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‘I don’t understand why you should be so afraid.’ He paused, brilliant golden eyes clashing with her upward glance in naked enmity. ‘What a lie! You have the intelligence to be afraid. But what of? Violence may be what I feel but it would put me in prison and I have no love of small, closed places. And some couples may celebrate an approaching divorce with a farewell tumble between the sheets but when I become that desperate for a woman I will become celibate,’ he spelt out with brutal candour.
Humiliation pierced her like a knife-point. A primitive need to claw him for that unnecessary taunt charged her but a moment later she wanted to curl up and die. The condemned woman, branded a failure, finally scorned and cast aside. ‘I hate you,’ she framed strickenly.
‘Then it is more than you felt for me before. Even hatred—it is something. There is hope for you yet,’ he responded unfeelingly. ‘Who was the man you were with?’
She spun away, savaged by him as she had been so often before. Only this time she was tormentingly aware that she was betraying her reactions and Rafael was receiving a vulture’s satisfaction from her apparent new vulnerability. Her composure had cracked wide open earlier tonight. Now she was bare, stripped of all poise. ‘Why should you want to know?’
‘It amuses me to ask. It is so liberated to ask such a question of one’s wife.’ Provocation quivered through every accented syllable. ‘Though perhaps not in your case. Hell will freeze over before you invite him into your bed!’
Outraged by his derision, she swung back. ‘Are you so sure?’
Rafael stilled, straight ebony brows lowering over piercing tawny eyes.
‘You and your bloody ego!’ she gasped. ‘Yes! That idea really gets to you, doesn’t it? You can let some trollop crawl all over you six feet from me but—’
‘Trollop?’
‘Puta!’ she spat, her emotions spinning into a fierce spiral of rage and mortification.
‘No es,’ Rafael fielded smoothly. ‘I have never had to stoop to payment, muneca mia.’
‘Don’t call me that!’ she shrieked at him. ‘I am not a doll!’
As he tilted his head to one side, his whole concentration unnervingly pinned to her, light glistened over the black silk luxuriance of his gleaming hair. ‘You are arguing with me. Increible. You are answering back,’ he breathed in wonderment. ‘You are even shouting.’
His response drained the wild, unfamiliar anger from her, leaving her weak and badly shaken up. ‘Please go,’ she whispered.
‘Who taught you to shout?’ he prompted. ‘It is a very healthy sign. I like it.’
Her hands flew up, covering her ears. ‘You are driving me out of my mind!’
‘That is what you did to me. You threw my heart back at my feet and trampled on it. Two years of torture on this earth,’ Rafael intoned rawly, his sensual mouth compressed into a white line. ‘I gave you everything. You gave me nothing. You had the generosity of a miser. No woman has ever done to me what you dared to do. Por dios, when I think of how I suffered, I marvel that I stand here now and keep my hands from you…’
Involuntarily a hollow laugh escaped her. ‘The sole saving grace of your visit is that you now possess that capability.’
Dark colour scorched his high cheekbones. ‘You throw that in my teeth?’
She knew that intonation. Her tongue moistened her dry lips. It was the untrustworthy quiet before the storm.
‘You think I made unnatural demands of you?’ he raked at her between clenched teeth. ‘Every time I touched you, I was made to feel like an animal. You lay like a block of ice beneath me, tolerating my filthy desires!’
Sarah was the one reddening now, spinning away to present him with a defensive back. ‘Do you have to be so crude?’
He vented a stifled expletive. ‘You are the only woman who has ever called me this…that,’ he corrected in a driven undertone. ‘To think that I was once enslaved by you…it makes me shudder.’
‘The feeling is mutual.’ Waves of pain were tearing at her. Rafael had not lost his impassioned powers of picturesque speech.
‘Crude,’ he repeated again.
Sarah went white, strangely ashamed of herself. On some crazy level she was attuned to the awareness that she had drawn real blood. A lean hand was clenched into a fist at the insult. Her eyes stung. He had never been crude. Indeed, for someone afflicted with his hot-blooded, over-sexed temperament, he had been extraordinarily gentle and patient and kind. Only it hadn’t helped. Her inhibitions had proved insurmountable.
