'It may have been an oversight on his part. Had you asked him to wait?'
Georgie stiffened. 'Well, I thought he under
stood '
'Do you know the registration of the taxi?' Rafael surveyed her with an offensive lack of expectation. Angrily she shook her head.
'Your bag may yet reappear,' Rafael asserted. 'If your bag is not handed in, then you may say that it has been stolen, not before. You were stupendously careless!'
'Lecture over yet?' she demanded shortly.
'When you found yourself stranded, what did you do?'
'By the time I realised he wasn't coming back, the place was deserted, so I started walking and then I...'
She hesitated. 'Then I hitched a lift. You wouldn't be lieve how pleasant and unthreatening the driver was when I got into his truck '
'I believe you. I should imagine he came to a wheel-screeching halt,' Rafael murmured with withering sarcasm. "Then what?'
Georgie lifted her chin. 'He offered me money and while I was pushing it away he lunged at me. I thought I was going to be raped!'
'I understand you kneed him in the groin and drew blood. One may assume you are reasonably capable of self-defence. He thought you were a prostitute '
'A what?' she exploded.
'Why do you think he offered you money? Female tourists do not travel alone in Bolivia, nor do they hitch alone.' Grim dark eyes flicked a glance at her outraged face before returning to the road.
'Have you any idea how scared I was when he drove off and wouldn't let me out of his truck?'
'He was determined to report you for what he saw as an attempt to rip him off. But he was happy to drop the charge once he realised that his neighbours would laugh heartily at him for being attacked by a woman half his size!'
Georgie was enraged by his attitude. The message was: you asked for it.
'You had a very narrow escape. He might have beaten you up to avenge the slur upon his manhood. This country has been dominated by the cult of machismo for four centuries,' Rafael drawled in a murderously polite tone. 'It will take more than a handful of tourists to change that but, happily, the great majority of travellers are infinitely more careful of their own safety than you have been.'
'So I asked for what I got... in your view!' she flared,
'An attempted kiss, a hand on your knee—he swore that was all. He said you went crazy and I believe him. It'll be weeks before he can show his face without his neighbours sniggering.' Rafael actually sounded sympathetic towards the truck-driver.
Silence stretched endlessly. He made no attempt to break it. The four-wheel-drive lurched and bounced over the appalling road surface with the vehicle behind following at a discreet distance. Briefly, Rafael stopped the car and sprang out. Incredulously she watched him open the sack to release the snake. Wow, environmentally friendly man, and sensitive enough not to offend the villagers by refusing the unwanted gift. It crossed her mind bitterly that the snake was getting more attention than she was.
Then, that was hardly a surprise. Four years ago, Rafael had made it brutally clear that she failed his standards in every way possible. Her morals, her behaviour—her sexually provocative behaviour, she recalled angrily—had all been comprehensively shredded by that cruel, whiplash tongue. But what still hurt the most, she was honest enough to admit, was that she hadn't had the wit to take it on the chin and walk away with dignity. Like a fool, she had attempted to prove her innocence.
'He's from a different world,' her stepbrother Steve had derided once. 'And he belongs to a culture you don't even begin to understand. Don't be fooled by the fact that he speaks English as well as we do. Rafael's a very traditional Latin-American male and the women in his life fall into two categories. Angels and whores. The females in his family—they're the angels. The females who share his bed—they're the whores. When he marries, he'll select an angel straight out of a convent and she'll be as well-born and rich as he is. So where are you planning to fit in?'
And ultimately Steve had been proved right, that dreadful evening when her short-lived relationship with Rafael had been blown apart at the seams. Rafael had treated her like a whore. Scorched by that memory,
Georgie sank back to the present and cast aside the sweltering blanket in a gesture of rebellion. She stretched out her lithe, wonderfully shapely legs and crossed them. She didn't give two hoots for his opinion, did she? She wasn't a stupid, besotted little teenager any more, was she?
'Where are you staying in La Paz?' he asked after a perceptible pause, firing the engine again.
