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His thumb grazed a swollen nipple and she gasped, her bones melting and coalescing beneath her skin. Holding her upright, he bent his dark head and seized the taut crest between his teeth before laving the sensitive flesh with a tormenting tongue tip. Her fingers dug fiercely into his arm, a cry forced from deep in her throat as shudders of delight ripped and tore through her body.
He said something raw in his own language and his hand pushed up her skirt, dealing summarily with the hindrance, smoothing over the trembling silken length of her thigh. A jolt of electric anticipation stabbed at her, leaving her limp and pliant as a rag doll in his arms. Her flesh ached for him and she was devastated by that discovery. It rewrote and overturned everything she knew about herself. One last shred of sanity remained to her and it could only tell her, this can’t be real, this isn’t really happening. She was caught up in emotions and sensations quite beyond her control.
‘Rafael…this…no,’ she hardly knew what she was saying, never mind what she had intended to say.
‘No?’ Her skirt parted company with her hipbones and pooled round her feet. A determined hand splayed across her hips, crushing her against him. Smouldering tiger’s eyes currented into her dazed vision, flaming a purely sexual intent. ‘No is not a word I am inclined to listen to in the state that I am in.’
He swept her up in his arms and kicked the bedroom door wide. He tumbled her down on the bed, following her there in an almost instantaneous motion. Impatient hands disposed of the remainder of her clothing. He was indifferent to the sound of ripping lace but she welcomed the rapacious savagery of his demanding mouth. His mouth, oh, God, his mouth. The hot, hard angularity of his body on hers was an unbelievable pleasure and the burning urgency of his hands made her cry out, defenceless against the wild, explosive agony of need that he had induced.
‘Please…please,’ she gasped, driven to a torturous peak of excitement.
He parted her thighs with hands that were almost violent and thrust into her powerfully, suddenly. She felt pain but pain was nothing to the raw, incredible intensity of the pleasure. She shattered into a million tiny pieces and then she was falling…falling…falling with an astounded sense of wondering discovery and the most glorious feeling of utter, endless peace. As Rafael shuddered in the tight circle of her arms, she was assailed by a wholly intoxicating delight in her own femininity.
The strong muscles of his back contracted beneath her covetous fingers. So that is what it is like, she thought dazedly, idly running an uncontrollably possessive hand over golden skin that had the sensuous appeal of oiled silk to her worshipping touch. But far from sharing her own relaxation, Rafael’s lithe magnificent length was as whipcord tense as a coiled spring. In the silence a shard of fear pierced her but she blindly fought it off. She did not want to think further than five minutes into the future. Anything more would be threatening. Anything more would detract from the tremendous sense of achievement she was experiencing. Rafael still wanted her. Magically and quite miraculously, Rafael still wanted her.
‘You’re very quiet,’ she whispered uneasily.
‘You expect conversation as well?’ He lifted his dark, tousled head and released her from his weight, rolling over in the tangle of sheets without looking at her. ‘You have just fulfilled my every fantasy. Conversation seems a little superfluous.’
She paled. ‘That sounds like sarcasm.’
‘Such acute perception. Where do you plan for us to go from here?’ he gritted roughly.
Was he afraid that she was trying to trap him back into their marriage? Humiliated by the suspicion, she muttered in an impulsive rush, ‘This doesn’t have to mean anything.’ She hesitated. ‘I mean…I don’t expect anything from you. If you like you can just walk out that door and we can forget this ever happened…’
He reared up, brilliant eyes flashing in stunned collision with hers. His hand anchored into the hair streaming across the pillow. ‘I think you forget who you are speaking to.’
So he didn’t want that escape route. An inner glow warmed her. ‘The traffic through my bedroom really isn’t that heavy,’ she murmured with a hectic flush on her cheeks.
His fingers twisted painfully amongst the pale, golden strands of her hair but Sarah didn’t object. She was fascinated by the play of strong emotion on his dark, golden features. For a second he had looked savagely angry, yet what could he possibly have to be angry about? She had not initiated that shameless seduction scene in the hall. Rafael had made all the moves and Rafael, in spite of appearances, never acted on impulse. The arts of calculation came as naturally to him as breathing. He was the most shockingly manipulative male she had ever come across. That overpoweringly masculine ego of his ought to be glorying in the fact that he had at last received the response he had always wanted from her.
