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Caitlyn’s stomach dropped like a stone at the expression in Kay’s eyes. She clenched her hands into fists. Surely, Kay couldn’t believe what Rafaelo claimed was true?
Phillip took a large white handkerchief from his pocket and, without unfolding it, rubbed it across his brow.
“You are not going to deny it, are you?” Kay’s face had drawn into tight lines. She turned her attention back to Rafaelo, studying him with critical eyes. “How old are you?”
“Thirty-five.”
Kay was not telling Rafaelo to get lost.
“That’s the same age as Roland.” Kay paused and sucked in an audible breath. “When were you born?”
Rafaelo told her.
Hurt flickered across Kay’s face. “That makes you Phillip’s eldest son…even if Roland our—my—first child hadn’t died.”
There was a world of reproach in the look that Kay gave Phillip.
Hurriedly he reached for her. “Kay, I’m sorry. I never—” He broke off, shamefaced.
“Never wanted me to know?”
Phillip didn’t answer and Kay tugged her hand free and walked away. After a horrible silence, Phillip took off after her.
Finding that her hands were shaking, Caitlyn balled them against her mouth. God. It had all happened so fast…
And it appeared that Rafaelo wasn’t lying.
A sideways glance revealed that Rafaelo’s face held no expression. No glee. No gloating. So why had he done it? Why had he come all the way across the world and dropped this devastating bombshell on the Saxons?
He met her questioning gaze with a decided lack of expression and said, “So I am not a liar.”
Then Rafaelo was walking away from her, too, his back ramrod-straight, his black head held at a proud, arrogant tilt. Caitlyn stared after him, her mouth hanging open. Finally she came to her senses.
“What were you hoping to achieve by staging that little scene?” She hurled the words like pebbles at the space between his shoulders.
He stopped, then turned.
Caitlyn glanced around. A little way off a couple stared curiously in their direction. Farther away groups stood around talking. “It’s too public here for the conversation I have in mind. Come with me.”
He didn’t look like the kind of man who followed orders. She half expected him not to follow as she crossed the lane that led past the winery to the house and wound her way along the shoulder of the hill, down the northern slope planted with Cabernet Franc vines. For once Caitlyn didn’t notice the pale green of the leaves, or how the land opened up to meadows where wildflowers had started to bloom in deep drifts along the fence line. She was too mad.
His fault.
Normally, she was even-tempered, easy to get along with—she never lost her temper and rarely even told off any of her cellar hands. But Rafaelo Carreras had managed to get under her skin with his intransigence, with his hard-ass, unbending attitude. She glanced back, he was following. Good.
She quickened her pace.
Caitlyn took him to the stable block. As they entered the yard in front of the L-shaped block, several horses stuck their heads over the half doors, ears pricked with interest. The familiar warm smell of horses and hay calmed her a little. At the end of the row, one stall was closed top and bottom and Caitlyn could hear the animal inside battering the door with his hooves as he demanded to be let out.
That would be Lady Killer. Apart from him, there should be no interruptions. Certainly, there would be no danger of being overheard by guests who’d come to attend Roland’s memorial service.
She swung around and glared at Rafaelo. “Do you have any idea what you interrupted?”
“I called the winery. I made an appointment.”
Caitlyn raised her eyebrows. “I don’t think so. Not for today. Not when Kay and Phillip are unveiling a memorial plaque for their son.”
“No, no. The appointment was for yesterday.” His hands raked his hair. “But I experienced some delays.”
She scanned his appearance. Not even the wrinkles and specks of dust could hide the fact that the suit was unlike anything she’d seen before. It fitted like it had been handmade—even if it was looking a little shabby right now. “The security scare in London?” She nodded at his startled look. “I heard about it on the news. I’m sorry, but Phillip and Kay haven’t been taking appointments for the last few days.”
He looked a little abashed. “The woman who answered the phone said something but I wasn’t listening.”
So he wasn’t lying. The frustration in his eyes was too real.
“You must’ve spoken to Amy, the winery’s PA. Roland was her fiancé.” Poor, poor Amy. She would almost certainly not have remembered to tell Phillip about any appointment. She was perilously close to a breakdown. “So I’m sorry, but Phillip probably didn’t get the message.” But that still didn’t excuse Rafaelo’s harsh behaviour. “Once you realised that a memorial ceremony was taking place, couldn’t you have left?”
“So the memorial service is for Roland? The eldest son?”
His face wore a strange expression. Caitlyn gave up trying to decipher what it meant. “Yes, Roland died in a car accident, several weeks ago.” The night of the annual Saxon’s Folly masked ball. “A terrible tragedy.”
