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‘I’m not afraid of what you have to say.’
‘Then why the hell are you goading me like this?’ Raul splintered back at her in frustration. ‘I don’t like being needled. I especially don’t like snide comments. If you have something to say to me, have the guts to say it loud and clear, because I have no time for anything else!’
Melina loomed like the bad fairy in her mind’s eye. Polly wanted to defend herself. She wanted to explain how upsetting and threatening she had found that encounter. But she had a greater fear that the mention of her own feelings in relation to yet another woman and him would be a dangerously provocative act that would simply send him through the roof. As he gazed expectantly back at her, Raul’s eyes burned as gold as the flames in the heart of a fire.
‘I haven’t anything to say,’ she stated, in what she hoped was a soothing tone likely to defuse the situation.
But, disconcertingly, that tone had the same effect as throwing paraffin on a bonfire. Raul sprang up, throwing her a blistering glance of derision. ‘You have the backbone of a jellyfish! I’m ashamed to be married to such a spiritless excuse for a woman!’
‘Maybe...m-maybe I have more control over my temper than you have,’ Polly stammered through teeth clenched with restraint.
Raul slashed an imperious hand through the air in savage dismissal. ‘This morning I left you at the airport. I walked away from conflict. I’ve spent the last ten years doing that quite happily. I watched my father do that all his life with women,’ he grated in a raw, hostile undertone. ‘And then it dawned on me that I was married to you, and that if I start closing you out when you anger me, what future can this marriage have?’
‘Raul, I—’
‘Cállate! I am talking,’ Raul broke in with supreme contempt as he yanked a garment out of a drawer. ‘I find your continuing jealousy irrational and disturbing. And for someone so repressed she shrinks from even sharing a bath with her own husband, I find it even stranger that you should want to know what I might or might not have done with other women when I was answerable to nobody!’
Lips bloodlessly compressed to prevent them from trembling like the rest of her shivering, woefully weak body, Polly watched him pull on a white polo shirt and whispered shamefacedly. ‘I don’t want to know...’ She was stumbling wretchedly. ‘I mean—’
‘Never again will I make the smallest sacrifice to make this marriage work!’ Raul swore with hard emphasis. ‘I have my son...what else do I need? Certainly not a silly little girl who cowers at the idea of making love with me!’
‘Raul, please...’ Polly muttered strickenly as he strode towards the door and flung it wide.
All volatile energy and movement now, he yelled something down the corridor. On cottonwool legs, Polly followed him to the threshold and watched one of the maids coming at an anxious run.
Raul rapped out instructions in Spanish. The maid bobbed her head in instant acquiescence and then sped off down the corridor again.
Raul sent Polly a smouldering look of derision. ‘You need no longer fear my unwelcome approaches, mi esposa. The maid will convey your possessions to another room!’
CHAPTER EIGHT
POLLY paced the floor in the beautiful guest room the housekeeper had allotted to her without once meeting her eyes. The shame of so new a bride being ejected from the marital bedroom had been fully felt on Polly’s behalf.
Over the next couple of hours, Polly ran the gamut of fiercer emotions than she had ever known. She had never come across anyone with a temper as volatile as Raul’s. She had never dreamt that Raul might speak to her like that—even worse, look at her as he had. As if she was nothing to him, less than nothing, even, nothing but a pain and a nuisance, beneath his notice and utterly unworthy of any further attention.
She went from rage at his having made such a public spectacle of their differences to sudden all-engulfing pain at the sheer strength of that rejection. They had been together perhaps twenty-four hours, yet everything had fallen apart. A voice in her mind just screamed that she couldn’t cope, couldn’t handle the situation. She wanted to take Luis and run...run and make Raul sorry, she registered. The tears flowed then, in shame at the manner in which her thoughts went round and round in circles but never lost the need to keep Raul at the very centre.
Calmer, if no more happy once she had cried, she took a good, hard look at her own behaviour and didn’t like what she saw. And when she exerted herself to try and see things from Raul’s point of view, she just groaned and squirmed at her own foolish prickly resentment and insecurity.
Gorgeous, woman-killing, much sought-after and fêted guy becomes unwilling husband but makes decent effort to paper over the cracks. What with? Sex. What else? He doesn’t know anything else. Every other woman can’t wait to get him between the sheets to check out that fabled reputation, but his bride is inexplicably and therefore offensively reluctant. Not only reluctant but also sarcastic, jealous, and seemingly incapable of behaving like a mature adult committed to getting their marriage of convenience up and running.
And why had she behaved like an idiot?
Because she loved him, Polly conceded painfully, and she wanted, needed to be so much more than a convenient body in Raul’s bed. And, worst of all, a sexually ignorant partner when he had to be accustomed to lovers with a considerable degree of sophistication and expertise, not to mention lithe and perfect bodies. So, out of stubborn pride and resentment over her own sense of inadequacy, she had driven him away.
If she had told him straight off about that clash with Melina D’Agnolo, at least he would have understood why she was in such a prickly mood. But she had missed her opportunity and knew that it would be an act of insanity to risk opening such a subject with Raul now. In fact even the thumbscrews he had mentioned wouldn’t dredge Melina’s name from her lips...not when he already saw her as an obsessively jealous woman.
And all his self-preserving male antennae were in perfect working order, Polly acknowledged at the lowest ebb of self-honesty. She was and had been jealous, and no doubt would be jealous again, because jealousy thrived on insecurity. And she did want to own Raul, body and soul.
Seeing how swollen her eyes were in the mirror, she splashed her face over and over again with cold water. Then she washed her hair, put on a little light make-up, some perfume and slid into one of the silk nighties he had given her. Creeping down the corridor like a burglar sneaking under the cover of darkness, she walked back into the marital bedroom and clambered into the big wide bed to watch the moonlight slant across the ceiling through the undrawn curtains.
She must have fallen asleep, because she woke with a start later, hearing running feet and then raised anxious voices in the corridor outside. Thrusting her tumbled hair off her sleepy face, she switched on the light and lurched out of bed. Opening the bedroom door, she peered out.
A clutch of gesticulating staff surrounded Raul. Liberally daubed in mud, and far from his usual immaculate self, he looked frantic, shooting out questions at volume, expressive hands moving at volatile speed to indicate his level of angry concern.
‘Raul... ?’ Polly called worriedly as he paused for breath. ‘What’s wrong?’
The staff huddle twisted round with a general look of astonishment.
