Lynne GRAHAM

is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular and bestselling novelists. Her writing was an instant success with readers worldwide. Since her first book, Bittersweet Passion, was published in 1987, she has gone from strength to strength and now has over ninety titles, which have sold more than thirty-five million copies, to her name.

In this special collection, we offer readers a chance to revisit favourite books or enjoy that rare treasure—a book by a favourite writer—they may have missed. In every case, seduction and passion with a gorgeous, irresistible man are guaranteed!

LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen Mills & Boon® reader since her teens. She is very happily married, with an understanding husband who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog, which knocks everything over, a very small terrier, which barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.

A Fiery Baptism

Lynne Graham

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

CHAPTER ONE

‘I’M REALLY not much of a party animal,’ Gordon warned in the lift on the way up to Karen’s apartment.

‘We don’t need to stay long,’ Sarah said quickly. ‘I just want to put in an appearance.’

He smiled down at her, his shrewd grey eyes softening. ‘I wasn’t complaining. Far from it,’ he assured her. ‘I’m looking forward to meeting Karen. If she’s at all like you…’

Sarah laughed. ‘She’s not. Karen and I are about as different as two women could be!’

‘Even so, you’ve been friends since you were at school together.’

He was wrong in that assumption but Sarah didn’t bother to correct him. At school, Sarah and Karen had been poles apart. Popular and full of mischief, Karen had been the high-spirited centre of an admiring throng. Quiet and introverted, Sarah had been a loner, invariably on the outside of the girlish gossip sessions. Last winter she had run into Karen again quite by accident. Within ten minutes, Karen had been telling her that she had changed out of all recognition.

‘I used to think you were the most awful snobbish prig, who looked down on us all,’ Karen had confided bluntly some weeks after that first meeting. ‘But we were really just jealous little cats. You were quite disgustingly beautiful as well as being hatefully well behaved. You matured so much faster than the rest of us. I suppose that was the problem. We were pretty cruel sometimes, weren’t we?’

Listening to her, Sarah had come ridiculously close to tears. Karen recalled their schooldays with amused affection. Sarah recalled them with sharp pain. Nobody had sensed the crushing insecurity and loneliness she was concealing. Nobody had ever guessed how fiercely she had longed to be one of the crowd. From earliest childhood, Sarah had been taught to hide her feelings from others.

Her wealthy parents had adopted her as a baby. Her father was a merchant banker, her mother a lady of leisure who did nothing more strenuous than consult with her housekeeper about the seating arrangements for her dinner parties. Charles and Louise Southcott were very controlled people, physically undemonstrative and uncomfortable with any strong display of emotion. At Southcott Lodge, nobody had ever shouted or argued in Sarah’s hearing. Disapproval had been signified by chilling silence. By the time she was four years old, the sound of that silence had quelled Sarah more thoroughly than the coldest rebuke. But unhappily that silence had done a lot more emotional damage.

Like any young child, Sarah had swiftly learnt how best to please her parents. She had conformed to their expectations of her. It had been unacceptable to get dirty or be untidy, even more unacceptable to fight, lose her temper or cry. In return for her obedient docility, Sarah had been rewarded with every material advantage and an inordinate amount of proud parental attention. Nothing she ever did or said had been too trivial for their notice. What age had she been before she realised that it was odd for her to have no friends in her own age-group?

Friends had never been encouraged. Her birthday parties had been well attended because an invitation to her parents’ gracious country home had been prized as a sign of social acceptance in the neighbourhood. Sarah hadn’t been able to unbend with other children. The ability to join in rough and tumble games or relax into the chattering, secretive intimacy of other young girls had been stolen by her antiseptic upbringing. She had attended an exclusive boarding school as a day-girl, kept scrupulously close to home, cosseted and protected by two extremely possessive parents from every potentially harmful influence.

She had grown up with an outer shell of poise that was inevitably mistaken for a maturity beyond her years. But deep down inside she had been as wound up as a spring in a dangerously tight coil. She could not have gone on indefinitely as she was…as much a free-thinking individual as a one-dimensional cardboard image. The perfect daughter, the perfect teenager, always immaculately groomed, smilingly polite and obedient. A shiver ran through her, disrupting her ruminations. She shrank from recalling the years between eighteen and twenty.

‘This has to be it,’ Gordon remarked, shooting her back to the present.

Karen’s front door was wide open, feeding out mingled voices and music. What would Gordon make of Karen? Sarah wondered amusedly. Her friend was a successful photographer, extrovert and outspoken. Gordon was a banker, ultra-conservative in his tastes and inclined to take himself a little too seriously.

Glimpsing the casually dressed crush in the hall, Gordon frowned and curved a protective arm to her slender spine. ‘We’ll be standing in a smoky corner all evening,’ he forecast. ‘I don’t think I’ve been to a party like this since I left adolescence behind.’

Karen gave a frantic wave and waded towards them. A long-legged brunette, she wore a spectacularly short skirt and an antique lace top that exposed plenty of smooth, tanned flesh. ‘Where on earth have you been?’ she demanded.

Sarah grinned. ‘My babysitter got lost in her studies at the library and forgot the time. Sorry!’

‘It’s all right. You’re forgiven. Better late than never.’ Karen was running an unapologetically curious scrutiny over Gordon from the crown of his well-brushed fair head down over his tailored dinner-jacket to his knife-creased trousers. ‘I suppose you already know how hard it is to prise Sarah away from her little monsters for an evening. She can’t bear to miss out on a single bathtime and Beatrix Potter session,’ she complained with mock severity.

‘I can understand Sarah’s concern. Single parents do carry double the responsibility.’ As he sprang needlessly to her defence, Gordon sounded irritatingly pompous.

‘Are you talking from personal experience?’ Karen enquired drily.

Gordon stiffened. ‘No, actually I’m not, but—’

‘Gordon Frinton…Karen Chalmers,’ Sarah introduced hastily as Gordon’s fingers flexed with annoyance against her back. The fireworks of a personality clash were in the air.

