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‘You really think so?’
The indentation between his brows deepened. ‘If you have any doubts, then I’ve been doing something wrong.’
‘No, Rafael, you do everything right…so right it hurts.’ She pressed a hand low on her stomach to show him where her agony was centred.
His smouldering eyes slipped to her mouth. Very slowly he lowered his head and kissed her; he kissed as if he would drain her, then he lifted her up into his arms and strode from the room.
‘You do know all this macho stuff does nothing for me,’ she said, teasing the sensitive skin behind his ear with her flickering tongue.
‘You are very bad for my ego.’
‘Well, you’re incredibly good for mine,’ she confessed struggling even now to get her head around the fact the marvellous man fancied the socks off her.
Rafael removed more than her socks and she enjoyed every single second of it. She was determined to savour every moment of their short time together.
Over the next few days Maggie did not lose sight of her vow.
She did indeed extract the last ounce of pleasure from everything, from the sound of his laughter, to waking and feeling the warm weight of his arm across her waist, and the intimacy of a candlelit meal and a shared bottle of wine.
She savoured everything and firmly pushed away the lurking knowledge that it would all shortly end. It was getting harder to ignore the ticking clock.
She woke on the Wednesday and thought, Two days left.
She opened her eyes and the cheerless thought slipped away. Rafael’s head was on the pillow beside her, his long lashes lying in dark fans across the chiselled contours of his cheekbones, his jaw darkened with a layer of piratical dark stubble.
Sleep had ironed some of the severity from his patrician features and the hank of dark hair flopping across his high forehead made him look younger.
She could have carried on looking at his face for ever.
Over the days some of his defences had come down and he had opened up and spoken to her about his family and the uncomfortable relationship he had had with his father, who sounded to Maggie like a sadistic monster.
When Maggie had voiced her opinion he had laughed, and told her that his father had never been that interesting.
She had learnt about his mother more slowly. Sometimes she had caught a look of surprise on his face when he’d spoken of her. She got the impression that it was not something he did often.
Then the previous night as they had lain, their bodies still cooling in the aftermath of lovemaking so intense that it had made her weep, he had explained abruptly why he had reacted so strongly to her tears.
‘I was ten when my mother left. I never saw her again. She was crying.’
The association, it seemed, had stayed with him always.
He had not revealed the story in one go, it had slipped out in fragments that Maggie had joined like a puzzle to see the big picture, and it was a very sad picture that had made her tender heart ache for him. Though, knowing how allergic he was to any form of sympathy, she had made her response practical, contenting herself with hugging him hard until he’d laughingly asked if she was trying to break his ribs.
Amazingly he was not bitter that when faced with the stark choice his mother had chosen her lover over her son. He was not even sorry she had left, because, he’d explained, her marriage was killing her.
Maggie had realised that he wasn’t speaking metaphorically.
She had fought back tears as he’d described watching her being reduced to a shadow of herself by her destructive marriage.
Aching with empathy, Maggie had felt his frustration—a child who had had to stand by and watch helplessly the systematic destruction of someone he loved.
No, it seemed that the thing that haunted Rafael was the angry words he had yelled at her while she left. Things he had never been able to retract because she and her lover had died not long afterwards in a train smash.
Maggie, her tender heart bleeding for the vulnerable child he had been, had wrapped her arms tight around him, laying her head on his warm chest.
‘She would have known you didn’t mean it. She must have known you loved her. And the last thing she’d want is for you to carry on beating yourself up over it. I mean, she must have been eaten up with guilt.’
She wasn’t sure if her comments had helped but she hoped so. It had been late before they had slept and, not wanting to wake him now, she slipped from their bed careful not to disturb him. Shrugging on a towelling gown, she went downstairs to the big kitchen where she helped herself to coffee from the fresh pot on the stove before pulling a warm roll from the basket. Tossing it from one hand to the other as it burnt her fingers, she reached for a plate and the butter.
She was topping the butter with jam when Ramon entered the kitchen looking uncharacteristically flustered.
‘If you’re looking for him, the boss is still asleep.’
