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Rafael made a scathing sound of dismissal. ‘There was nothing wrong with your mother. Her sudden illness was merely another ploy.’
‘Yes,’ Sarah allowed heavily. ‘But I didn’t know that then. My fears for her health were very real. And what did you do? You—’
‘I attempted to break the deadlock,’ he interrupted her again with greater heat.
‘Was that what you called it? You gave me forty-eight hours to join you in New York. I said no and that was that. I never saw you again. Sometimes I wondered if I’d dreamt you up. Only dreams tend to be kinder than reality!’
‘I came back to England. Where were you?’
Sarah had become suddenly taut and when a waiter refilled her glass she clasped it gratefully. Holding something made it easier for her to keep her hands steady.
‘The only communication I received from you was through a lawyer,’ he continued with caustic bite. ‘A demand for a divorce. So much faith as you had in me, gatita!’
‘My father put detectives on you while you were in New York.’
‘I know that!’ he cut in rawly. ‘And five years ago I might have explained myself to you but not now.’
A hollow laugh escaped her. ‘An explanation would have seriously taxed your ingenuity, Rafael. When a woman spends the night in your hotel room there isn’t much leeway for error…’
‘It might have been innocent.’
Sarah gulped down another fortifying mouthful of wine. ‘With you in the starring role? Are you kidding?’ she demanded with a reasonable pretence of mocking amusement, but in spite of her determination to remain cool the old anger was spiralling up from the tight coil of tension inside her. ‘I wasn’t surprised. I can be honest about that now. I never trusted you. I was always waiting for it to happen. By that stage, I was sure it already had…’
Rafael was watching her with unnerving concentration.
‘You have the morals of an alleycat.’ That last sentence fled her lips before she could seal them and tremulously turn her head away, fighting hard to recover her self-control.
‘Yet you said nothing of these suspicions at the time.’ Long fingers deftly coiled round the bottle and tilted it over her half-empty glass. ‘I did not realise how you felt,’ he positively purred.
‘You were too b…blasted insensitive!’ As his mouth quirked, she flushed with embarrassment.
‘It seems I must have been,’ he murmured soothingly. ‘Have some more wine. The vintage appears to agree with your palate.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ she muttered in partial apology as she pushed her plate away and picked up her glass again.
A splintering tension she didn’t understand suddenly held her still beneath the glittering onslaught of his golden gaze. ‘No woman was ever more loved than you were.’
‘You married me to get me into bed,’ she muttered bluntly. ‘Why wrap it up?’
‘Sarah.’ A sunbrowned forefinger idly circled over the back of her clenched hand and hot shivers ran through her, setting up a chain reaction of responses that shook her rigid. Under her blouse, her breasts peaked into painful tightness. Her nerve-endings all seemed to be centred at screaming point beneath his finger. Aghast by the sensations, she couldn’t move.
‘If I had insisted you would have shared my bed before I married you,’ he asserted with lazy arrogance. ‘You know that, I know that. That is not why I married you.’
She curved back defensively into her seat, edgily removing her fingers from reach of his careless caress. But she could still feel the imprint of his flesh, heating her blood and murdering her ability to think straight. Her heartbeat had accelerated to an insane tempo and it wasn’t steadying even yet. What on earth was the matter with her?
Rafael withdrew his hand with a sudden brilliant, blazing smile that made it difficult for her to breathe. ‘We will talk about that later,’ he dismissed, resting his ebony head back, narrowed tawny eyes gleaming with rich satisfation. ‘Where were you when I returned to England?’
The direct question, thrown without warning made her freeze. Gooseflesh prickled on the exposed parts of her body. She evaded his gaze. ‘I was in a clinic. That was true,’ she shared jerkily. ‘The doctor said I would miscarry if I didn’t have complete peace and quiet. I was there for weeks and it was incredibly boring—’
‘You were ill?’ Rafael had lost colour, abandoned relaxation. ‘Dios!’ he ground out viciously. ‘If I had your father here now, I would—’
‘You didn’t try very hard to find me,’ she said helplessly.
‘I had no desire to find you when I believed you had had an abortion,’ he proffered fiercely. ‘Your father made it clear that it was too late.’
‘You didn’t have much faith in me.’
‘Their hold on you was greater than mine.’
‘No, it wasn’t,’ she corrected unsteadily. ‘I was being torn apart. You hated them and they hated you and I was out in no man’s land, trying to keep the peace. Sometimes I just wanted to run away and leave you all to it.’
His expressive eyes had chilled. ‘I have never forgotten how I was insulted by your family.’
‘Yet you had so much in common with them,’ Sarah dared.
‘Que te pasa?’ Rafael grated incredulously. ‘What’s the matter with you?’
Her smile was awry. ‘To both of you I was an object, a possession. They bought me with adoption, you bought me with marriage. Let’s face it, it was an ownership dispute. They wouldn’t let go and you wouldn’t share me. It was a tug of war and inevitably the rope had to break.’
‘Perhaps it amuses you to be facetious.’
‘I don’t find it amusing even now,’ Sarah confessed. ‘In a sense you were even more selfish than they were. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. I don’t think I can have come under the context of fixtures and fittings when you took me away from them. You didn’t steal me, did you? You had legal title.’
‘Sarah.’ It was a warning growl, given between gritted teeth.
Her head was feeling oddly light but she was enjoying herself. ‘Didn’t you ever wonder why I was the very centre of their world? Or didn’t you care? They don’t like each other very much. They don’t talk because they’ve nothing to talk about unless I’m there or I’m provoking some sort of crisis. They should have split up years ago but they stayed together because they were offered a child. And unfortunately that child was me…’
‘You are not responsible for their marital problems.’ Rafael was patently uninterested in the subject.
Her soft mouth curved down. ‘Of course you probably gathered all that from the beginning. I was too close to see it. I thought the way they were was somehow all my fault. In their own twisted, self-centred fashion they care about me. It was very, very hard for them to accept that I was never going to live with them again.’
Black luxuriant lashes partially veiled his keen scrutiny. ‘When did that miracle occur?’
‘My great-aunt offered me a home just before the twins were born. Up until last year I was living with her in Truro.’
‘Truro?’ he echoed.
‘It’s in Cornwall.’
‘I know where this place is!’ he grated. ‘Are you saying that you have been there ever since our separation? I believed you were living under the protection of your parents.’
‘When did you last fight off a dragon and rescue a fair maiden, Rafael?’ she enquired gently.
His jawline clenched. ‘Explain this talk of dragons.’
Sarah fingered a prawn off her plate and nibbled at it abstractedly. The tip of her tongue darted out to lick her lips clean. Glancing up, she found tiger’s eyes intent on her soft, full mouth. ‘Only helpless little creatures with fluff between their ears need protection now the dragons have gone. I’ve never had much taste for iron bars and bossy people. Yet I married you.’ Slowly she shook her head over that riddle. ‘That’s called leaping out of the frying-pan straight into the fire.’
