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‘You know what I meant! It was a saying, not a threat. Are you afraid that you will lose contact with your parents? All right. If you want to bring them over here on a visit, you can!’ It was clear from his expression that he considered that a magnificently unselfish offer. ‘It is a very big house and I would probably see them only at dinner. What do you think?’ he prompted impatiently.
‘I don’t really think you want to hear my answer.’
A smouldering dissatisfaction was awkening in his tawny gaze. ‘I am not very good with people I don’t like.’
‘I did notice that over dinner last night,’ she said woodenly.
‘But for your sake I would make an effort. Who knows? Time may have changed your parents,’ he breathed with a brooding lack of conviction.
Dear heaven, this was sacrifice. This for Rafael was the equivalent of lying undefended on a cold stone slab with a gleaming knife-point hovering over his heart. He was ready to make the ultimate sacrifice for his children’s benefit, most probably on the mistaken assumption that the twins were very attached to their maternal grandparents. ‘I shouldn’t worry, if I were you. I imagine it will take my father quite a while to come to terms with your connections with Santo Amalgamated Industries!’
‘Cristo, Sarah!’ Abruptly, he lost patience. ‘You are being deliberately obstructive. I have apologised for last night. But you are behaving like a sulky little girl!’
‘Perhaps I’m less idealistic about the future than you are and I should know what I’m talking about—I have lived with you before!’
‘Let me spell my intentions out, then,’ he grated. ‘Whatever you want, you can have. Whatever you want, I will try to give you. What more can I offer you?’
She couldn’t tell him. Her self-respect might be badly dented but it was still in existence. She wanted his love, his trust, his understanding. Only none of those things was on offer. He had loved her when he was twenty-four but that was a long, long time ago and a century in terms of maturity. In those days, compromise would have been a very dirty word in his vocabulary. Then, it had been all or nothing for Rafael.
That day he had called her from New York and issued his forty-eight-hour ultimatum, he had gambled their entire relationship on the single turn of a card. And a day past the deadline and her failure to put in an appearance, he had picked up that exotic brunette at the gallery and taken her back to his hotel room. Until now she had rigorously avoided seeing that connection. It was perfectly possible that in the heat of anger and wounded pride Rafael had believed that their marriage was over, that she had made her final choice and that that final choice did not include him.
‘What happens if you fall in love with someone else?’ she asked drily. ‘What happens then?’
A spasm of pain flashed through his eyes, pain mingled with some other fierce and dark emotion. Regret? Bitterness? It was there so briefly that she might almost have thought her imagination was playing tricks on her had not a lingering tautness to his facial muscles confirmed the impression that she had hit a nerve.
‘That is a very unlikely event.’
Sarah felt numb. Quite accidentally she had jerked a tripwire. She had thrown the question off the top of her head, intending only to disconcert him. He had tripped but she was the one who, to borrow Gordon’s terminology, had ridden herself into one back-breaking fall. Rafael was in love with someone else. Someone else, someone else…the echo rose to deafening proportions in her head.
Perspiration dampened her upper lip and she turned, pretending an interest in the canvases on the wall when in actuality she couldn’t see them. A vast and horrible emptiness was yawning inside her, making her wretchedly aware that in spite of everything that she had been busy telling herself she had been cherishing the hope that sooner or later, he might…he might what? Love you again? You weren’t even his type the first time around!
Her unseeing gaze focused involuntarily on one of the paintings and without conscious volition she moved closer. Recognition shocked her briefly out of her stupor. A girl in a prim white sundress was sitting on the deep sill of a low window, hands folded, feet neatly placed together. All the cluttered paraphernalia of an artist’s studio surrounded her. You could taste her tension and isolation. Her shoulders had a defeated droop; her whole posture radiated misery.
‘I did it from sketches,’ Rafael murmured softly.
‘I look like a dying swan.’
‘I think you look lost and unhappy. It is not very good.’ His intonation had roughened. ‘Next time I paint you there will be no comparison.’
She tensed. ‘There won’t be a next time.’
‘But who thought there would be a next time for us?’ he countered mockingly. ‘And in Andalucia we say, “Life is much shorter than death.” You should think about that.’
CHAPTER NINE
‘ARE you awake, gatita?’
The inhabitants of a cemetery would have been enlivened by the racket Rafael had made coming to bed. Sarah lay very still, play-acting sleep in the darkness.