Karen cast Gordon a glowing smile. ‘Sarah has mentioned you, but when I saw you I wasn’t at all sure that you could be Gordon,’ she said, typically cryptic, as she rested a determined hand on his sleeve. ‘While you go and lock your cashmere in my closet, Sarah, Gordon and I will—’

Gordon turned back to Sarah. ‘Let me take your coat.’

‘Don’t be silly, Gordon,’ Karen interposed sweetly. ‘I have to show you where the drinks are stashed. You can’t be in two places at once.’

Gordon was carted off whether he liked it or not. His innate good manners forbade further protest but the squared set of his shoulders spoke for him. The luminous amethyst eyes that dominated Sarah’s triangular face sparkled with humour. Poor Gordon. The more aloof he was, the more outrageous Karen would be. She had already told Karen that Gordon was no more than a casual friend but Karen wanted to check him out for herself.

Having disposed of her coat, Sarah scanned the spacious lowlit lounge, relieved that the room wasn’t as crowded as the hall crush had suggested. It was a very long time since she had been at a party. Indeed if it would not have been outright rudeness to refuse yet another of Karen’s invitations, Sarah would not have been here at all. She was more at ease with small groups of friends than she was amid a sea of strangers.

There was a brief lull in the music and a throaty burst of male laughter splintered through the covering buzz of conversation. Sarah’s head jerked round on a chord of recognition too instinctive even to be questioned. In appalled stasis, she froze, her pupils dilated by shock.

A tall, black-haired male with boldly cast sun-bronzed features stood in stark silhouette against the backdrop of floor-deep uncurtained windows. As he sank fluidly down on to the arm of a cream leather couch, he was the confident focus of a gathering crowd.

A woman pushed past Sarah to gain entry to the room. ‘Good lord, isn’t that…?’

The roaring in her eardrums drowned out the rest of the sentence. She could not believe at first, did not want to believe that he was real. But Rafael was breathtaking and unforgettable. Successfully blocking him from her every waking thought had not prevented his lithe dark image from regularly haunting her dreams.

Absorbed faces surrounded him. Lean golden hands sketched vivid word pictures in the air. His raw vibrance struck her like an electrical charge. Against that intensely physical aura of his, other men simply paled into the woodwork. Wherever Rafael went, women followed him with their eyes. They did it openly or covertly or even unconsciously. None of them was immune to the storm-force potency of his personality. Or that white lightning sexuality that could illuminate the darkest room…burning, blatant and blinding. God had beamed benevolently on Rafael’s birth but, even without that striking, hard-boned physical beauty, Rafael would have exerted a magnetic draw for her sex. He held court with the uninhibited ease of a natural extrovert.

Without warning, his chiselled profile spun in her direction. His piercing eyes narrowed, homed in on her with laserbeam velocity. Eyes tawny…hypnotic…compelling. Before she swung away on a high of mindless panic, she registered the loss of animation that stilled his dark, strong face. On wobbly legs that threatened to buckle beneath her, she pushed a driven passage back through the hall and down to the sanctuary of Karen’s bedroom.

Her stomach was heaving. She fled into the adjoining bathroom and retched painfully and miserably on an empty stomach. As she gasped for breath in the stricken aftermath, it occurred to her that she had to be the only woman alive capable of reacting to Rafael with nausea and recoil.

Oh, you’re so brave, so brave, Sarah. If she had known he would be here, wild horses wouldn’t have dragged her out tonight. That wasn’t cowardice, she reasoned weakly. You didn’t forget that amount of pain, not if you lived to be a thousand, you didn’t. But in five years she had changed so much; she wasn’t the same person, she was a completely different woman. Are you? an inner voice gibed. He’s out there ringed by fascinated, lusting females and envious, admiring males…and you are hiding in a bathroom. Dear heaven, had nothing changed after all?

A flush of shame covered her drawn cheeks. She returned to the bedroom. Backbone and pride had resurfaced, although neither was the equivalent of a burning Olympic flame. Dear lord, what was he doing here? But why shouldn’t he be here? Karen had countless friends and acquaintances. There was hardly anybody who was somebody on the social scene whom Karen didn’t know. However, Rafael didn’t live in London, he lived abroad. Like a lush, tropical plant of the jungle variety, he thrived only in hot, sunny climates.

Her fingertips pressed to her throbbing temples. He would leave. He had seen her. Of course he would leave. Even Rafael would not have the insolent detachment to stay on. Had he been reminded that he had two children he had never seen? Never even tried to see? Trembling, she forced herself to check her appearance in the mirror. Amazingly, the sleek wings of her cornsilk hair were still smoothly looped to the back of her small head. Her strappy whisper-green dress skimmed slender curves as delicately drawn as a porcelain figurine’s. Her agonised vulnerabilty was etched in her eyes alone.

A derisive echo from the past swam out of her subconscious. ‘You’re the pretty little doll, the fair princess they chose to elevate and create with their money. Dolls don’t live and breathe, querida. And neither do you.’

She was torn afresh by the agony of that rejection. A doll in an elaborate costume kept sterile within plastic casing. Perfect to look at, lifeless to touch. When her life was smashed to smithereens by the man she loved, that was how Sarah had seen herself.

The door opened, startling her.

‘So this is where you’ve got to. Here I am throwing the party of the year and you’re in hiding. Thank God,’ Karen pronounced in her off-beat style, shutting the door behind her. ‘I’ve dealt with Gordon for you. I stuck him behind the bar in the kitchen, pulled off his bow-tie in case someone takes him for an official barman, and I’ve advised him to have a few while he’s serving. He’s so nicely brought up that he’ll be there all night if you don’t decide to rescue him!’

Sarah faced her friend, pale but composed. ‘I wouldn’t care to bet on that if I were you,’ she quipped.

Karen peered at her. ‘Are you feeling OK? You’re as white as Gordon’s shirtfront.’