Sex. Just a small thing, not of great importance, something she could endure when she had to as no doubt other women had endured from the beginning of time. The sheer stupidity of her reasoning before their marriage tormented her now. Then she had been secretly flattered by the intensity of the hunger she roused in Rafael. Afterwards she had learnt to be afraid of that hunger, jerking away at his slightest touch.
It was typical of Rafael to be so gloriously and unashamedly wrapped up in his own sufferings, as he called them, she thought bitterly. Had he ever really thought of what it was like for her? To be married to a male so extravagantly gorgeous and innately virile and know you were a disaster in his bed? To live day in, day out with the knowledge that you were losing a little more of him by the hour? And finally to sink so low in a sense of utter inadequacy that she had taken his infidelity for granted. Closing her eyes, refusing to see. Anything just to keep him, anything so long as he stayed, a lesson learnt well at her mother’s knee with a father whose extra-marital affairs were as numerous as they were well known.
Rafael was splashing brandy into a glass, throwing it back. Strong muscles worked in his brown throat. ‘Tonight I will get drunk.’
‘Are you driving?’ The question fled her strained lips, inspired by an instinctive practicality and concern.
He shot her a gleaming, killing glance. ‘So prosaic, so sensible, so much the lady. Your hair up like a royal princess, the not too revealing dress. This is what I lived with. The patronising smiles, the small talk when our marriage was dying. We must not notice. We must not talk about these personal, private things. It is not nice. That is the word.’
She was trembling. Oh, dear God, why had he had to come here to destroy her all over again? Look forward, never back, her great-aunt Letitia had once told her. Until now it had been excellent advice. Without Letitia’s brusque and unsentimental support, Sarah wasn’t entirely sure that she would have been here today, a completely different Sarah from the mixed-up, desperately unhappy girl she had been in her teens. She had come through a baptism of fire to find her own security. She no longer endured agonies of guilt over her parents’ emotional blackmail. She no longer attempted to twist herself into something that she wasn’t to please other people. In the year since she had made her home in London, Sarah had gone from strength to strength. But now, all of a sudden…horrifyingly, it was as though she had been catapulted back in time.
Why was Rafael behaving as if he were the innocent party? Innocence had deserted Rafael in his cradle. But conversely an image of him on a hot, dusty pavement laughingly bestowing flowers on a Parisienne baglady chose to surface in her mind’s eye. Rafael, exuberantly, indescribably happy and wanting to share it with the world. In those days there had still been a streak of the child in Rafael. And now it was gone.
Hard cynicism curved his chiselled mouth. Nobody could stare like Rafael. You got the feeling that he could see right into you, strip away the concealing layers and pretences until only the inner self remained. ‘Shall I call a taxi?’ She couldn’t bear the silence any longer.
‘When I wish to leave, I will leave.’ He loosed a hard, humourless laugh. ‘I know why I am here. You will think me quite the sentimentalist. But I have this one question and it is not at all…nice.’
‘I’d sooner not hear it, then.’
An ebony brow arched and she was suddenly, shockingly aware of the raw tension in his lean, powerful body. ‘But you will,’ he asserted fiercely. ‘Did you ever regret it?’
‘Regret what?’
Something akin to naked violence seethed in his brooding gaze, setting up tiny ripples of fear in the pulsing atmosphere. ‘The price of family forgiveness. Is that how you thought of it?’ he slung at her harshly. ‘If God has given you a night of uninterrupted sleep in five years, he has been too good to you!’
In bewilderment, she muttered, ‘What are you talking about?’
‘You know what I am saying,’ he bit out, if it was possible with even greater ferocity. ‘Did it mean so little to you? A brief stay in some discreet clinic where I couldn’t find you? It was against the law…it must have been somewhere very expensive. But what is expense to your parents when they find it within their power to destroy the last evidence of your most unfortunate marriage? Ah…you go pale. Did you think I would have forgotten so easily? How could I forget? It was an act of revenge. You did it to punish me!’
‘Rafael, I—’ she began, lost in the welter of demands that she didn’t understand.
