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He lifted the phone. ‘My driver will take you.’
And she waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t. The silence clawed at her, and she was afraid that she would fill it, that she would let the truth spill out to damage him as much as it had damaged her.
To guard against that risk, Harriet turned on her heel and walked back out into the echoing hall. A minute later the manservant appeared with her suitcase. No other sound disturbed the quiet until the buzzer on the intercom announced the arrival of the limo. She wanted to run back and say…What would she say to Rafael? What was there to say? Despair settling like a lump of concrete inside her, she let the lift carry her down to the basement car park.
CHAPTER TEN
UNA ALMOST FELL off her bicycle in her desperate eagerness to speak to Harriet. ‘I think Fergal must be seeing that English tourist who’s renting a room at Dooleys!’
Harriet glanced at the teenager’s anguished face and hurriedly looked away again. ‘So?’
‘Don’t you know how I feel about him?’ Una gasped tearfully. ‘I just saw him walking through the village with her!’
With effort, Harriet fought free of her preoccupation. She put an arm round the distressed girl and gave her a comforting hug. ‘I’m sorry you’re hurt.’
‘I’m more than hurt…I love him. I can’t stand to see him with someone else!’
Harriet breathed in deep but remained silent.
‘Go on—say what you’re thinking!’ the teenager urged fiercely.
‘You’re too young for Fergal and I’m afraid that he has a life to get on with,’ Harriet murmured, as gently as she could.
‘You don’t understand how I feel about him,’ Una mumbled thickly. ‘I told Rafael and he understands—because he didn’t say anything like that…he just listened!’
Harriet stared a hole in the sack of feed she was opening. She was not as naive as Una, who seemed to have no suspicion of how protective her brother was. She was imagining Rafael listening. Rafael, who was too clever and too controlled to speak and reveal his thoughts. It was ten days since they had parted in London. He had been cold as ice. He had shown nothing, felt nothing. But what had she expected? Wasn’t it better that way? On his terms it had been a casual affair that he, at least, would swiftly forget. Why should that hurt her even more? Her eyes were so heavy that she marvelled she didn’t fall asleep standing up. But she knew that no matter how tired she was she would be tormented by nightmares. She would also wake up feeling distraught in the middle of the night, and then lie tossing and turning until dawn.
‘Don’t think I haven’t noticed that Rafael and you are acting real weird. I just haven’t said anything because Tolly said I shouldn’t,’ Una added, half under her breath, before she took off to park her bike and help in the morning routine of feeding, mucking out and exercising the horses.
Harriet wanted to chase after the younger woman and ask how Rafael had been acting. She craved information about him but would not allow herself to seek it. With every atom of her will-power she was attempting to suppress her longing for him and retrain her thoughts. Incest. The word and the meaning of it haunted Harriet. She had tried so hard to avoid it, but it crept up on her and attacked her countless times a day. A crime against the moral order of society. A crime in law. It was done and could not be undone.
Yet still she found it hard to believe that she had unwittingly made such a disastrous mistake—that in the whole wide world she had had to meet and fall madly in love with the only other man who was as closely related to her as Boyce was. But then it was quite natural for her to be reluctant to believe that, wasn’t it? How could she trust her own misgivings about Eva’s dramatic revelation? Why had some inner streak of unf
amiliar cynicism noted that even at seventeen Eva had not sunk to the level of a Mr Ordinary? Even in a remote Irish village her mother had still managed to catch the eye of a very wealthy and newsworthy man. But then Eva was very beautiful, and why on earth would her mother choose to lie about such a thing?
If Valente Cavaliere had fathered Una, why should he not also have fathered Harriet thirteen years earlier? Rafael had acknowledged that his late father had been a womaniser without any sense of conscience or responsibility. Harriet had looked for pictures of Valente on the Internet and had sought in vain to find some point of similarity between her supposed father and herself. Rafael and Una had inherited Valente’s height and colouring and his bone structure, whereas she bore not the slightest physical resemblance to the man. Yet that only meant that she had inherited her physical characteristics from the maternal side of the family.
Was it possible that on some deep level she had felt a strong affinity with both Rafael and Una right from the start because of the very existence of that blood relationship? That was a possibility she shrank from.
That evening she was running a bath when she heard the helicopter passing overhead. Before she could stop herself, she had run through to the back bedroom to watch the helicopter drop down over the trees and disappear from view as it went into land. Dressed in clean jodhpurs and a faded green shirt, she was feeding Samson and Peanut at the back door when she looked up and stilled in surprise. Rafael was out by the sand paddock beyond the stables, watching Fergal put Tailwind through his paces.
She feasted her attention on him, helpless before her overpowering need to stare. There was an aching familiarity now to his lean, dark profile and tall, powerful physique. But the instant she experienced that magnetic pull she was ashamed of herself, and she dredged her attention guiltily from him again. She no longer knew how to behave around him. Just ten days earlier she would have felt free to walk over and join the two men. Now she was constrained by a whole host of concerns and she went back indoors. Half an hour passed slowly and painfully before she heard a car engine start and a car move off into the distance. He was gone again, she reflected just as a knock sounded on the front door.
Her heart in her mouth, she answered it.
Rafael studied her with dark as midnight eyes full of keen enquiry. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m great,’ she said weakly.
She was lying, Rafael decided: she looked as though she wasn’t sleeping or eating properly. He had no idea what was going on, but he had every intention of getting to the bottom of the mystery.
‘May I come in?’
Harriet hesitated, and then moved back to let him enter the cottage.
‘Why didn’t you warn me that my sister was infatuated with Fergal Gibson?’
Unprepared for that grimly voiced question, Harriet frowned in dismay.
