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The sudden sharp reminder by her conscience of just why Raul was here now, why he had had to drop everything and come to England had her choking off her words and swallowing them down in a rush. She was supposed to have told him the truth about what had happened. That was why she had been waiting for him at the hospital. She had been there to tell him; to make sure that he knew before he found out in any other way. She had to be the one who explained things to him.
But instead she had messed everything up. When she had tried to talk about Chris she had just broken down, gone to pieces, and everything that needed to be said had been left unspoken.
And she could hardly tell him now. Not here, in the darkness of the car, with his chauffeur in the driving seat and the glass panel between him and his passengers in the back partly open so that he would hear every word she said.
‘So he is at work, this new man of yours?’
She couldn’t answer that, not without lying, and so she hedged her bets, sticking instead to a round-about answer that she prayed would satisfy him without actually coming out with the truth.
‘New? It’s been two years.’
‘So long … and yet you wear no ring.’
It was dropped softly, almost lightly into the silence and Alannah was surprised to find that her instinctive response was to clamp her right hand down on top of her left, pushing the ringless finger out of sight. She didn’t know why she reacted in that way, only that some note in Raul’s voice had suddenly made a sensation like the slither of something cold and nasty slide down her spine, so that she shifted uncomfortably in her seat.
‘There’s no need for that.’
Again she dodged round a real answer. There was no need for a ring—but because there was no other man, new or not, in her life.
‘Oh, I see—so was that my mistake?’
‘Mistake?’ Alannah blinked in confusion. Raul Marcín never admitted to mistakes.
‘My approach was too conventional? You should have said that you weren’t interested in marriage.’
‘I wasn’t interested in marriage to you!’
How she wished it was as convincing as she made it sound. The bitter truth was that she had thought that her heart would burst with joy when he had proposed. It had simply never occurred to her innocent, naïve twenty-one-year-old self that this devastating, sexy man could actually want to marry her for any reason other than that he had been as head-over-heels in love with her as she was with him.
It had truly never occurred to her that a sophisticated man of the world like Raul might have other, more pragmatic reasons for wanting to marry her. Reasons for which her innocence, sexually at least, and her family background were much more important than any feelings she might have.
‘It really was just as well we split up when we did,’ she said hastily, as much to distract herself from her own foolish thoughts as to fill the awkward silence that had fallen between them. ‘After all, what is it they say about repenting at leisure?’
‘But that saying is usually preceded by the line “Marry in haste",’ Raul drawled mockingly. ‘We never actually got that far.’
‘And for that we ought to be thankful. If we had got married, it would have been a disaster.’
‘You think so?’ A sceptical note on the question caught on a raw edge on her nerves.
‘Very definitely,’ she stated emphatically. ‘Don’t you agree?’
His sudden silence, his total stillness was unnerving.
Turning to him in confusion, she caught a look she couldn’t begin to interpret in his eyes, flashing on and off, on and off as the streetlights caught them and then moved on.
In spite of herself, her heart gave a sudden rough kick inside her chest, making her blood throb in her veins.
He would only have to move a couple of inches, she told herself hazily. He would only have to turn in his seat, just so, and he would be facing her, his head directly above hers. And with her face turned up towards him as it was, then he would just have to lower that proud dark head in order to crush her lips in the kiss he so obviously wanted to take from her. The kiss that the gleam in his eyes, the softening of the beautiful, hard mouth promised.
And the kiss she so wanted from him.
The realisation was like a blow landing on her ribcage, making her catch her breath in shock and confusion.
She wanted Raul to kiss her. Wanted it so much that it was like a scream in her head. But a scream of need that warred in the same instant with an equally desperate scream of denial and warning. This didn’t make any sort of sense. It was not only stupid, but it was also dangerous as hell. She should be running miles away from Raul, as far and as fast as she could. Not sitting here, imagining, waiting—yearning …
‘Raul …’ she said, trying desperately to make it sound like a warning, as offputting as possible. But she had so little control over her tongue that instead it came out on a sensual husk, enticing and provocative when she was trying for exactly the opposite.