‘You murdered my unborn child and I curse you for it. You did not have the right to make that choice. I will never forgive this nor will I ever forget it,’ he swore in implacable condemnation. ‘You did not want my child but I would have taken him, I would have brought him up…’
Sarah’s perception of reality was rocking on its axis. A tiny sound dragged her glazed eyes from Rafael. Gilly was peering round the door, her pixie face screwed up against the intrusion of the light. She came stumbling across the room, powered by sudden noisy sobs. ‘Ben tol’ me the spider’s gonna get me and eat me up!’ she wailed, clutching at Sarah’s skirt. ‘And it was in my dream. Mummy, make it go away or give it to Ben. It’s his spider!’
Rafael mumbled something incomprehensible in Spanish.
Sarah bent down to lift her daughter, smoothing a hand over her tousled black curls. Gilly pressed her face into her mother’s shoulder. ‘Who’s dat man?’
‘Never mind.’ Curving protective arms tightly round Gilly’s hot little body, she attempted to brush past Rafael.
A bruising set of fingers closed over her shoulder. ‘She called you Mama. Who does she belong to? Es imposible. Speak!’ he pressed fiercely.
Tearing free of his punishing hold, Sarah sped into the hall. Her sole concern was Gilly. Gilly must not be exposed to Rafael. She’d sink a knife between his ribs before she’d let him come within twenty feet of either of her children! He had accused her of aborting their child. Of course, he couldn’t believe that! A piece of nonsense, that was what it was! Some sly, sneaky gambit aimed at explaining away a four-year uninterest in fatherhood? He must think she was mentally deficient. Well, she wasn’t and where her children were concerned she would fight like a lioness. Had natural curiosity finally pierced his tough hide? Well, it was too late. He was nearly five years too late. He wasn’t walking in here now to exercise rights he had surrendered of his own free will…no way was he doing that!
Her hands were shaking so violently that she had trouble in covering Gilly up again. Her daughter was much too sleepy to notice the state she was in. ‘Is it gone away?’ she mumbled.
‘Far, far away,’ Sarah soothed tremulously, scanning the other single bed with frightened eyes. Ben was just a bump under the duvet, not a centimetre of him in sight. In sleep, Ben was a burrower. Gilly was a sprawler, kicking the bedding off while she slept.
Rafael was blocking her exit from the bedroom. She raised her hands. ‘You can’t come in here.’
He wasn’t moving anywhere. Neither forward nor back. ‘Madre de Dios,’ he muttered weakly, lapsing into Spanish, accented syllables rising and falling disjointedly.
Her palms planted against his broad chest. She thrust him bodily from the room, hauling the door closed behind her, denying him even the view. In none of these instinctive reactions did she recognise herself. Fear and rage were consuming her in equal parts. ‘Go!’ she gasped. ‘I don’t want you here!’
A brown hand collided abruptly with her shoulder, forcing her back to the wall. ‘My daughter…she’s got black hair. She has to be mine. She has to be!’ he grated.
‘Not yours. Not unless you can call basic biology paternity!’
Hooded tiger’s eyes bore down on her. ‘And the other one?’
‘Twins!’ she snapped.
A flaring, incredulous fury had entered his dark features. Before she could retreat, he slammed a hand to the wall an inch or two from her ear. The reverbation tremored through her pounding temples. He frightened her half out of her wits. ‘So you lied to me. All of you lied! The abortion story? A lie. Por dios, a lie!’ he vented in the soaring crescendo of all-encompassing black fury. ‘All this time, all these years a lie to enable you to steal my children from me. You think you can do this with impunity? You think I would let a frozen vixen raise my own flesh and blood? For this you will pay. You will lose them. I will take them away.’
Sarah was beyond understanding a tithe of what was happening to her. She grasped only that final, searing threat. ‘You can’t do that!’
He withdrew his hands. ‘I will see you and your family in court. I have papers. There is no reference to my children. I have proof of what has been done to me. No judge will award custody to a woman who is both a liar and a cheat!’
Sarah gazed at him in horror. He wasn’t even looking at her. He was heading out of the door. She raced after him, heedless of her bare feet. In panic she clutched at the sleeve of his jacket and he shook her off in violent repudiation. ‘Liar!’ he roared at her loud enough to wake the entire building.