“My condolences.” He bowed his head. Briefly. Politely. Then, like a dog with a bone, continued, “I have travelled many miles, I came with a purpose—I’d made an appointment. I wasn’t to know Saxon knew nothing of it. Nor do I have any intention of turning tail and leaving without fulfilling that purpose.”
“That’s it? That’s all you can say?” Caitlyn stared at him in disbelief. “After that confrontation you just forced?”
“I had no intention of forcing a confrontation—it was you who provoked that.”
He gave her a frown filled with dislike. Caitlyn opened her mouth, then shut it again. Oh, why hadn’t she stayed out of it?
Yet she knew that would’ve been impossible. She’d taken one look at the tall, dark foreigner, heard the sardonic edge to his voice as he harangued Phillip and she’d leapt into the fray to protect her employer. Hell, Phillip was more than an employer. He was her sounding board…her mentor…a dear friend.
“You must understand that the Saxons are like family to me.” It was true. “I could no more leave you to bully Phillip than I could walk away from a delinquent drowning a kitten.”
“I am not a bully,” he growled, blood rushing under his olive skin. “I am not a delinquent. I do not drown kittens. I am a man of honour, something that your employer is not. I would never leave a young woman pregnant and alone.”
Suddenly aware of his height and the strength of him as he loomed over her, Caitlyn felt a whisper of fear and took a step back.
He followed, relentlessly closing the space she’d claimed. “I wanted to face my cowardly father with the fact that he has a son he has never cared to acknowledge—and a woman who he had abandoned without giving her any emotional or financial support.”
Another step and the whitewashed wall of the stables pressed against her back; Caitlyn could feel the roughness of the plaster through the linen jacket. She swallowed nervously. “Maybe he didn’t know—”
“He knew!” Rafaelo loomed over her, dark and menacing, and planted a balled fist on either side of her head. “My mother wrote to him when she first learned she was pregnant.”
“Perhaps—” Her voice cracked as he bent forward. Up close the snapping eyes were full of anger, his mouth drawn into a hard line that highlighted the small white scar below his bottom lip. No sign showed of the good humour that the laugh lines around his eyes suggested.
She didn’t know this man at all.
He was a stranger.
What had possessed her to seek out privacy far from everyone else? Caitlyn swallowed again, horribly conscious of how isolated they were here in the empty stable yard.
Bravely she found her voice. “Perhaps the letter went astray.”
“My mother wrote to him again, she was desperate. Is it likely that two letters went astray? New Zealand is, after all, hardly Mars.”
The turmoil in his eyes twisted Caitlyn’s insides into a knot and her anxiety about her own safety subsided. She fell silent. It did sound bad. But she couldn’t believe Phillip would act so callously. Despite Rafaelo’s accusations, she knew Phillip was a man of honour, a decent man, respected throughout the region for his business acumen and the fund-raising he did for charity.
She had to make Rafaelo understand that.
But before she could try to convince him, he pushed his hands away from the wall. The suffocating space between them widened, and Caitlyn sucked in a breath of relief.
“My mother even contacted him by telephone. Phillip Saxon made it clear that he wasn’t interested in the child he had fathered, told my mother that he wouldn’t be leaving his wife.” There was a corrosive bitterness beneath that exotic accent.
Caitlyn glimpsed pain and suppressed rage in his expressive eyes. Unbidden, her hand came up, driven by an urge to rest it on his shoulder, to comfort him. Then the memory of his head bending over hers—of the suffocating closeness of a moment ago—returned and a sharp sliver of the poisonous fear pierced her. Hastily she dropped her hand to her side.
“There must have been some mistake,” she whispered at last, thinking the response that he roused in her was definitely a mistake. She didn’t want, or need, this.
“It was no mistake. Phillip Saxon abandoned her.”
The edge in his voice took her mind off her body’s incomprehensible reaction and made her think about what it must have been like for his mother to find herself alone and pregnant. Three decades ago it would have been worse; society had been much less accepting.
Yet Caitlyn couldn’t help the wave of sympathy for Kay that flooded her. Poor Kay! How humiliating this must be. How horrible to discover her husband’s betrayal of their marriage vows at a time when she was struggling to come to terms with grief over the loss of her son.
In front of her Rafaelo shifted, his eyes unseeing, focused on an inner hell.
The last lingering vestige of apprehension left her. Caitlyn stepped away from the wall. “You’re not the only one who has suffered.” Surely Rafaelo would see that he had more in common with his father than he believed? “Phillip lost a son recently. Can’t you find it in yourself to show him pity?”