‘You should be. I made enough noise.’ He laughed softly. ‘Why are you lying over there? I forgot the time. You should have phoned the studio. Lo siento mucho,’ he breathed huskily as he drew her inexorably into the strong circle of his arms. ‘But better late than not at all, es verdad?’
‘I’m tired,’ she muttered curtly.
‘Dios, Sarah, the bed is here at any hour. I am not,’ he teased.
‘You conceited jerk!’
‘Is this some game that I am to play? Heads, you want me? Tails, you don’t?’
Silently, Sarah slid out of his embrace and rolled over to a cool, uninviting stretch of the bed. She had no sense of satisfaction. The unpleasant thoughts that had been her constant companions throughout the afternoon and evening refused to be shaken off. If he loved someone else, why had he made no attempt to speed up the divorce? Or had he only met her recently? Why had he made love to her that day in London? Was it possible that this other woman was already married and out of reach? Was it possible that she didn’t feel the same way? For hours, she had tortured herself with every feasible possibility in search of answers that she didn’t really want to find. For hours, she had been waiting for him to put in an appearance.
And then what did he do? He strolled in as if he hadn’t a care in the world and reached for her as if she was his by some holy, unwritten law. Well, she needed to be more than a warm, willing body in his bed, a physical release for his sexual desires…a tolerable and practical substitute for some other woman he couldn’t have. Every ounce of pride she possessed revolted against that latter prospect. The knowledge was too fresh, too like a drop of acid burning into her flesh for cooler reasoning to play any part in her response. She had to mean more to him. A loveless, careless joining of bodies in the dark was not enough for her.
‘I too have my pride,’ Rafael asserted, his intonation tellingly abrasive. ‘I want nothing from you that you do not give freely. When the pious high of self-denial loses its attractions, you can make the running—’
‘Never!’ She practically spat the word at him, she was so outraged.
‘But you will have no other choice. It will become rather cold and lonely on that side of the bed.’
There was something alarmingly threatening about that blithe promise. It set her teeth on edge. A little while later, she listened to the deep, even sound of his breathing. He had fallen asleep. How could he do that when she was tossing and turning in turmoil? Tears inc
hed a stinging path of betrayal from beneath her lashes. Rafael had offered neither reassurance nor persuasion. If anything, he had sounded bored. He couldn’t really have wanted her that much to begin with, and it was not that she wanted him to want her when she most definitely didn’t want him, but…? At that point she withdrew from her hopelessly entangled thoughts, experienced a surge of totally illogical fury over his ability to simply drop off to sleep and curled up in a tight ball at the furthest edge of the bed.
* * *
‘You must be formally introduced to the family,’ Dona Isabel repeated immovably.
‘But while you’re unwell…’ Sarah murmured worriedly but her arguments were steadily losing force. It was very obvious that they were unwelcome.
‘I have already listened to Rafael on this topic. I am feeling stronger,’ Dona Isabel asserted firmly. ‘We will hold a dinner party. I have already begun drawing up the guest list. I shall make use of Rafael’s secretary, Senora Morales. It will be excellent experience for you as well, Sarah, to see how such things are correctly organised.’
Sarah bent her head, hiding a smile at the thought of the amount of training she had received from her mother. Setting up a dinner party would not have provided her with any problems whatsoever. ‘Yes,’ she agreed.
‘The invitations will go out tomorrow.’ Her keen old eyes rested on Sarah. ‘You should be with Rafael in the evenings, not sitting here with me.’
Sarah tautened, taken by surprise. ‘He’s probably in the studio.’
‘Consuelo informs me that many nights he sleeps there.’
‘He’s painting,’ Sarah said tightly.
‘He is restless, discontented. These are not good signs. Rafael? He needs careful handling. A clever woman would not let him know that he is being handled,’ Dona Isabel continued meaningfully.
In the mood Rafael was in at the moment a clever woman would need a shotgun to get that close to him. A bubble of hysterical laughter was trapped in her throat. She had been ill prepared for his grandmother’s candour although goodness knew why. Over the past two weeks she had become pretty well acquainted with Dona Isabel. Rafael’s grandmother had spent a lifetime dominating her family. While she did not make the mistake of trying to dominate Rafael, she was not above speaking her mind to Sarah in no uncertain terms.