‘Alannah …’ Raul murmured and his tone echoed hers almost exactly, the gravelly purr seeming to coil around her head like perfumed smoke until she felt as if her senses were swimming from just breathing in. And what breath she managed seemed to catch in her throat so that her lips parted on a small, faintly gasping sigh as she fought for control.
Those gleaming eyes were fixed on her and she saw the faint twitch of his mouth into a tiny smile before he sobered again. Staring intently at her partly open mouth. And she could only watch, frozen as his dark head tilted slightly to one side, lowered …
And stopped dead as the car drew in to the side of the road and pulled up, coming to a smooth halt right outside the main door to the building where her flat was. A comment from the driver—something on the lines of ‘We’re here’ in Spanish, Alannah presumed—broke into the taut, heated silence that gripped the two of them as the engine slowed, stilled.
And still Raul didn’t move. Still he kept his hooded gaze fixed on her lips, so fiercely intent that she could almost feel its burn along the delicate skin of her mouth, drying them, drying her throat until the sensation became totally unbearable and she had to slick her tongue over her lips to ease the parched discomfort there.
And almost groaned aloud—but whether in relief or disappointment she was unable to say—when she saw how the tiny, brief movement shattered the mesmeric mood. Raul’s head came up again, his eyes clashed with hers just for a moment, then glanced away again, looking out into the rain-swept street.
‘My stop, I think,’ Alannah managed, her voice coming and going on the words like a badly tuned radio. ‘This is where I get out.’
If she expected any response, she didn’t get one. Instead Raul leaned across her and pushed open the door, letting in a waft of cold, wet air as he did so, then sat back, obviously expecting her to take herself off, out of the car, and as speedily as possible if his closed, withdrawn expression was anything to go by.
‘Thank you for the lift.’
‘You’re welcome.’ He made it sound the exact opposite.
The abrupt change from fiercely intent sensuality to cold distance was so disconcerting that Alannah actually felt herself shaking, unable to quite get a grip on herself. She had been so sure … and yet now his mood was so totally different that she was forced to wonder if she had been imagining things, deluding herself completely.
She couldn’t get out fast enough, pushing awkwardly and inelegantly out of the car. It was only as she set foot on the pavement, buffeted uncomfortably by the force of the wind and the rain, her short jacket no protection against the inclement weather, that she suddenly remembered in a devastating rush just why she had met up with Raul at all. Why she had been at the hospital in the first place.
She had been there to tell him everything—the whole truth about the terrible accident that had claimed Chris’s life—and she hadn’t even begun to say anything. She had let the time in the car slide away from her, caught in her memories of the past, in anything and everything other than what she should have been thinking of.
What she should have told him.
What she still had to tell him.
She couldn’t let someone else break the truth to him; couldn’t let him find out in any other way. There was only one person who could tell him everything that had happened—and it was her duty to make sure he got the right story. It was the last thing she could do for her brother—the only way to preserve Chris’s memory.
But there was no way she could turn round now and tell him. What was she to do? Get back in the car and say—‘Hang on, I’ve got something to tell you’? Or say it baldly and bluntly standing here like this, leaning in at the door, where the driver and possibly anyone passing by might also be able to hear.
She couldn’t do that to him. Not even to Señor Heartless Raul Marcín. In these circumstances she owed him a bit more than that.
And so she drew on all her strength, took a deep, calming breath, and bent down to lean in at the car door again.
‘We don’t have to leave it like this, do we? Would you like to come inside—for coffee?’
She knew the form of her words was a mistake even as they left her tongue but she only knew how bad an error she had made when she heard them fall into the silence of the night, sounding horribly light considering the impetus behind them. She felt even worse when she saw the way that Raul’s face changed, his eyes narrowing in his shadowed face, his mouth thinning out to just a hard, cold line.
‘Coffee?’ he said, making the word sound like a curse, as if the drink was a totally alien substance to him.
‘Well, you never got a drink in the hospital.’ she managed jerkily, seeing no change in that distant expression, no lightening of the darkness of his eyes.
He was going to refuse; she knew it in her heart. He was just a second away from lifting a hand to dismiss her, snapping an order at Carlos to drive on, before pulling the door shut right in her face. And if he did that then she had no way of getting in touch with him again. After all, that was why she had been waiting at the hospital in the first place.