Somewhere in the still-scrambled depths of her brain she realised that she hadn’t a clue what she was doing and there was something insidiously reassuring about the admission. It excused her from responsible behaviour, freed her from the conventional fetters that made life so very uneventful even if they also made it safe. Be a little reckless now and again, Letitia had once urged her impatiently. Still headily in the hold of newly learnt sensuality, Sarah could not prevent her fingertips from wandering over his muscular chest, snarling into whorls of crisp, curling black hair. Reckless, she tasted dizzily, quite unaware of his unresponsive stillness as her heavy eyes slid shut, reckless felt good…indeed reckless felt like a passport to heaven.
* * *
When she woke up, she was totally disorientated. It was still daylight. A dazed look crossed her sleepy face. Slowly she sat up, wincing at unfamiliar aches and pains. She had a headache and a raging thirst as well. Memory came back like a poison arrow thudding into a target. A wave of scorching heat enveloped her body and then drained gradually away, leaving her shivering in horrified aftershock.
Oh, dear God, what had she done…what had she done? she asked herself in anguish. How could she have let this happen? How could a simple lunch-date have turned into a disaster of such appalling proportions?
But she knew. Oh, yes, she knew. Where Rafael was involved, nothing was ever simple and nothing was ever quite as it seemed. Had he been amused by the revelation that the frigid wife he had left behind now trembled and threatened to burst into flame if he so much as skated a provocative fingertip over the back of her hand? Her stomach constricted in sick distress.
In defiance of her own wretched vulnerability she had been determined to show him that she had long since come to terms with the break-up of their marriage. Reflecting on the means she had used to demonstrate that point, Sarah cringed. Her bitterness and her jealousy had goaded her into excess and, as if that had not been enough, she had proved to be as naive about her own sexuality as an adolescent. Rafael had understood exactly what was happening to her in that restaurant and Rafael, in time-honoured tradition, had homed in on her weakest point of defence. Well, at least there was nothing new in that. In a fight, Rafael was like a warrior in mortal combat. There were no holds barred, no allowances made for a less able partner.
She had never had a strong head for alcohol yet he had topped up her glass and lounged back indolently while she chattered her way into World War III. He must have known that she was in no fit state to know what she was doing. But, unbelievable as it seemed to her, Rafael had set out quite deliberately to seduce her. And her subconscious mind, for so long disciplined into subjection, had had the last laugh after all…hadn’t it?
With fingers that were all thumbs, she pulled on her robe. Someone like Karen fell in love at least four times a year. Karen skated on the sparkly tinsel surface of romance and deftly avoided collisions. But in a Paris street, Sarah had met crash…bang…wallop with the equivalent of a major pile-up and ever since she had lived in the accident zone.
Five years ago, she had put her feelings for Rafael into a compartment. She had locked the door and thrown away the key. She would have burnt at the stake sooner than admit to anyone how she still felt about Rafael. It wasn’t socially acceptable to continue to want a man who had kicked you in the teeth. By the same yardstick, such self-knowledge was a constant source of self-loathing. She was as much in love with Rafael as she had ever been and undoubtedly a psychologist would tell her that she was a masochist. After all, she conceded with a surge of sudden bitterness, Rafael didn’t know the half of what he had done to her.
The final cost of repeatedly defying her father had been terrifying. In remembrance, she shuddered, struggling to close out all recollection of the nightmare months when the most basic of human rights had been wrested from her. The loss of her freedom and the terror that she would never regain it had somewhat diluted the effect of Rafael’s infidelity. Survival came before pride. Sarah had learnt that lesson within weeks. Locked away in that clinic and deprived of all contact with the outside world, she had swiftly realised that Rafael was her only possible ally against her father. Only Rafael hadn’t come to slay her dragons for her. Surrendering that last hope of rescue had been like losing the will to live for a time and the memories of how she had felt could still wake her up in a cold sweat of fear in the middle of the night.