‘I had a bit of a headache. I took some tablets.’ As Sarah told the lie, she went pink.

‘Knowing your talent for understatement as per casual friends, you’ve probably got a migraine coming on. Lie down, for goodness’ sake,’ Karen commanded bossily, pulling up a chair and settling herself down. ‘I want to hear all about Gordon.’

‘Honestly, I’m fine.’ Sarah sat down on the foot of the bed. ‘Should you be leaving your party?’

‘I’ve Gordon on the bar, big brother looking out for drunks and kid sister minding the music,’ Karen confided. ‘The food is all cold and laid out in the dining-room. As a hostess, I am superfluous.’

‘You’re certainly well organised.’

‘Gordon,’ Karen repeated impatiently. ‘You’ve been holding out on me. Who? Where? How? I would have had to pin him to the wall and throw knives to get the details out of him! Even then, it might just have been name, rank and number. Still, he looks exactly what protective Mummy and Daddy Southcott would prescribe for an unattached daughter.’

Rafael would be gone when she returned to the party. Bolstered by the conviction, Sarah’s rigid spine relaxed slightly. ‘He’s a banker.’

‘I knew it!’ Karen carolled with exuberant satisfaction. ‘I said to him, you’re a broker, an accountant or a tax consultant. He didn’t look at all pleased, but he’s got a face like a bank vault! Without the magic combination, you stay out in the cold.’

Karen’s madcap conversation was steadily easing Sarah’s tension. ‘We are just friends. He recently transferred here from New York. He’s a widower. His wife died of leukaemia last year,’ she related ruefully. ‘Understandably he’s not over that yet. It must have been harrowing for him.’

Karen was aghast. ‘Oh, no!’ she groaned. ‘I’ll have to take him off the bar now! No wonder he looked so grim when I was reduced to my tinker, tailor rhyme and came up with undertaker.’ Her friend’s embarrassment ebbed fast and her generous mouth slowly upcurved again. ‘But on the other hand, I’d say that Gordon is coping with his tragic loss rather better than you suspect. The one time he didn’t look as locked up as a bank vault was when I was trailing him away from you. Gordon, my pet, is half in love with you already!’

Sarah stared at her in astonishment. ‘Of course he isn’t. I hardly know him. He’s spent a couple of weekends with my parents. We’ve lunched once or twice, gone to the theatre…that’s all.’

Karen shook her head in exasperation. ‘You’re dating him, Sarah. You just haven’t noticed yet.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Sarah protested uneasily.

‘Casual acquaintances aren’t as protective as guard dogs,’ Karen teased. ‘And you are far too beautiful to inspire purely platonic thoughts. Why should that be a problem?’

‘Gordon and I have been quite frank with each other, Karen.’ Sarah was maintaining her amused smile with difficulty. ‘Neither of us is interested in emotional involvement. I like him but that really is all there is to it.’

‘He’s handsome, successful and free and the best you can do is like the guy?’ Karen was quite appalled by the admission. ‘What am I going to do with you? Is this the female who knocked our entire school on its ear by eloping with an exceptionally ineligible foreigner in Upper Sixth? You went out in style, my pet. What happened to all that risk-taking passion and spontaneity?’

Sarah’s facial muscles locked, what colour she had recovered evaporating. ‘I grew up,’ she muttered tightly.

‘No. You buried yourself,’ Karen argued. ‘Look, I’ve never pressed you…well, not seriously pressed, for a single gory detail about your marriage. I know it must have been very painful because if it hadn’t been you’d have been able to talk about it by now. But there’s more to life than motherhood, Sarah. Goodness knows, everyone’s allowed to make one mistake. First time round you obviously landed a prize bastard. So what? I don’t think I’d have done much better choosing a life partner at eighteen, but you don’t let one bad experience put you into permanent retirement!’

‘Lecture over?’ Sarah prompted. A drink or two and Karen became a crusader. Unfortunately Karen just didn’t know what she was talking about.

Venting a rather rude word, Karen leapt up to renew her lipstick at the mirror. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are. Gordon’s cute. I fancied him the instant I laid eyes on him!’

Sarah’s taut mouth twitched. ‘Feel free.’

Karen sent her a wry glance. ‘I’d need a rope and tackle. He’s taken. And he’s tailor-made for you. At least give him a chance.’

The idea that Gordon might actually want that chance disturbed Sarah. Could Karen be right? Her friend was surprisingly perceptive about people. Her snap judgements were often spot on. If Karen was right about Gordon, Sarah would have to stop seeing him.

‘Holy Moses! I’ve a head like a sieve!’ Karen gasped, comic dismay widening her eyes. ‘I forgot about my celebrity guest. What are we doing in here? One of the models I worked with in Italy simply walked in with him as cool as you please. Rafael Alejandro! Here! In my humble home. Can you believe that?’

Deception didn’t come naturally to Sarah. ‘Alejandro…the painter?’

‘Dear God, is there another one around? He’s only one of the most famous artists alive!’ Karen stressed. ‘Considering that most of them have to drop dead to achieve recognition, we are talking here about fame as in serious fame, fame with a capital F!’

‘I believe he’s a remarkably talented artist.’ Even to her own ears, Sarah sounded wooden.

‘Believe me, when you look at him his skill with a paintbrush is about the last thing on your mind.’ Karen was dry, annoyed by Sarah’s refusal to be impressed. ‘Newsprint doesn’t do him justice.’

‘The gossip columns do.’

Karen dropped her offended stare and grinned. ‘Sarah, my innocent, when you get an incredibly beautiful man the wild reputation goes with the territory. “Mad, bad and dangerous to know” may not be you but you haven’t seen him yet. The guy is pure fantasy. I swear my hormones went into a feeding frenzy on the doorstep!’

As Sarah stood up, her conscience twanged. Sarah would be upset when she found that the rare bird had flown in her absence. ‘More you than Gordon?’