She hesitated to add, ‘Can I help?’ because, although the staff rather surprisingly acted as though her position in the household were permanent and had developed a habit of consulting her on domestic issues, Maggie was very conscious of her temporary status and always referred them to Rafael, who was not always appreciative of her tact. Only the previous day he had become extremely exasperated and referred the problem back to her after she had refused to mediate a minor domestic dispute.
‘That is the problem. Sabina took it on herself to wake him when the guests—’
‘He has guests?’ Maggie tightened her robe.
This was the first time the outside world had intruded on her little idyll and it was an unwelcome reminder of how flimsy the foundations her happiness was based on actually were.
The world was out there and, like it or not, she had to go back into it. She had wondered what she would say if Rafael suggested continuing their relationship after her holiday ended.
She had agonised over her response, finding the thought of never seeing him again hard to contemplate without horror. But would drifting slowly apart, as they inevitably would, be less painful? A cancelled visit, a missed call, watching the gradual disintegration of their relationship? Wouldn’t a clean break be easier in the long run to bear?
In the end the question might be academic; he might not suggest it. While he never mentioned it ending, he never mentioned it carrying on either. And Rafael had never given any indication that he considered their time together anything other than a pleasant interlude.
For her part Maggie had resisted it, but she had finally been forced to ask herself why when she was around him her heart reacted independently of her brain.
He was the love of her life, and though she had always scoffed at the better-to-have-loved-and-lost theory she would not have had it any other way.
Him not returning her love was a tragedy, but not ever meeting him would in her mind have been an even greater one. She had embarked on the affair thinking that sex might liberate; in reality love had.
‘I think I’ll take my coffee upstairs.’
‘Well, if you think that.’ Ramon stopped. ‘Perhaps that might be best, but I thought.’ He shook his head and vanished, leaving Maggie to stare after him in perplexed bemusement.
The reason for his stress became more obvious when she entered the grand hall, her intention to take the short cut up the main staircase to their room.
She came to a halt and tried to blend into the background. Rafael was standing at the far end in the company of a man and woman, who was pushing a pram up and down with her foot.
The raised angry voices of the two men made it clear she had wandered into the middle of a private argument. Unsure whether to retrace her steps and use one of the rear staircases or try and slip unnoticed up this one, she hesitated uncertainly.
While she stood there the seated woman turned her head and the blood left Maggie’s face. The plate and mug slipped from her nerveless fingers and she shook her head slowly from side to side.
This could not be happening.
The face she was looking at demonstrated how slim the line between beauty and average was; it was her face if her features had been perfectly symmetrical, if her lips had been less generous and her nose had been straight.
The woman stood and Maggie thought she could be looking in the mirror if she were four inches taller and half a stone lighter.
Nobody was shouting any more; they were all staring at her. She never had liked being the centre of attention, she thought, struggling to control the bubble of hysteria lodged in her throat.
The silence that had followed the shouting was unbearably loud.
‘I dropped the plate.’
Her voice was the catalyst for a fresh bout of yelling. This time the woman joined in and the baby—no, babies—in the pram started to cry.
Feeling strangely disconnected from the drama unfolding and, for that matter, her own body, Maggie listened to the exchange of insults and accusation—a lot of accusation, and most of it aimed at Rafael, who made, it seemed to Maggie, only a token effort to defend himself.
His attention was constantly straying from those who were energetically jabbing the finger of blame at him to Maggie.
‘How could you, Rafael! My daughter…you have betrayed every trust I ever had in you!’
‘What gave you the right to assume.? I am not like your father… I thought we were friends…’
Maggie sucked in a breath, caught up in this strange nightmare moment but distant from it—distant from these people who were not her people.
The need for the comfort, the familiarity, of those she knew were there for her no matter what rose up inside her until she had to act on it.
‘Nice to meet you, but I have to go now.’
Even though her voice had been barely more than a whisper the acoustics in the room were such that every word echoed around the room.
Silence broke out all over again.
Maggie dropped to her knees. ‘I’ll just…’
Rafael was at her side, taking her hand and cursing as he saw blood oozing steadily from the superficial cut.
‘I could do with a dustpan, really.’
‘Madre di Dios!’ he breathed, lifting her into his arms.
He turned his head, murder in his eyes in response to an angry comment from the male half of the couple, before he strode up the stairs with Maggie in his arms. She didn’t resist, she did not do anything—the blank look in her eyes scared him more than anything in his life!
