observed strict boundaries in his behaviour towards her and was prone to cool withdrawal when her impulsive tongue came anywhere near breaching that barrier.

‘Rafael likes you,’ Maria Cristina had said once—just one of many desperately gathered little titbits.

‘You make him laugh…’

‘He thinks you’re very intelligent…’

‘He wonders why you aren’t studying Spanish…’ What an agony of hope that had put her in! But then, it hadn’t all been good news.

He thinks you flirt too much…

‘He said if you wore your skirts any shorter, you’d be arrested…’

‘He believes that the two of us will only be adults when we stop telling each other absolutely everything!’

But Georgie had never told Maria Cristina whose photograph she kept in that locket which she wore constantly. She had been horribly embarrassed the day her friend chose to tease her about that secrecy in front of Rafael. He had silenced his sister. Dark eyes had intercepted Georgie’s anxious gaze and he had smiled lazily, and she had known that he knew perfectly well that it was his photo, taken by her with immensely careful casualness the previous year.

She had met Danny Peters at a sports event a few months before she sat her final exams. They had run into each other several times, quickly forming an easy friendship. Danny had just been ditched by his steady girlfriend and Georgie had supplied a sympathetic ear. When he had asked Georgie to attend his school formal with him, she had agreed, well aware that he merely wanted to save face in front of his friends. It had been a fun night out, nothing more. But Maria Cristina had gone all giggly about it and had insisted on talking about Danny as Georgie’s boyfriend. Had she mentioned Danny to Rafael?

For, one week later, Georgie had come home from visiting her grandmother one afternoon and a scarlet Ferrari had been parked in the driveway. She had raced into the house and frozen on the threshold of the lounge, seeing only Rafael, nothing else but Rafael impinging on her awareness. His very presence in her home without his sister in tow had told Georgie all she needed to know.

‘Rafael thought you might like to go for a drive,’ her stepmother had mumbled in a dazed voice. ‘You should get changed.’

She remembered Steve catching her by the arm before she disappeared into her bedroom. ‘He’s going to make a bloody fool of you,’ he had condemned in a furious undertone. ‘But money talks, doesn’t it? I can’t believe my mother is encouraging him!’

Georgie sank back to the present. With a not quite steady hand, she massaged her stiff neck and strove not to lift her head and look at Rafael. But it was so difficult when she was remembering that glorious afternoon, the sheer joy that he had come, the overwhelming excitement of just being alone with him for the very first time. She had walked on air into that Ferrari.

Before he reversed the car, he had lifted a hand and quite calmly reached for her locket to open it. And then he had smiled lazily, pressed a teasing promise of a kiss against her readily parted lips and dropped a bunch of red roses on her lap. ‘If it had been anyone else, I do believe I would have killed you,’ he had laughed softly.

He had been outrageously confident of his reception, hadn’t even tried to hide the fact. Georgie had had the bewildering feeling that she was being smoothly slotted into a pre-arranged plan, and in a sense that had offended her pride. She might have been head over heels in love with Rafael but she hadn’t liked the idea that he knew it too.

He had been entirely complacent about the idea that she had spent eighteen months waiting for him to show an interest in her, that he was indeed her first real boyfriend…if a male of his sophistication could even qualify for such a label. But he had also been careful to tell her that the day she told her sister she was seeing him, their relationship would be at an end. At the time, not telling

Maria Cristina had really hurt. But later she had been grateful that she had kept quiet.

‘She’s asking you if you want coffee.’

Georgie’s head jerked up, her cheeks warming as she found both the stewardess and Rafael regarding her enquiringly. ‘I’d love some,’ she mumbled, shaking her head as if to clear it and hurriedly fixing her attention elsewhere.

Rafael added that she liked her coffee with both milk and sugar.

Georgie tensed, childishly tempted to say she now took it black and unsweetened but biting her lip instead. Four years ago, Rafael had chosen her food for her, and had allowed her only the occasional glass of wine, refusing to allow her any other form of alcohol in his company.

‘He’s a flipping tyrant,’ Steve had sneered that final evening, witnessing Rafael’s unashamed domination in action. ‘I can’t believe the way you let him order you around. If you want a drink, I’ll get it for you!’

And he had. He had got her several, just daring Rafael to interfere. Georgie did not want to recall where that foolishness had led. Her cup in an unsteady hand, she sipped at her coffee, badly shaken by the uncontrollable force of the memories washing over her.

It had upset Georgie then that her stepbrother and Rafael should barely be able to tolerate each other. Nor had she ever been able to decide who was most at faultSteve for being a bossy, interfering big brother, who didn’t like to see his kid sister being bossed about by anyone else, or Rafael for never once utilising an ounce of his smooth diplomacy in Steve’s hot-headed direction.

In those days she had been very proud of Steve’s success as a photo-journalist. He was four years her senior, her brother in all but blood ties, and she had relied heavily on Steve’s opinions, Steve’s advice… And then those ties had been almost completely severed the same night that she had lost Rafael. Truly the worst night of her life, she conceded painfully.

‘This is Rurrenabaque,’ Rafael informed her as the jet came in to land.

Georgie concentrated on the fantastic views as the land dropped dramatically away below them to spread out into the thickly forested expanse of the Amazon basin. Less than half an hour after landing they were airborne again in a helicopter, from which she saw the very physical evidence of the logging operations in the area. Then the rough tracks forged by man-made machinery petered to a halt, leaving them flying over untouched wilderness, broken only by lonely mountain plateaus and dark winding rivers until the rainforest finally gave way to the vast savannah, cleared centuries earlier for cattle ranching.

‘You will want to rest.’ Rafael sprang down from the helicopter in her wake and something she caught in his voice made her turn her head.

She met icy dark eyes, read the harsh line of his compressed mouth and the fierce tension in his strong features as he stared fulminatingly back at her. He doesn’t want me here. That reality hit her like a bucket of cold water on too-hot skin. Defensively she looked away again, wondering why on earth he had brought her to his home if he felt that strongly and cursing her own weakened, stressed condition earlier.

‘At the airport, you let me think you were going to put me on a flight home,’ she reminded him accusingly. ‘Why didn’t you tell me the truth?’

‘I was abducting you,’ Rafael delivered smoothly. ‘Why would I explain my intentions in advance?’

Her bright head spun back, violet eyes wide, her brow furrowed. Then she laughed a little breathlessly. ‘I never could tell when you were joking and when you were serious!’

‘You will learn.’ Unreadable dark eyes glittered intently over her animated face. ‘I’m looking forward to teaching you.’

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