‘No. I like to appreciate but I’ve no ambition to touch…well, at least not in my sane mind,’ Karen confided with her usual devotion to the absolute truth. ‘I prefer my men less…what do they call it in Spain? Muy hombre? A volatile artistic genius would be much too unpredictable for me.’

In actuality, Rafael was not unpredictable, Sarah reflected helplessly. He did what he wanted, when he wanted, how he wanted. He had a tongue like a whip and a convoluted, brilliant mind that thought round corners into the dark, secret places other people sensibly left alone.

‘Anyway, he’s reputed to be fantastically clever as well,’ Karen rattled on. ‘I’m not running myself down but I’m no Einstein and you just couldn’t be in control with a guy like that. It’s fatuous but people will talk about this party forever simply because he’s here.’ Karen pulled open the door to find Gordon raising a hand to knock on it. Half amused, half irritated, she said, ‘I underestimated you. Have you got a homing device planted on her?’

Gordon smiled and looked through her simultaneously. Karen flushed and muttered something about food in the oven.

‘Sorry, was I ages? We got caught up,’ Sarah said lightly.

‘I got taken over,’ Gordon shared wryly. ‘You were right. She’s not at all like you. She’s like a great overgrown schoolgirl.’

‘She’s a lovely person and there’s not an ounce of malice in her.’

Reluctantly he smiled. ‘Can you imagine the havoc she’d wreak if there were? Her brain is two steps behind her conversation.’

‘I wonder why she thought you were cute.’

‘Cute?’ His nostrils flared fastidiously.

‘A compliment you do not deserve.’

Unexpectedly he laughed, his pugnacious aspect vanishing. ‘I think of fluffy toys as cute but I was out of order. Let’s grab a seat,’ he suggested.

Gordon being Gordon there was no need to grab or even to search. He guided her between a low table and sofa, stowing her down in one corner. Ten seconds later he reappeared with two drinks he had evidently stashed somewhere near by in readiness. Gordon was always well organised. Meeting the level scrutiny she had been self-consciously evading, Sarah smiled. For once, Karen had made a mistake. Purely platonic friendship was perfectly possible between sensible people.

Her wandering gaze suddenly jolted to a halt. Shock reverberated through her in sickening waves and her fingers curled into her evening bag like white-knuckled talons, bracing for attack.

Rafael was lounging on the matching sofa on the other side of the low table. Her throat closed over. Every long lean line of his magnificent body emanated unnatural relaxation. There was a reckless violence in the dark, glittering stare that entrapped hers across the divide. Her ability to breathe was suffocated at source.

‘The punch has the kick of a mule,’ Gordon told her warningly.

Half of it went down Sarah’s convulsed throat in one go. Rafael had switched his attention back to the sinuous redhead curled under his arm. Cerise-painted fingertips were idly tracing the taut inner seam of the faded denim encasing one long, muscular thigh. Those caressing fingers exercised a sick fascination over Sarah. She could not take her eyes off them.

Gordon was talking to her and she couldn’t hear him. In desperation she turned towards him, only to be nailed again by Rafael’s steel-bright stare. Unforgivably he had been watching her watching him. She felt like an animal caught cruelly in the jaws of a trap with the hunter standing over her, making no attempt to administer a clean kill. She had the terrifying sensation that Rafael was seeing her naked and defenceless. Her muscles were so clenched that she physically hurt. For a crazed moment she was so wildly out of control that she almost ran for cover again.

Karen’s voice exploded in her ear. ‘Why aren’t you circulating?’

Karen wasn’t real. Gordon wasn’t real. The only reality was Rafael, even when Karen was blocking her view. He had not needed to speak to brutally intimate his savage contempt for her as a woman. He only had to sit there letting that tramp practically make love to him in public! She read the message like the banner he intended it to be and she felt ill, cornered.

‘Por dios, this world is truly a small place.’ Sarah’s head jerked up, a row of spectral toothmarks biting into her jangled nerves, her pallor pronounced.

Rafael had moved. He stood over her now, casting a long dark shadow before he crouched down in front of her with a natural athlete’s grace. So close, so unexpected was it that it took every atom of will-power she possessed not to rear back. Somewhere Karen was loudly proclaiming an introduction.

‘Sarah and I know each other.’ He said it to her, nobody else, his tiger’s eyes a golden threat on her white immobility.

‘You know each other?’ Karen positively squealed, hanging over the back of the sofa. ‘Where from?’

A smile slashed Rafael’s expressive mouth. A long brown forefinger skated over Sarah’s fiercely clenched hands, a mountain cat taking a first playful swipe at a trapped prey, frozen with fear. ‘Where from?’ he prompted silky soft. ‘Am I so easily, so quickly forgotten?’

Only desperation came to her rescue. ‘Paris, wasn’t it?’ she managed tautly.

‘When I was still starving in my garret, although not alone,’ he mocked, velvety smooth, smiling again as her trembling fingers snaked jerkily back out of reach. ‘I believe I was part of the Francophile experience.’ Slowly he sprang upright again, still ignoring Gordon. ‘Es verdad?’

‘Boy, have you got some explaining to do!’ Karen snapped painfully close to her eardrum as he walked away. ‘Give me an inch, Gordon, there’s a love. This is girl-talk, utterly beneath your notice. Sarah, you couldn’t possibly have forgotten him!’

‘To think that I once believed that the Spanish were a uniquely courteous race,’ Gordon drawled. ‘Shall we sample supper?’

Karen cut in on him, ‘Sarah, tell me—’

‘You don’t need a public address system, do you?’ Gordon detached Sarah’s numbed arm from Karen’s over-enthusiastic grip. They were a hair’s breadth from fighting over her, Sarah realised on the brink of hysteria. Rafael’s behaviour had shocked her into dumb stupidity. She couldn’t have made small talk to save her life.

‘Paris,’ said Karen and suddenly she burst out laughing. ‘Of course! He was one of Margo’s and you never did tell tales.’