He sat her on the bed and cleaned and dressed the wound. He pushed a glass of brandy into her hand. For a moment she looked at it blankly, then he saw something move at the back of her eyes a moment before, with calm deliberation, she tipped the contents on the floor.
‘Was that who I think it is?’
‘Yes, it was. Your mother is married to my cousin.’
The muscles along her jaw quivered as she looked at him with dark unfriendly eyes.
‘No, she isn’t, because my mother,’ she said in a voice that quivered and shook with emotion, ‘my mother looked after me when I had chicken pox and wanted to scratch the spots—she stopped me. She read my teacher the Riot Act when I was being bullied at school. She listened to my spellings when I had a test. I only need one mother and that woman is nothing to me…a stranger.’
‘I know it must be hard for you to understand now, but Angelina was very young and her family—’
Maggie shook her head and covered her ears. ‘I don’t want to know her name. I don’t want to know how sad and sorry she is. I want nothing from her. Do you understand? Nothing!’
‘You’re pretty judgemental. Haven’t you ever made a mistake?’
The question drew a bitter smile from Maggie. ‘Several, but the one I’m looking at right now makes the others fade into insignificance.’
She saw him flinch as her words hit home and she didn’t care. She was glad. She wanted him to hurt as much as she was, even though that was impossible.
The burst of anger had actually cleared the fog of confusion in Maggie’s brain, leaving cool, clear clarity in its place. As the argument’s main points sifted through her mind she looked at her bandaged hand and noticed it had stopped shaking.
‘Let me get this straight—is it true what that man said?’
‘Alfonso my cousin.’ Who now, it seemed, hated and despised him—there was a lot of it around! The next time anyone asked his advice he was going to develop selective deafness—not that this was likely to happen any time soon; most, if not all, of the people he cared about were not talking to him.
‘Was he right? You slept with me to stop me confronting her and spoiling a family party. You could,’ she suggested bitterly, ‘have just explained it wasn’t a good moment. And I wasn’t…’
‘You weren’t?’
‘I have never wanted to trace my birth mother. I even split up with Simon because he did just that and now you…’ She dropped her head into her hands. Rafael had seemed so different, but actually he wasn’t.
He was worse!
She pressed her fingers to her pounding temples. Rafael covered them with his own and tilted her face to his. ‘I admit it started out that way.’
‘And then you fell desperately in love me…yes… Save your breath, Rafael, for the next starry-eyed fool who thinks every word you utter is gospel.’
‘I have never lied to you, Maggie.’
‘No, but you were pretty economic with the truth and anyway you didn’t need to lie, did you? Because, let’s face facts, I was easy!’
Rafael swore.
Maggie flinched away from his outstretched hand. ‘It was all an act, wasn’t it? And in the end such a waste of your valuable time, because I never presented any danger. I was not a scandal waiting to happen. I was just a silly girl who believed you were as special as you seemed. And you’re not, you’re not special, you’re…’ Her voice quivered as the tears began to seep unchecked from her eyes. ‘I hate you and I wish we’d never met!’ She raced to the wardrobe and began to pull her possessions off the rail. ‘I’m going home.’
The dark lines of colour scoring Rafael’s razor-edged cheekbones deepened as he watched her. ‘I did not ask you to stay with me only because of Angelina and you did not stay because you hate me.’
Maggie spun back, her dark eyes glowing with scorn. ‘Like you said yourself, I’m a fast learner, and actually hating is not so hard!’ Maggie drew a hand across the nape of her neck to free the hair trapped under her shirt before sweeping it back from her face and securing it behind her ears.
‘Do not be dramatic.’
The terse recommendation drew a low growl of incredulity from Maggie’s throat.
‘You could not regret the sex any more than I do…’
Maggie’s head went back as though he had struck her. She bit her trembling lip.
‘You were not so open,’ he charged angrily. ‘You did not tell me you were a virgin.’
Maggie’s jaw dropped as she shook her head in disbelief—as if what he had done could compare. ‘What was I meant to do—carry a sign around my neck? Call me an idiot, but I had this crazy idea I was missing out on something marvelous, that the experience would be liberating! How was I to know that it was all hype and no substance?’