But still she skidded in his wake. The instinct to pursue was her only driving purpose. When the lift doors slotted closed, she fled down the stairs two at a time, round and round and round again until she charged dizzily across the small, polished foyer.
‘Mrs Southcott!’ The security man exclaimed, jumping out of his seat to follow her.
A black Lamborghini raked off down the street with the speed of a jet on a runway. Sarah stood in the centre of the pavement, strands of pale hair falling round her fevered cheeks.
‘What happened?’
Dumbly she faced the anxious guard, not at all sure what she was doing outside in the evening air. ‘Nothing…nothing,’ she said again.
Shivering, she stepped into the lift. Angela’s mother was standing at her flat door, peering in. ‘I heard someone shouting. My goodness, you look dreadful! My dear,’ she gushed.
‘I’m sorry if you were disturbed.’ Sarah backed hurriedly into her own flat and shut the door.
How had her tranquil world suddenly exploded into a nightmare? Rafael had uttered insane threats. Why had she panicked? But questions without viable answers were circulating in her spinning head. Rafael did not tell lies. Not even social lies. In times gone by he had used blunt candour as a weapon against her parents, watching them reel in civilised shock from the stinging bite of unapologetic honesty.
A monstrous suspicion was growing in her mind. She relived Rafael’s shattered response to Gilly’s appearance, his floundering speech…his silence. She remembered the documents she had signed unread almost five years ago. I have proof, Rafael had hurled in challenge. And if that was true, it meant that her father had deliberately concealed the twins’ birth by ensuring that no mention of them appeared on paper. That thought plunged her into a black hole and spawned other thoughts that brought her out in a cold sweat of fear.
Had Rafael ever received her letter? No matter what her father had done, she had still had faith in her mother. What choice had she had? When you were ill, you were dependent on others. A damp chill enclosed her body. Tomorrow she would have to tackle her parents. There had to be some reasonable explanation, there just had to be. Somewhere along the line a misunderstanding had occurred and Rafael had been the victim. But as she lay sleepless in her bed, her mind revolving in frantic, frightened circles, she failed to see just how such a gross misinterpretation of past events could innocently have taken place.
And try as she might she could not help but remember that fateful three weeks in Paris. A tide of colourful, unforgettable impressions was surging back to her. The intriguing bookstalls on the corner of the Pont au Double; the evocative scent of the mauve blossoms weighting the empress trees on the Rue de Furstenberg; the dazzling array of fresh fruit and vegetables at the Mouffetard market; the sinfully sweet taste of Tunisian honey cakes from the Rue de la Huchette…
In her final year at school, she had been lonely and isolated, too quick to grasp at any overture of friendship. She had blocked out the awareness that her classmates thought Margo a spiteful, unpleasant girl. Margo’s invitation had been a much-needed confidence booster, her subsequent behaviour a painful slap on the face.
Margo had invited her to Paris solely to please her widowed father. On the day of her arrival, the other girl had made it resentfully obvious that Sarah would not have been her choice of a holiday companion.
‘Dad thinks you’ll cramp my style but he’s wrong,’ Margo had asserted sullenly. ‘I have a boyfriend at the Sorbonne. I’ve got better things to do with my time than trail you around like a third wheel!’
She should have flown home again but she had had too much pride. Having pleaded with her parents to let her accept the invitation, she had shrunk from admitting that she had made a mistake. Margo’s father had been a successful businessman, very rarely at home and far too busy to concern himself with her entertainment. He had assumed that his daughter was showing her guest round Paris. It had not occurred to him that Sarah might be left to show herself around.
She had been free as a bird for the very first time in her life. Nobody had had the slightest interest in where she went or what she did. Venturing out with a very boring guidebook, she had been intimidated by the seething anonymity of the crowds and the incredible traffic. On the third day, while she was standing at a busy intersection trying to make sense of a map, disaster had struck. A youth on a motorbike had whizzed past at speed, snatching her shoulder-bag and sending her sprawling into the gutter. Rafael had come to her assistance.