Learning now that Rafael had not deliberately abandoned her had cut through the protective layer of her bitter antagonism and distrust. And this…this, she registered, surveying the disordered bed with a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach, this was the catastrophic result of letting her guard down in Rafael’s radius. Shame was eating her alive. Thank God he had had the decency to leave. Clumsily pulling open the bedroom door, she walked into the lounge and froze on the threshold.
Three pairs of identical dark eyes turned to her. Gilly and Ben were sitting crosslegged at Rafael’s feet.
‘I…I didn’t know you were home yet,’ she stammered.
‘We’ve been home for ages,’ Ben volunteered cheerfully. ‘We had to be quiet ’cos you were sleeping.’
‘You should have woken me up.’ Fiddling nervously with the sash of her robe, Sarah avoided Rafael’s piercing scrutiny, afraid of what she might see there. Amusement, triumph or contempt—it didn’t really matter. Nothing could wipe out her agonised awareness that just a couple of hours ago she had been sobbing with satisfaction in his arms.
‘We were busy,’ Gilly told her. ‘Daddy was telling us a story.’
‘Daddy?’ Sarah interrupted, ludicrously unprepared for the ease with which that designation tripped off her daughter’s tongue.
Ben gave her a miniature male-to-dumb-female look of reproach. ‘How could you move house and not ’member to say where the new house was? Daddy didn’t know where to find us.’
Gilly nodded sagely. ‘We got lost and now Daddy’s found us we’re going to be a family.’
Sarah’s teeth ground together. ‘We’re a family now.’
‘But we look like Daddy. We don’t look like you,’ Ben objected, sending pain shooting through his mother as he studied Rafael with unhidden admiration. ‘Or like Grandad or Grandma.’
‘And we’re Span-nish ’cos Daddy’s Span-nish,’ Gilly sounded out importantly. ‘Spanish people live in Spain and talk Spanish.’
‘Ethnic origins seem to have figured heavily on the agenda,’ Sarah breathed tightly.
As Gilly broke back into excitable speech, Rafael moved a silencing hand. ‘I want both of you to play in your room while I talk to your mother.’
Under Sarah’s arrested gaze, the twins scrambled up and did as they were told. True, their feet dragged on the way out but they didn’t argue. Rafael jerked invisible strings and her children leapt to do his bidding. They could not have been home much more than an hour and he had already won their respect and their acceptance. He had achieved that without her help or even her presence. Then did not like identify with like? Mutual recognition had clearly been matched by mutual appreciation.
Rafael rose fluidly upright and suddenly the room seemed small and airless. Fully dressed, he put her at a further disadvantage. Dark eyes, impenetrable as night, rested on her. Her anger mysteriously ebbed away to be replaced by a desperate uncertainty.
‘I thought you’d already gone.’ She was determined to mask the jumble of hopelessly confused emotions that had taken hold of her without warning.
An eloquent black brow lifted. ‘Even as a teenager, I had more finesse.’
Painful red stained her complexion and she turned away in an uncoordinated half-circle. ‘You said something about wanting to see the children tomorrow.’ Her fingernails scored purple crescents in her clenched palms. ‘You can see them whenever you like. I’m prepared to be reasonable.’
‘Avoiding the issue is an art form with you, gatita.’ Tiny hairs prickled at the nape of her neck. ‘Is this all you have to say to me?’
He had the most gorgeous, growling accent. Momentarily she was unsure whether it was nerves or an overt and crucifying awareness of him that was responsible for her inability to concentrate. ‘I intend to forget what happened.’ Her voice was shamefully unsteady.
‘This is very trite. From any woman but you, it would be almost unbelievable.’ His roughened intonation alerted her to the darkness of his mood. ‘You wanted me, Sarah—’
‘When I was falling down drunk!’ she cut in, angrily repudiating the charge as she moved restively over to the window and crossed her arms over her breasts. She ached to be held by him. She could feel it inside her; a spreading weakness and terrible vulnerability that she had to find the strength to deny. She had given herself with a naive sense of joy and wonder. She could not bear to have reality destroy the last remnants of the dream.