Karen had herded them both into the dining-room. She was chatting nineteen to the dozen now, glad to have solved the mystery so easily. ‘We all thought it was a scream when Sarah’s parents let her go and stay in Paris with Margo. Easter in Upper Sixth, wasn’t it?’

Gordon passed out plates. ‘Margo?’ he prompted obediently.

Sarah parted bone-dry lips. ‘Margo Carruthers. Her father had an engineering business in Paris.’

‘Sarah used to sleep in French class,’ Karen took up impatiently. ‘And her parents put French on a level with flower arranging and good carriage.’

‘I went to Paris to improve my French.’ Sarah had to fight to keep her voice level on the unnecessary explanation.

Karen was giggling like a drain.

‘I’m afraid I don’t see the joke,’ Gordon imparted.

Karen gave him a ‘you-wouldn’t’ look. ‘Margo was sex mad. Anything in trousers,’ she emphasised. ‘But she acted like a little novice nun round parents. You must know what the Southcotts are like. If they’d had a clue what Margo’s favourite pursuit was, they’d never have let Sarah within a mile of her exclusive company!’

‘Teenagers are very vulnerable,’ Gordon said coolly.

‘You can’t know the Southcotts very well. When there was a flu outbreak at school, they kept Sarah home for a whole six weeks!’ Karen sent Sarah’s shuttered face a guilty glance. ‘Sorry, forgot you were there. Where are you in this conversation, anyway?’

Karen’s sister came up and whispered something. ‘No!’ Karen exclaimed in angry vexation. ‘Excuse me. Someone’s been in my dark-room.’

‘I hope we can assume that the interrogation is over,’ Gordon said grimly. ‘Alejandro had one hell of a nerve forcing himself on you like that. But then what can you expect from a gypsy?’

An extraordinary urge to slap the complacent superiority from Gordon’s well-bred features assailed Sarah. Karen’s assumption that Rafael had been one of Margo’s men had filled her with embittered humour. Even her closest friend couldn’t imagine any more intimate connection between them. Only the devil’s idea of a black joke could have matched two such radically different personalities. And why had she had to go to hell and back to discover what was so obvious to everyone else? The North Pole and the equator did not meet.

Gordon hailed a familiar face with relief. Another dinner-jacket and bow-tie. A man with a thin blonde on his arm shook her hand, spoke, and she must have spoken back. The dialogue roamed from government cuts to the Booker Prize on to Wall Street. Gordon was in his element. They worked their passage slowly back to the lounge, a comfortable part of a foursome, but shock was still curdling Sarah’s stomach. Nervous tension always made her feel sick.

Rafael was leaning back against the wall. He didn’t have a restful bone in his superbly built body. He was never still even when he was working. Oh, God…oh… In despair, she struggled to suppress the memories chipping away at what little remained of her poise. As people pushed past, propelling her uncomfortably closer to Rafael, Gordon draped an unexpected arm round her narrow shoulders. Rafael’s lady friend was tugging at his sleeve, her other hand resting on his chest. Sarah was reminded of a red setter bouncing up and down with a lead in its mouth, begging for a walk. Repulsion slithered through her. Some cruel fate had decided to punish her tonight.

‘I think it’s time we went home.’ It was Gordon’s clipped drawl.

‘Yes, it’s getting late.’ She had no idea what time it was, how long it might have been since she had finally contrived to wrench her magnetised attention from Rafael.

Gordon steered her out to the hall with surprising speed. ‘I’ll collect your coat.’

A chill was spreading along her veins. She would phone Karen tomorrow. In all likelihood, Karen would not even recall that she had left without speaking to her. Before she could take refuge in that hope, Karen emerged from the lounge and hurried over to her.

‘Will someone please tell me what was going on in there?’ she hissed.

‘Sorry, I don’t…’

‘Gordon and Rafael Alejandro. For a minute I thought there might be a punch-up but Gordon predictably opted for the diplomatic retreat. Talk about instant antipathy and not a word exchanged!’ Karen giggled. ‘You don’t mean to say you didn’t notice all that silent flexing of male egos? You’re blind, Sarah.’

Gordon appeared in the midst of these unwelcome confidences. Smoothly cutting in on Karen, he mentioned an early morning meeting with just the right touch of polished regret.

‘Phone me when you get home,’ Karen mouthed, unimpressed.

There was silence in the lift. Her high heels clicked noisily over the pavement. Gordon unlocked the passenger door of his Porsche. Her hands were trembling. She clasped them together on her lap. When a taxi cut in front of them, Gordon cursed, which was most unlike him.

‘It was you in Paris with Alejandro,’ he murmured flatly, abruptly.

Sarah shut her eyes. ‘Yes.’

Silence stretched but mentally she imagined that she heard the crash as she fell off her ladylike pedestal.

‘Just yes?’ Gordon queried, crunching the gears at the traffic lights. He was revealing a flip side character unfamiliar to her. ‘It’s none of my business, but he upset you.’

She straightened out her coiled fingers, rearranging her hands with the care of a small child mindful of adult appraisal. ‘I’m not very good with surprise encounters. I didn’t expect to ever see him again.’

‘You were still at school! What kind of a…?’ His voice broke off harshly.

Sooner or later, Gordon and Karen would both add two and two and make four. She had fallen in love when she was eighteen. Love had sent her off the rails. Love had plunged her into a kind of compulsive insanity that had left her at the mercy of emotions she could neither understand nor control.

For the first time in her life, someone had had more power over her than her parents. The Southcotts had been faced with someone as strong-willed, as ruthlessly manipulative and possessive as they were themselves. Battle had commenced with a vengeance. Stranded in the middle of the war zone, already sinking beneath the pressures of a relationship in which she was hopelessly out of her depth, Sarah had slowly been torn in two.