‘Please …’ she said hastily. ‘It needn’t be for long. I just want to thank you.’
‘No thanks are necessary.’
But then just for a moment he hesitated, looked deep into her eyes. And the narrow-eyed assessment in his gaze made her flinch back away from it as if from some dangerous, poison-tipped arrow. Just what was going through that cold, calculating mind of his?
Then abruptly he leaned forward in his seat, directing some terse command in Spanish to the driver, who glanced at him once, briefly, then nodded.
‘What …?’ Alannah began then froze as she saw one strong, tanned hand move to unclip his seat belt and toss it aside.
‘Half an hour,’ he said curtly, flicking a glance at the slim gold watch on his wrist, and then away again. ‘Be here at nine,’ he told Carlos, the emphatic use of English deliberate, Alannah felt, to get the point home to her. ‘And don’t be late.’
Could he make it any plainer that he had little time to spare for her, and that he wanted to be away from here as quickly as possible? Alannah asked herself. But at least he was coming. Once they were alone in her flat, in privacy, she would tell him what she had to say as quickly as possible. At least then, with what she felt was her duty done, she would be able to relax.
And Raul would go out of her life again and leave her in peace.
Which was what she wanted most in all the world, she told herself, refusing to let her mind even acknowledge the way that the words suddenly had a disturbingly hollow ring inside her head.
For now, she had enough to cope with just considering what was ahead of her and the prospect of facing the apocalyptic storm that would erupt when Raul knew the truth.
If she could get through the next thirty minutes then her life would be her own again.
CHAPTER THREE
THIRTY minutes and he was out of here, Raul told himself as the lift that was taking them to Alannah’s flat sped upwards towards the fifth floor. Less than thirty. He had told Carlos to be back exactly thirty minutes after he had left the car and already more than a couple of those had passed.
Not enough in Raul’s opinion. The sooner he got this—whatever this was—over and done with and was on his way again, the better.
The truth was that he didn’t know what the hell he was doing here at all. If he had any sense he would have stayed in the car and ignored Alannah’s invitation but tonight it seemed that all sense had deserted him, left behind in the headlong rush from Spain after the first phone call alerting him to the news of the accident.
At first he’d thought that the car had come to a halt just in time to stop him from doing something very stupid. The temptation to kiss Alannah, to feel the softness of her lips, taste the intimate flavour of her mouth, had almost overcome him. Another couple of seconds and he would have been lost in the sensual temptation of that upturned face, the soft swell of her lips, the sweet scent of her skin so close to him in the back of the car. So the feel of the vehicle drawing to a halt and Carlos’s announcement that they had arrived had come at just the right moment.
But then she’d turned on her way out of the car and looked back inside. Already the steady downpour of the rain had soaked into her hair, making it hang around her face in dripping strands, and drawing attention once more to how pale she was, how huge and dark her eyes appeared above the almost colourless cheeks. He remembered how slender she’d felt in his arms, how fragile, and when she’d suddenly offered him coffee he had found that the instant refusal that had risen to his lips had shrivelled there, unspoken, in the face of the look in those big green eyes.
In that moment he’d thought he understood just why she had asked him to come in with her. He felt he knew just what was in her mind because the same dark feeling, the same dread of being alone with his thoughts was the one that shadowed his own existence.
Because what was waiting for him when he got to the hotel? An empty, soulless room. A mini-bar that in the mood he was in would be far too tempting—but raiding it would not be in the least bit sensible. And he still wasn’t sure that he should leave Alannah on her own. She had calmed down since that emotional breakdown back at the hospital, but she was still barely holding herself together. He could see it in her eyes, hear it in the tremor of her voice. And knowing the dark, dragging ache of loss that was always there, he could imagine how she was feeling in spite of her obvious efforts to cover it up.
And so he had gone with her, determined to see her to her flat, to drink that damn cup of coffee. He would delay—for her and for himself—the moment of being alone, the time when the darkness closed around him all over again, hold it back for just thirty minutes, and then leave again. It would still be waiting for him when he came out. Nothing in the world could change that.