‘You were not drunk. You were not even close to that state.’ With characteristic candour and no small amount of derision, Rafael ruthlessly demolished the excuse. ‘You wanted me and I gave you what you wanted. Do you know why?’
She laced her arms even tighter. ‘I don’t want to know.’
‘I was curious,’ he confided cruelly. ‘Insatiably curious.’
Sarah recoiled. Brilliant dark eyes lingered assessingly on her growing pallor. ‘As an experiment, gatita, it was remarkably informative. Five years ago, you were ice in my bed. And now? Now you throw yourself at me with positive enthusiasm!’
A shudder of acute mortification snaked through her taut limbs. ‘That’s a lie!’
‘Is it? Then I do not presume to flatter myself with the belief that my experience with you was unique.’ The rawness of each accented syllable suggested gritted teeth. She looked at him properly for the first time since she had entered the room. Anger barely contained irradiated his strong, dark features, lightening his golden skin. His jawline was savagely taut. Rafael was making a very high-profile attempt to restrain his hot temper.
Sarah blinked rapidly, more awake to his anger than his meaning. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Don’t you?’ he breathed, and she could feel sparks ready to ignite in the suffocating atmosphere. ‘I am not the only man you have invited to your bed in recent years. This…this was obvious…so obvious that it was an insult!’
‘An insult?’ she parroted, foolishly rooted to the spot.
‘You could not wait to demonstrate your lack of inhibition. You wanted me to know that you had had other lovers!’
The floor seemed to be heaving under her feet. Rafael invariably saw wheels within wheels, hidden things in dark corners and complexity and double meaning where none existed. He had a naturally suspicious nature. Briefly she didn’t know whether to be amused or offended by his assumption. She ought to be laughing, she decided numbly. She couldn’t understand why she wasn’t laughing because really it was hysterically funny. Only a suicidal maniac would have reeled away from their marriage to go off in pursuit of another man.
‘We are still m…married.’ She stumbled clumsily over the reminder. ‘And there haven’t been any other—’
‘You were quick to disabuse me of that notion earlier,’ he rebutted contemptuously. ‘What we shared was a casual sexual encounter and that reflects glory upon neither one of us.’
Sarah was shaking. She dug her fingers into the back of a high-backed chair, afraid that if she let go she might fall. Casual? Casual? Rafael had practically torn her clothes off. Phrases like indecent haste and a violent lack of control seemed more apt. But then what did she know about such things? She had no basis for comparison. Certainly Rafael had never behaved like that during their marriage. Then he had been very cool, very controlled…except once, her memory adjusted and her skin heated as she recalled the night that the twins had been conceived without her agreement. After that, he had never touched her again. Casual, she tasted again, retreating from the past and cringing from the present. Every moral principle she possessed revolted against the knowledge that Rafael had taken her out of some sort of cruel and lustful impulse.
‘You bastard.’ Abusing him hurt her throat but then she did not believe that there was a single part of her that wasn’t hurting.
A scathing brow lifted. ‘Almost,’ he breathed disconcertingly. ‘But not quite. And no doubt you are ready to accuse me of the double standard, es verdad? I am not ashamed of that. You are the mother of my children.’
Rafael was a throwback to the caves and he was not about to apologise for the fact. Anger was coming slowly but surely to Sarah’s rescue, raising her from what felt like the very depths of humiliation. Evidently Rafael had expected her to exist in suspended animation since his desertion. After all, if she did not want him how could she possibly be attracted by any other man?
Women fell in the aisles round Rafael. He wasn’t conceited but he could not have been unaware of his own worth. His ‘love them and leave them’ reputation with her sex ran little short of notoriety. He was fantastic copy for gasping female gossip columnists. And this was the male standing here in her lounge, unashamedly outraged by the suspicion that his estranged wife might have dared to find solace in another man’s arms? Where the blazes did he get the brazen nerve from? How dared he?