Rafael was the estranged and unrepentantly unfaithful husband who had had the unmitigated gall to refuse her a divorce. The high-powered lawyer her father had hired had tried repeatedly to break the deadlock. He had failed. Had Sarah been prepared to prove Rafael’s adultery, she would not have required his consent to a divorce. But Sarah had not been prepared to grasp that stinging nettle. Indeed she had shrunk from the threat of the publicity that would have accompanied a contested case. And three months from now the five-year time limit would be up. Technical freedom would be hers once more.

And what difference would it make to her? Sarah had stopped feeling married in the white-walled prison of a luxurious private clinic while she had waited…and she waited for a man who never arrived. What did it do to a woman when she offered understanding, if not forgiveness, and even understanding was rejected? Why had she even bothered to write to him? Time and time again she had asked herself that question. In her darkest hour she had offered an olive branch…in her own parlance, she had crawled. Her husband had committed adultery. And she had crawled. For nothing. That was what was still burned into her soul. She had put her pride on the line for nothing.

It was a blessing that nobody knew his identity. Her parents had gone to great lengths right from the beginning to bury all the evidence. When she had failed to return from Paris, they had told the school that she was ill and when time wore on that she was convalescing abroad. Rafael’s starburst ascent from impoverishment to success beyond anyone’s wildest dreams was a savage irony. ‘An offence against good taste,’ her mother had called it.

She rested her aching head back while Gordon drove her home to her small Kensington flat. ‘I wish you’d talk to me,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry.’

At the door of her flat, he caught her wrist between his fingers. Suddenly he was kissing her, the pressure of his mouth warm and practised on hers. She endured the embrace passively. Unmoving, unresponsive. To respond you had to feel something. Sarah felt nothing beyond an awkward sense of embarrassment.

Gordon drew back, a faint flush on his cheekbones. ‘I don’t win any prizes for timing, do I?’ But he smiled down at her, restored to his normally even temper. ‘I’ll call you.’

Karen had once told her that no man ever believed his interest might be unwelcome to a woman. And Gordon was a very confident man, calmly proving the concept. At the start of the evening the mere idea of Gordon kissing her would have been enough to alarm Sarah, but Rafael had already sent her crashing through the shock barrier.

‘I’ll be very busy this week,’ she replied.

His mouth quirked but he said nothing, standing there until she was safely indoors. Dropping her coat on the hall chair, she kicked off her shoes and walked into the lounge.

Her babysitter was already bundling up her books. ‘You’re early. I didn’t expect you for ages yet.’

‘I was tired.’ Sarah dug into her purse and paid the teenager, who lived just across the corridor. ‘Any problems?’

‘Oh, no!’ Angela grinned, digging the notes deep into the pocket of her skin-tight jeans. ‘I let them watch the late film with me,’ she then conceded carelessly. ‘I’ll let myself out.’

Sarah wandered over to the sideboard and withdrew the bottle of brandy which she kept for her father’s occasional consumption. She was pouring a measure into a crystal glass when she thought she heard Angela speaking to someone. With a frown she lifted her head just as the front door rocked on the teenager’s noisy slam, making her wince.

Angela was trustworthy and sensible but she had a soft-hearted tendency to give way to Gilly and Ben’s pleas to get back out of bed. Give the twins an inch and they took a mile. Tomorrow they would be overtired and cross. Tomorrow…her hand shook and she curved an arm over her stomach. Damn him, damn him…damn him.

‘Dios mio.’ It was a purred intervention in the quiet. ‘I should think you would need to drain the bottle to sleep tonight.’

Incredulously, she whirled round. The glass slid between her fingers and fell with a soft thud, spilling out an amber pool of liquid in a slowly spreading stain on the carpet.

CHAPTER TWO

‘LO SIENTO. I’m sorry. Did I startle you?’ Grimly amused by the entrance he had achieved, Rafael uncoiled his lean length from the doorway. He executed the motion with inherent animal grace, strolling soundlessly into the lamplight out of the shadows. From beneath luxuriant black lashes that a woman would have killed to possess, narrowed tiger’s eyes inspected her. ‘It is so unlike you to be clumsy.’

Her tongue unglued from the roof of her mouth. ‘How did you get in?’

‘The girl was leaving. I told her I was awaited. She was surprised but very trusting.’ Even white teeth flashed against golden skin. ‘You have this one trait which I can appreciate now. There was no risk that I would be breaking up a private party for two. You really should tell that pretty tailor’s dummy that he’s on to a very bad bet; I might almost find it within my heart to pity him.’

She could barely follow what he was saying to her. Over four years of silence and then this? Why should Rafael come here now? It made no sense. Her violet eyes were huge against her pallor. ‘How did you find out where I lived?’

‘That wasn’t difficult.’ His hard mouth twisted.

‘What do you want?’ she demanded shakily.

A broad shoulder sheathed in butter-soft leather shifted in an infinitesimal shrug. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I was curious.’

‘Curious?’ she echoed, her voice rising steeply.

He glanced round the small, pleasantly furnished room. ‘This is not how I pictured you living,’ he admitted. ‘I would picture you in the drawing-room at your parents’ home, a butterfly safely preserved behind glass.’

Dialogue with Rafael had never been straightforward. He had a disorientating habit of leaping back and forth, voicing exactly what passed through his agile mind. Jerkily she folded her arms. He bent a long-fingered hand down to the corner of the armchair beside him, twitching up something that had caught his attention. It was a cookery book. ‘You use this?’ he asked, much as if it were a mechanic’s wrench.

Perspiration was dampening her skin. Hysteria was clawing at her. She was too afraid to make sense of his sudden impulsive appearance. ‘Any reason why I shouldn’t?’ she enquired defensively.

Casting the item carelessly aside again, he straightened to his full six feet two inches. ‘When you stand like that, you look like a little fishwife. Mama wouldn’t like it,’ he said cruelly. ‘Who takes care of you here?’

The blood rushed hotly to her cheeks. ‘Nobody.’

‘You have learnt to cook and clean? You astonish me.’

