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Rafael’s proud head came up sharply, black brows drawing together over the tawny eyes that were suddenly wary, as if he had something he very definitely wanted to conceal.
‘Who told you that?’ he demanded in a voice that promised retribution on the person responsible just as soon as he found out.
‘Oh, come on, Mr Cordoba!’ Serena protested. ‘I may have had an accident—a knock on the head—but I’ve not completely lost my mind!’
‘I thought we agreed on Rafael,’ he inserted coolly, in an obvious attempt to distract her from her line of questioning.
‘We agreed on nothing! You instructed me to use your name, told me not to worry my pretty little head about anything…’
And, weak and vulnerable, she had done just that. She had accepted his presence in the hospital because the medical staff did, hadn’t persisted with the questions that had been so subtly but effectively blocked because with her head still aching and her thoughts still whirling in confusion it was easier not to. She had simply assumed that Rafael Cordoba had some part in the time she couldn’t remember, the moments just before or just after the accident, and so hadn’t pressed the matter.
But not now. Now she couldn’t believe that she had been so foolish, so blindly, stupidly naïve. Now she wanted some answers.
‘And it wasn’t just a bang on the head,’ Rafael continued imperturbably, moving to lay the baby back in his carrycot. ‘You were very much out of it there for a while, and you were lucky to get away with only the injuries you had.’
‘You don’t have to tell me that!’ Serena retorted swiftly.
She still felt cold inside just to recall the moment when, helped by a nurse, she had first managed to struggle out of her hospital regulation gown and into one of the new, pretty cotton ones Rafael had provided for her. She had been shocked and horrified to see the bruising that covered so much of her body, the scratches and cuts that marred the whiteness of her skin.
And that bruising had been on her face as well, when she had finally nerved herself to look in a mirror. Patched and ugly, in shades that blended from dark purple to a nasty, fading yellow, it had mottled her forehead and all down the right side of her cheek. It was the darkest, most obviously damaged area, just above her eye, that had made her shudder to think just how lightly she had escaped and what might have happened.
‘But I’m feeling better now, and I’m able to think straight again. For a start, I’m in a private ward. And I’d have to be all sorts of a fool to think that the food I’m getting, the nursing care, the comfort that’s been provided is the same as I’d be getting if I had just been taken in as ordinary Serena Martin, brought in unconscious off the street, with no one to help her. So I asked a few questions…’
That didn’t please him at all. It was stamped all over his autocratic face, etched into every arrogant line of bone and muscle. And the way his sensual mouth tightened, obviously clamping down on some angry response, dried her throat uncomfortably so that she had to force herself to continue.
‘I was told that I was receiving private medical care, and that you were footing the bill. Is this true?’
For the space of several taut and uncomfortable seconds, it looked as if he wasn’t going to answer her. But then a disdainfully curt nod of his dark head admitted the truth.
‘But why? Why should you, a complete stranger, do all this for me? That is, if you are the stranger you said you were.’
‘And why the devil would I lie to you?’
Scorn blazed in his eyes, searing over her skin until she felt as if it had scoured off a much-needed protective layer. Instinctively she folded her arms around herself, suddenly feeling over-exposed.
Temporarily she had managed to blot out the fact that she was actually in a bedroom, however institutionalised, in her nightclothes, while this darkly devastating man was fully dressed beside her. But that look had ripped away the shield she had built around her.
‘I—I don’t know. I can’t even begin to imagine. You say I’d never met you before, and yet you do so much for me.’
‘I told you I could afford it.’
‘I know what you told me!’
Serena flung out her arms in a wild gesture of rejection of his response, heedless of the way it made the slightly too large neckline of her nightdress gape, revealing the rich curves of her breasts.
‘It’s what you’re not saying that’s bothering me! I don’t need to know that you’re some wildly rich international banker or that the cost of my stay here is just chickenfeed to someone with your millions. I want to know exactly why you’re involved in all this—and don’t you dare say, All what?’ she flung at him as he drew breath sharply, prior, she was sure, to doing just that.
In his turn, Rafael lifted his own hands in a gesture that surprised her by its apparent mood of concession. But the wry twist to his mouth, the distinct glint in his eyes, spoke of something else entirely.