In that split second, the entire course of her future had changed. He had helped her to her feet, asking her in fluent French if she was hurt. He had switched to equally polished English in receipt of her stammering attempts to express herself in a foreign language. She had looked up into dark golden eyes in an arrestingly handsome face and time had stood still. When the clock started ticking again, everything had undergone a subtle transformation. The sun had been brighter, the crowds less stifling, and the loss of her bag had inexplicably become an annoying irritation rather than an overwhelming tragedy.
Do you believe in love at first sight? she had once been tempted to ask Karen, only she had been very much afraid that Karen would laugh. But something reckless and exhilarating and frightening had seized hold of her in that instant.
Meeting Rafael had been like colliding with a meteor and falling back into bottomless space, completely dazed by the experience. Louise Southcott’s daughter, who was very careful never to speak to strangers, had let herself be picked up in the street and in a terrifyingly short space of time Rafael had become the centre of her universe.
‘You’re so quiet…so mysterious,’ he had once teased, running a long finger caressingly across her lips, smiling when she skittishly pulled her head back. He had never doubted his ability to awaken her to an answering sensuality when he so desired.
But then Rafael had not seen a desperately insecure teenager. He had seen a young woman, expensively clothed, her features matured by expertly applied cosmetics. Superficially, she had possessed considerable poise. Rafael had fallen in love with her face, the face that he had been unable to capture to his own satisfaction on canvas.
And Sarah? Sarah had been drawn, entrapped and finally mesmerised by his emotional intensity. Passion was the mainspring of Rafael’s volatile temperament. He loved with passion, he created hauntingly beautiful works of art with passion and, she realised now on a tide of pain and regret, he hated with passion as well…
* * *
‘Who was dat man?’ Gilly asked sullenly over breakfast.
‘What man?’ Sarah muttered evasively.
Gilly frowned. ‘That man,’ she said louder.
‘What man?’ Ben picked up the refrain.
Sarah stood up, sliding her untouched toast surreptitiously into the bin. ‘He was someone I met at the party last night.’
‘You look funny, Mummy,’ Ben said thoughtfully.
‘Funny Mummy,’ Gilly rhymed and giggled, as ever mercurial in her moods.
She phoned Angela and asked if she would babysit for her again. Since Sarah paid well, the teenager was more than willing to oblige. But naturally she was surprised. On Saturdays, Sarah always took the children to see their grandparents. It was an arrangement that was religiously observed but not one, Sarah reflected, that was of any real satisfaction to any of them. Her parents complained bitterly about the small amount of time she allowed them to spend with their grandchildren and Sarah always found the visits a strain. The twins had all the boundless exuberance and vitality of their father. Within an hour of their arrival, little looks would be exchanged by her parents, cold criticisms of her methods of child-rearing uttered, and the twins would go horribly quiet as the atmosphere became repressive and disapproving.
It was a bright beautiful morning with clear skies and sunlight. The promise of early summer was in the air. Normally she enjoyed the drive to Southcott Lodge. She rarely used her car except at weekends. It had belonged to her great-aunt and, having been well maintained, was mercifully still going strong in spite of its age. When the car did develop problems, she doubted that she would be able to replace it.
Inflation had considerably reduced the value of the income she received from a small trust fund set up by her late grandmother. Five mornings a week she worked as a receptionist in a large insurance company while the twins were at nursery school. The flat was her one asset and already it was becoming cramped.
Her family home was an elegant red-brick Georgian house set in spacious, landscaped grounds. Even the lawns looked manicured. The exterior was as picture perfect as the interior. The innate tidiness of her parents’ lives was matched by their surroundings.
The housekeeper, Mrs Purbeck, opened the front door. Her brow creased as she noted the absence of the twins. ‘Your parents are in the conservatory, Miss Southcott.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Purbeck.’ Sarah crushed back a ludicrous desire to laugh. On Saturdays, in spring and summer, her parents always breakfasted in the conservatory. Her father would be reading his morning paper at one end of the table and at the other her mother would be staring into space. Neither would find it necessary to speak to the other unless something of importance arose.
‘Sarah…you’re early.’ Folding his paper into precise folds, Charles Southcott rose to his feet, a tall, distinguished man in his late fifties, his blond hair greying, his eyes ice-blue chips of enquiry in his long, thin face.
Her mother frowned. ‘Where are the children?’