‘If you don’t get out of here, I’ll call the police!’ she threatened in a wild rush.

Rafael dealt her an unmoved glance of contempt. ‘I am still your husband. If I want to be here, I have the right to be here.’

‘No! You do not have that right!’

‘You should be calm. One may have the right without the desire to exercise it for very long,’ he sliced back. ‘Why do you live in a place like this? Don’t tell me—Papa’s finally been caught insider dealing!’

Agonising tension was squaring her slight shoulders. ‘I meant what I said. If you don’t leave, I’ll—’

Rafael bit out a sardonic laugh. ‘Why not? Call the police and entertain me. It is the emptiest threat of all and you know it. You would not court the publicity.’

‘Wouldn’t I?’ He had moved slightly closer and she took a tiny uncertain step backwards, her pale head gradually lowering in defeat. ‘No, I wouldn’t.’

‘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?’

Sarah took a deep breath. ‘I haven’t brought them.’

An anxious pleat-line formed between Louise’s pencilled brows.

‘You see, I needed to talk to you privately,’ Sarah confided tensely.

Her father appraised her pale face and taut stance. ‘Is there something wrong, Sarah? Sit down and we’ll talk about it calmly.’ Although she had yet to do or say anything that was not calm, there was a cold note of warning to the command.

Sarah swallowed hard. ‘I saw Rafael last night.’

Her mother turned a ghastly shade beneath her well-applied make-up. Her father was not so easily read. He continued to watch her without visible reaction. The silence threatened to strangle Sarah, forcing her to keep on talking. ‘Gordon took me to a party and he was there.’

‘What sort of people are you mixing with these days?’ Louise’s voice betrayed the shaky undertones of stress.

‘Afterwards, he came to the apartment.’

Charles Southcott showed his first response in a chilling narrowing of his gaze. ‘At your invitation?’

Her mother looked at him with reproach. ‘Sarah wouldn’t have invited him into her home.’

‘He didn’t know about the twins,’ Sarah advanced stiffly. ‘He said that he thought I…I had had a termination. He said that that was what he was told.’

A dragging quiet lay over the room. Louise studied her clasped hands, still as a statue. Her father’s features were shuttered, a tiny nerve pulling at the edge of his flattened mouth.

‘I mean…that’s just so ridiculous.’ Sarah was wretchedly conscious of the high-pitched note that had entered her voice.

Charles Southcott expelled his breath shortly. ‘Sit down, Sarah. We don’t want a scene.’

She was feeling sick, shaky. Facing up to her father still had that effect on her. She sank down reluctantly into an elaborately cushioned wickerwork chair, her back a ramrod-straight rejection of its comfortable embrace.

‘Let me make one point clear in advance. We were solely responsible for your welfare,’ her father delivered with an air of strong censure. ‘When Alejandro went to New York and left you here with us, we were extremely concerned about you. Your marriage was destroying you.’

‘He was destroying her,’ her mother chipped in, tight-mouthed with bitterness. ‘He turned you into a stranger. We lost you and you never came back to us.’

Sarah’s throat was closing over, hurting her. ‘He was my husband and I loved him.’

Charles Southcott released a cutting laugh. ‘You didn’t love him, Sarah. You were obsessed by him. It was a sick obsession and you needed help…’

‘Help?’ Sarah repeated chokily. ‘You call locking me up helping me?’

‘Sarah,’ Louise whispered pleadingly. ‘Please…’

‘It was for your own good. I didn’t want to hurt you. I wanted to bring you to your senses,’ her father continued coldly. ‘When Alejandro had the impertinence to show up here again…’

Sarah froze. ‘Rafael came here?’ she prompted in disbelief.

Her mother murmured, ‘We had to keep him away from you, Sarah. You weren’t well. You might have had a miscarriage. We didn’t really lie to him. He jumped to conclusions and we didn’t contradict him.’

An unpleasant smile that was no smile at all had formed on her father’s narrow mouth. ‘I believe it’s relatively common for Latins to believe that sin is inevitably followed by some holy form of retribution,’ he scoffed. ‘I confirmed his suspicions.’

Sarah was leaning dizzily forward. ‘Oh, dear God, how could you do that to him?’ she gasped in horror.

‘Naturally I saw that the letter you intended to send was destroyed,’ he added icily. ‘While it was unhappily not within my power to prevent you from making a fool of yourself over him for two years, it was within my power to prevent you from doing so on paper.’

Sarah shuddered under the lash of his contempt.

‘I loved him,’ she whispered abstractedly. ‘And at the beginning I trusted you. He blames me and he’s right to blame me,’ she vented with a shaken gasp. ‘Nobody has any excuse to be that naive. You made me believe that he had just cut me out of his life as if I didn’t exist. You didn’t care what that did to me. But then you didn’t care what you did to me by putting me in that place…’

‘It was our duty to protect you from yourself.’

‘You took your chance when I was in no fit state to know what you were doing,’ Sarah condemned. ‘You hadn’t been able to buy him off. You hadn’t been able to scare him off. So you lied to him and you lied to me and nothing you can say will change those facts!’

‘Why are we arguing about something that was finished most conclusively five years ago?’ Charles Southcott surveyed her with sharp distaste. ‘I did you a favour. You were well rid of him.’

Sarah sprang upright on a wild surge of anger. ‘What did you know about our marriage? Did it ever occur to you that I wasn’t the perfect wife? Why did you assume that I was such a precious gift?’ she demanded strickenly. ‘And at least Rafael didn’t treat me the way you treat my mother!’

She dashed a trembling hand across her streaming eyes. Until that moment she hadn’t realised that she was crying. The silence was so familiar, chilling, suffocating. ‘I should have known,’ she framed tremulously, defying the icy silence to the last. ‘I should have known.’