‘You are obviously feeling much better,’ he murmured dryly. ‘But the doctor believes…’
‘Yes, I know that the doctor believes it’s better to wait. That she wants me to remember on my own. But I’m not remembering, and it’s doing my head in… It’s making me feel worse, even more confused,’ she amended hastily as he frowned his confusion, even his near-perfect grasp of English incapable of following the slang phrase. ‘I feel like I’m going out of my mind. I’m frightened—’
Her voice broke unevenly on the last word, hot tears burning in her eyes, making them glisten brilliantly as she struggled to blink them back.
‘Right now you seem like the only person I know in the entire world, but I don’t really know you! I don’t know a thing about you except the way you seem to have moved in here, taking over…’
‘Maldito sea! I felt responsible.’
It was the last thing she had expected and it stopped her dead, her eyes wide and stunned, her soft mouth actually falling open a little in shock.
‘You? Responsible? But how?’
The look he turned on her made her stomach quail nauseously. Suddenly she wished she’d never opened her big mouth.
‘It was my car.’
‘Your…’
Through the tumult of emotion inside her head she couldn’t begin to interpret the inflexion he put on the words, the feeling behind them. But she couldn’t stop herself from reacting purely instinctively, recoiling back against the pillow, all colour leaching from her face, one hand coming up to cover her trembling mouth.
‘You—you were driving?’
‘Dios, no! I wasn’t even in England at the time, but my—’ He caught himself up sharply, seeming to hunt for the right words. ‘It was my car that was involved in the accident.’
‘Your car…’ Slowly Serena lowered her protective hand, sitting back up a little, but her face was still clouded with confusion. ‘Was I driving?’
‘No. You were a passenger.’ It was curt to the point of rudeness, obviously deeply reluctant.
‘Then what…? How…?’
‘Miss Martin…’ Rafael used cold formality to freeze her out, stop her questioning in its tracks. ‘May I remind you that I have been instructed not to give you the full facts about your accident? Doctor’s orders, I believe you say.’
But now she was really worried. Being left to remember in her own time was one thing. This dreadful feeling that something was being kept from her because it would be too upsetting to know it quite another.
‘But why? Did something awful happen? Who was the driver? Where is he—she—now?’
‘Miss Martin—Serena…’
‘Rafael!’ It was wrenched from her, her state of mind too disturbed to notice the way she had used his Christian name as she lurched forward, half out of the bed, to grab hold of his hand and clutch at it hard. ‘Please!’
For the space of perhaps two dozen long drawn-out, heart-thudding seconds he hesitated, obviously thinking hard. With his hooded eyes looking down into her own darkly shadowed ones, she saw him come to a decision, change his mind, rethink and change it again.
‘Please!’ she repeated, knowing intuitively that he had decided against her. ‘I need to know.’
His sigh was a blend of exasperation and unwilling resignation.
‘Serena—’ he said at last. ‘The driver…he did not survive the crash.’
‘Oh, no!’
It was the worst she had imagined. The only thing that really explained his reluctance to speak. No, perhaps the worst thing was the way she was feeling—or rather not feeling. She couldn’t even remember who had been driving the car, so she didn’t know what she should be feeling.
‘Who was he? Did I know him?’
But Rafael’s face had closed up, heavy lids and long, luxuriant lashes hiding his eyes and his thoughts from her.
‘That is for you to say.’
‘Oh, that’s not fair!’
But, ‘doctor’s orders’ he had said, and he meant to abide by those orders, no matter what it did to her.
‘I must have done, mustn’t I? I mean—I was there with him—in the car. I wouldn’t have got into a car with a stranger.’
She looked into his face, seeking a response that would help her, but finding only that stony-faced, blanked-off expression that made her think fearfully of the unseeing, frozen faces of the statues of Ancient Greece, carved from cold, unyielding marble.
‘I wouldn’t!’ For some reason she felt the need to repeat it, to emphasise the importance of what she had said. ‘I’m not that sort of a girl.’
He didn’t say a word, but some change in his face, a movement of his head, an expression in those burning eyes, a momentary lift of one black brow that he couldn’t quite control, seemed to question the truth of her assertion.
‘You don’t believe me?’