“I’m well aware that I am not the only person to suffer bereavement.” From this close her eyes were level with his mouth. His mouth…
Quickly she glanced up, only to find Rafaelo looking down his haughty nose at her. At once Caitlyn realised that he’d misunderstood her.
“I meant both of you are grieving. Perhaps you can offer comfort—”
“I have no intention of offering him anything,” Rafaelo growled. “I owe him nothing. Nada.”
Caitlyn’s cheeks grew hot at his stubborn intransigence. “He’s your father, and he’s just lost a son. Why don’t y—”
The black eyebrows jerked together. Something violent flashed in the depths of his stormy eyes. “Phillip Saxon is not my real father. My father is dead. My father taught me to ride, to fish, to swim—and about wine. And that man is not Saxon.”
“I’m sorry,” she muttered in a subdued tone, not knowing what else to say.
He sighed then, a harsh, grating sound. “On his deathbed, the man who all my life I’d believed to be my father, informed me that he and my mother had lied to me, that I was not his son.”
He’d felt betrayed. The sympathy Caitlyn felt for him grew. It had been wrong of his mother to keep the truth from him. But what choice would Maria have had? She’d probably wanted to forget Phillip existed. Now Rafaelo had arrived at Saxon’s Folly, betrayed, grieving…angry at the world.
It was an explosive situation. “Kay doesn’t deserve—”
“I concede that my timing is unfortunate.” The dark eyes lost a little of their angry fire. “But it was not my intention to deliberately set out to cause Kay Saxon pain.”
“Only Phillip,” she retorted, and watched his head jerk back. “You want to hurt him. Why? Because he rejected you when you were a child? Or because you’re scared that he won’t accept you now?”
A range of emotions flickered across his face, receding one by one, until only irritation remained. “I am not a child. I am a realist. I don’t even know this man who fathered me—”
“But you want to get to know him?”
“No! I don’t need to know him. I dislike him. I have no respect for hi—”
“So you want to wound him, don’t you?” Caitlyn could feel herself getting hot and bothered as annoyance spread through her. “What do you plan to do to make up for the hurt he caused you?”
“It’s not about me. I want the bastard to pay for what he did to my mother.” The words burst from him in a torrent.
The silence that fell between them was deafening, broken only by the scrape of an iron shoe as a horse shifted.
Rafaelo looked astonished.
There was another emotion, too. Bewilderment? Confusion? Irritation? It passed too quickly for Caitlyn to read. Either way, it showed there was a chink in that impenetrable armour.
Before she could respond, her cell phone rang. “Where are you?” Megan demanded. “We need you.”
Oh, damn. She was supposed to be helping with the reception.
“Be there shortly.” Caitlyn hit the button to end the call. Meeting his gaze, she said, “I have to go—and so should you. I think you’ve caused enough disruption today.”
His eyes flashed. “I have every right—”
“Not today,” Caitlyn said with certainty. “You need to calm down before you speak to your father.” She tensed, waiting for him to rail at her for calling Phillip that. But to her surprise he didn’t interrupt, so she continued, “Give the Saxons a chance to mourn, to remember Roland with dignity.”
His eyes narrowed until all she could see were slits of onyx. “Tomorrow.”
Caitlyn started to thank him. The compromise could not have been easy, but he steamrolled over her. “In the evening I am flying back to Spain. I do not have time to—how do you say?—twiddle my fingers.”
“Twiddle your thumbs.” She started to smile, refusing to let his disgruntlement spoil her pleasure in his concession. “It will be for only one night.”
Rafaelo stared at her. Caitlyn shifted uncomfortably.
“You will have dinner with me tonight? At my hotel?”
Suddenly his eyes held a lazy warmth that turned Caitlyn’s knees to liquid. The sensation was disturbing…and extremely unwelcome.
“No, I will not have dinner with you.” She couldn’t. Dared not. Not even to try and talk him out of the hatred he held toward the Saxons. “But may I suggest—”
“You are about to order me around again, no?”
She drew a deep breath. “No. Not order. Make a suggestion that will benefit both you and Phillip—and your relationship in the future.”
“I have told you, I have no relationship with him.” He was all disdain again, looking down that arrogant nose, the glimmer of interest that had warmed his eyes a moment ago well and truly doused.
The Spanish grandee, Caitlyn thought with a brief pang of regret at the loss of his more approachable manner. Then she said, “I think you do want a relationship with your father, otherwise why else did you come all this way?”