She walked out and they let her go as she had known they would. They would give her time to calm down and in a few days they would approach her, expecting family loyalty to have haltered her out-of-control emotions. Only this time that wouldn’t happen. Sarah only visited for her mother’s sake. She had always made excuses for her mother but now she had to face the fact that Louise had been in full collusion and agreement with her husband and she was nauseated by the knowledge that her parents had deliberately set out to break up her marriage and continued to rejoice in their success. Neither of them was remotely concerned about the high costs she had had to pay five years ago.

She sat in her car in the driveway for several dazed minutes. Her brain was roving off in a dozen different directions until it abruptly settled on one overwhelming necessity, a thread of seeming sanity in the nightmare of confusion. She had to find out where Rafael was staying. She had to see him, speak to him.

Karen answered her phone with a grumbling yawn. ‘Sarah,’ she muttered. ‘Why are you using a callbox?’

‘Do you know where Rafael Alejandro is staying?’ In the lengthy quiet that settled on the line, Sarah regretted her impetuosity and improvised awkwardly, ‘Someone I know needs to get in touch with him urgently.’

‘And you need to see a man about a dog.’ Karen was suddenly sounding very alert. ‘Actually I do know. Elise let it drop last night in a temper.’

‘Elise?’

‘The lady who brought him. Or should I say, the lady he allowed to bring him?’ Karen extended with irony. ‘I think we need a trade-off here, Sarah, my pet. Information for information.’

‘Karen, please!’ Sarah said impatiently.

Karen surrendered with bad grace and supplied the address.

‘Thanks. Thanks!’ Sarah said again. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

It was a small but exclusive apartment block in Belgravia. Pushing a nervous hand through the damp hair adhering to her forehead, Sarah stepped into the lift. She felt hot and bothered, utterly bereft of her usual cool. A little belatedly, she was wondering what she intended to say to Rafael and whether, in the heat of the moment, she might have been too hasty in her urge to immediately seek him out. She flinched when the lift doors whirred back and then she walked uncertainly along a corridor floored with a soft, deep carpet. The nasty suspicion that she might be about to make a gigantic fool of herself increased her reluctance.

A vase of beautifully arranged flowers sat in an alcove to one side of the entrance. Did Rafael own this place? Rent it? Whichever, this luxury was a far cry from the sort of flats they had once shared. She smoothed moist palms down over the tailored navy jacket and straight skirt she wore. Rafael hated navy. Frowning at the irrelevancy that her subconscious had served up, she pressed the bell.

She was midway through a second prolonged ring when the door jerked wide, framing Rafael. He was in the act of donning a white silk shirt, his thick hair damp and tousled from the shower. Drops of crystalline moisture still glistened on the wealth of black curling hair hazing his muscular chest. Involuntarily Sarah averted her eyes from the endless expanse of lean, golden flesh on view. Dry-mouthed, she swallowed. An odd tingling sensation ran down her backbone before she forced her head up again.

Raking golden eyes skimmed over her taut face and the brilliance of the unconscious appeal in her amethyst gaze. His superb bone-structure hardened, his ruthlessly sensual mouth tightening. Sensual…yes, those clean sculpted lines belied by that wholly passionate curve were uniquely sensual. The obscure thought-train surged up on Sarah out of nowhere, shocking her, sending rebellious heat to warm her skin. Her chaotic responses smashed her concentration and she was further confused by his silence. Silence from Rafael was an unknown quantity that unnerved her.

‘I need to talk to you.’ It emerged more as a plea than as the adult acknowledgement she had intended.

He took a fluid step back, employing body language to concede agreement. But it was a grudging invitation. He didn’t have to speak to tell her that. Rafael could put out vibes like placards. She was acutely conscious of the burning hostility he emanated.

‘I’m going out in ten minutes.’ Neither apology nor warning sounded in his intonation. It was an assertion that, no matter what she did, no matter what she said, he had no real intention of listening to her.

‘Perhaps you’ll change your mind when you hear what I have to say,’ Sarah fenced daringly.

CHAPTER THREE

SARAH was shown into a spacious lounge. It was very untidy. Books lay open on the couch. Cushions were tumbled on the floor and empty glasses littered a fine antique occasional table. And, oddly enough, for a timeless moment Sarah felt more at home and less of an intruder. The chaos which Rafael wreaked on his surroundings was disturbingly familiar and it threw up memories that threatened her self-discipline.

‘You have six minutes left,’ Rafael said with flaring impatience.

Sarah collided with intent golden eyes and hurriedly looked away again, her breath catching in her throat. ‘I saw my parents this morning.’

His strong jawline hardened. ‘Surely not an unusual event?’ he jibed. ‘Even when we were living in Paris, you contrived to see them three weeks out of every four!’

Her colour heightened but she decided to ignore the taunt. ‘Until I spoke to them, I had no idea that you returned to England to see me five years ago. Please believe that. They didn’t tell me.’

His narrowed hawk-like stare was discouraging. He exuded a daunting indifference to the revelation she had made. ‘That I can believe,’ he conceded unexpectedly. ‘What I do not comprehend is what this has to do with the present.’

Her emotions were running perilously close to the surface. Rigid with strain, she looked at him in stark appeal. ‘Don’t you understand? If…if I’d known, I would have been there…’

‘De veras?’ Rafael spread eloquent hands wide in a gesture of disbelief. ‘To greet your adulterous husband with open arms?’

Sarah visibly flinched from the suggestion.

Rafael arched a jet brow, his golden appraisal brilliant with contempt. ‘I think not.’

‘Since the situation didn’t arise, I can’t say what would have happened. But I would never have lied to you about the twins! Rafael…’ Her tongue tripped clumsily over the syllables. There was so much she needed to tell him but it was incredibly difficult to find the right words. To be open and honest about past events with so little encouragement demanded a degree of bravado that she had not previously exercised in Rafael’s radius. Frustration ran through her like a current. Self-expression was Rafael’s talent, not hers. Nobody ever went in ignorance of how Rafael felt or what he wanted and that ability, she appreciated now, was no small advantage in life. ‘You must see that this isn’t easy for—’

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