‘You still live in the same apartment?’
Courtesy insisted that he say something. It was either that or stare at her in stony silence all the way up to her flat.
‘The same building.’ Alannah was clearly making as much effort as him to make conversation. ‘The same floor, in fact. But not the same flat.’
Her tone was low, coolly distant and withdrawn. It was the voice of a stranger, someone he did not know. There was not a trace in it of the ardent, passionate girl he had once known or even of the sweet innocent he had first met. The sweet innocent he had believed she was when they had first met, he corrected himself harshly. He had only seen what he wanted to see and had been pretty quickly disillusioned.
At twenty-one, and fresh from university, she had just been looking for a holiday fling. Mission accomplished, she had moved on to someone else.
‘A bigger flat became vacant last year, so I grabbed at it.’
‘Room for two.’
‘What?’
A puzzled frown drew her arched brows together.
‘Your new man,’ Raul explained. ‘I assume you wanted to move in together.’
‘Oh—no, nothing like that.’
A wave of her hand dismissed the man in her life of as little importance as he had been.
‘I had a promotion at work and the flat came empty in the same month. I’d always wanted more space, so it seemed the perfect opportunity.’
The lift came to a halt as she spoke, metal door sliding open, and she walked out into the corridor.
‘That used to be where I lived …’
Another wave of her hand indicated a door to her left.
‘But now I’m down here …’
If she expected a response she didn’t get one, other than a quick, inarticulate sound that might have been agreement. From the moment that she had turned to walk away from him, Raul had found that his attention was momentarily distracted. Following Alannah down the blue-carpeted corridor towards the door of her apartment was a sensual experience strong enough to draw his attention completely. The fall of her red-gold hair mirrored the straight line of her back in contrast to the rounded curves of her hips. Long, slender legs in the tight-fitting jeans added to the delight.
He welcomed the sensations, the warmth that flooded his body. It was something to fill the black, empty spaces that seemed to have invaded his heart and his mind ever since he had answered the phone in the middle of the night and heard the news about Lorena’s accident. From that moment he felt as if he had been barely moving, speaking, functioning. Even the discovery of Alannah’s presence in the hospital room had hardly touched him.
Even when he had held her as she sobbed in his arms, he had felt as if his head was flooded with dark, icy water so that he couldn’t feel, couldn’t think. He had responded as he would do to any human being who was in pain and distress, and in the same way he had offered her a lift to her flat, taken her out to the car. Because it was the only thing that he could do.
But then there had come that moment in the car, in the darkness of the night, when, looking down into her upturned face as he saw it in the light of the street lamps as they flashed by, he had seen not just another human being but a woman. A living, breathing, beautiful woman.
And that was when he had first felt the stirring of something else, something warmer, something more like a feeling. Something that made him feel as if the black, icy water that filled his thoughts might actually be shot through with tiny rays of light, warming it faintly. But that was when the car had come to a halt, bringing him back to the reality of a cold, dark, wet night in England instead of the warmth of the sun he had left behind in Spain, reminding him of why he was here. And it had brought all the emptiness rushing back.
And when she had got out of the car, paused to look back in, he had seen the same emptiness in her face. And he had known that at least he shared this with her. They might never be close again—hell, they had never truly been close—but right here, tonight, they shared this terrible sense of loss. That was when he had decided that for just half an hour, thirty short minutes, they could hold back the darkness together and then go on their way, like ships that passed in the night. ‘Come in …’
Lost in his thoughts, he hadn’t been aware of the fact that Alannah had opened the door and was now standing with it wide open, waiting for him to walk into her flat.
In an almost colourless face, the deep green eyes were like dark, mossy pools, bottomless and unfathomable, and the pallor of her skin was heightened by the rich fall of her hair, darkened by the rain outside. The same rain that had made the black T-shirt cling to the firm swell of her breasts under the damp cotton.
‘You should get out of those wet clothes,’ he said, hearing his voice rasp on the words as the bleakness of his thoughts showed in his speech.
He saw the shock that widened her eyes, the deep green flaring suddenly, gold burning in the darkness, and carefully adjusted his tone a degree or two.
‘Or at least dry your hair.’