Angry now, she could no longer stay still. Swinging her legs out of bed, she got to her feet, snatching up the calf-length robe that matched her nightdress and pulling it on, belting it firmly around her slim waist with a rough, jerky movement that betrayed her inner feelings.
This was better. At least her slender height gave her the ability to look him in the eyes, even if he was still some five or so inches above her five-feet-nine.
‘How dare you? You have no right to sit in judgement on me when you don’t even know me—if that is the truth.’
‘I had never set eyes on you in my life until the first day I came to this hospital and saw you lying unconscious in that bed.’
‘Then—then you can’t tell me what I was doing at the time of the accident or just before it and why.’
Her delicate toes curling on the soft carpet, Serena shifted uncomfortably from one foot to another. She didn’t want to think of Rafael standing beside her bed, looking down at her unconscious form from that imperious height. Just the thought of those cold eagle’s eyes watching everything about her, judging, assessing, when she was utterly defenceless, unaware even of his presence, made her blood chill in her veins.
‘You can’t know anything about me—who I am or what I am—so you’ll have to take my word for it that I’m just not that kind of woman.’
‘You may believe that you were not that sort of woman—’
He bit off the sentence swiftly, but not quite quickly enough. Serena pounced on that revealing change of tense.
‘Were not?’ she repeated shakily. ‘Were? What does that mean? What do you know that you aren’t telling me?’
But he wouldn’t meet her eyes. Instead he turned to where little Tonio still lay, sleeping peacefully.
‘I have to leave,’ he said, not even attempting to hide the fact that he was deliberately ignoring her anxious questions. ‘Tonio will need feeding…’
‘No! You can’t do this to me! I won’t let you!’
The sidelong glance he turned in her direction was one of supreme indifference. I can do exactly as I wish, it declared, as clearly as if he had spoken. And you can do nothing to stop me.
Oh, couldn’t she?
Just as Rafael looped the handles of the carrycot over one strong hand she slipped past him, heading for the doorway and positioning herself just in front of it.
‘I mean it!’ she declared, praying that her vehemence hid every sign of the uncertainty that nagged at her.
‘Serena…’ Her name was threaded through with a note of ominous warning, one she knew she would be wise to heed, but she couldn’t bring herself to give up the fight so easily.
‘No. I won’t let you go until you tell me. It’s my life, I have a right to know!’
No, defiance was the wrong approach. It was only hardening his resolve. She could see that in the set of his jaw, the cold light in his eyes, the way they had narrowed, dangerously assessing. Hastily she rethought her plan of campaign.
‘Rafael, please… ‘ she cajoled, carefully adjusting her tone, making it soft and pleading, totally unlike the challenge of moments before.
‘Serena, don’t do this… ‘
Are you sure you know what you’re doing? a small, nervous voice questioned at the back of her mind. Are you sure that you really want to know?
‘No!’
Stubbornly she pushed the weak thoughts away, refusing to let them take root. If she gave in to Rafael now, if she let him go without answering her, then she would have lost her chance for ever. If he defeated her once, he would always be able to do so again.
‘Please—you don’t know what it’s been like! I’ve lain awake at nights trying and trying to remember, but it’s all just a blank—a big, gaping black hole where that day should be. Can you imagine how that feels—how frightening it is?’
‘Madre de Dios!’
Rafael dropped the handles of the carrycot and raked both hands through the shining luxuriance of his black hair in a gesture so expressive of burning exasperation that Serena couldn’t hold back a smile at the knowledge that she was getting through to him at last.
‘You will regret this.’
It was a flat statement of fact, not a threat, and that was what firmed her resolve, making her even more set on continuing.
‘I’ll regret it even more if I don’t find out what you’re talking about. This is my past—my life! How can I ever hope to move on, go forward, if I don’t know what’s behind me?’
Rafael’s only answer was another outburst of explosive Spanish, but at the end of it he flung up his hands in a gesture of defeat.
‘All right, you asked for it! And perhaps it is best that you know the truth. That date you gave… ‘
‘It wasn’t right? I was unconscious longer than I believed?’
‘On the contrary. In all but one detail the date was perfectly correct. The right day, the right month…’
‘But…’ She had to force the word out in a hoarse, tight-throated croak, because it was obvious that there had to be a ‘but’.
‘But it was a year early.’
‘Early? I don’t understand.’