She told him. That was the end of the conversation, but the atmosophere was so thick all of a sudden that she could taste it. It tasted like oil waiting for a flame-explosive. She tilted her head back, a helplessly feminine smile of satisfaction curving her lips as she noticed the tense grip of his lean hands on the wheel. So, in spite of all the insults, Rafael was still not impervious to her on the most basic level of all. A little voice in the back of her mind demanded to know what she was doing, why she was behaving in this utterly uncharacteristic way. She suppressed it.
She was surprised when he sprang out of the car and silently accompanied her into her shabby hotel, but she chose not to comment. Why lower herself to talk to him? She strolled ahead of him, every tiny swing of her hips an art-form. Presumably he was intending to take her straight to his sister. Maria Cristina was probably home again by now. But how on earth was Georgie to settle her hotel bill? Her missing handbag had contained not only her passport, but all her money as well.
Her room looked as though a bomb had hit it. Yesterday, she had gone out in a rush. Reddening, Georgie grabbed up her squashy travel-bag and snatched up discarded items of clothing and stuffed them out of sight. Rafael lounged back against the door, like a bloody great black storm-cloud, she found herself thinking, suddenly made nervous and grossly uncomfortable by his presence in the comparative isolation of the small room.
'You can wait outside while I get changed,' she muttered, because there was no en suite bathroom, just a washbasin.
'Don't be ridiculous,' Rafael murmured very drily.
'I am not being ridiculous,' Georgie returned tautly, her colour heightening even more. Dear heaven, surely he wasn't seriously expecting her to strip in front of him?
Intent black eyes collided with violet bemusement. Whoosh It was like grasping a live wire, plunging a finger into a light-socket. Violent shock thundered through Georgie's suddenly taut body. She was electrified, wildly energised, before she strained mental bone and sinew to shut out the rich dark entrapment of his gaze, badly shaken by that terrifying burst of raw excitement.
No... no, it simply couldn't happen to her again. She was immune to all that smouldering Latin-American masculinity now. She had not felt like that, she told herself frantically. She had not felt that stabbing, shooting sensation of almost .unbearable physical awareness which had reduced her to such mindless idiocy in the past. That was behind her now, a mortifying teenage crush in which hormones had briefly triumphed over all else.
Rafael bent down fluidly and lifted a silky white pair of very brief panties off the worn carpet and tossed them to her. Already sufficiently on edge, Georgie failed to catch them and ended up scrabbling foolishly on the floor, stuffing the wretched things into her bag with hands that were trembling so badly that they were all fingers and thumbs.
'You wouldn't have given me a knee in the groin,' Rafael murmured very softly.
Crouching over her bag, Georgie slewed wildly confused eyes in his direction, chose to focus safely on his Italian leather shoes.
He moved forward. She froze, the sound of her own breathing loud in her ears.
'You would have knocked me flat with enthusiasm,' Rafael completed thickly.
Bastard, she thought, absolutely shattered by his cruelty. She had believed she was in love, had held nothing back, had often told herself since that she was lucky he had dumped her before she ended up in his bed.
But now shame drenched her and she hated him for that. He didn't have to make her sound so cheap, did he? In the most essential way of all, she had been innocent, and there had been nothing calculated about her response to him.
'Teenagers aren't very subtle when they have a crush on someone.' Determined not to show that his cracks had got to her, Georgie even managed a sharp little laugh.
'But it wasn't a crush,' Rafael breathed, subjecting her to the full onslaught of deep-set dark eyes that disturbingly lingered and somehow held her evasive gaze steady. 'You were violently in love with me.'
Georgie very nearly choked. The bag in her hand dropped unnoticed as her fingers lost their grip. Abruptly, she turned away, sick inside. What kind of sadist was he? Did it give him some sort of perverse kick to throw that in her teeth? It had not been love, it had never been love—she had told herself that ever since.
'And the vibrations are still there.. . feel them,' Rafael delivered in a purring undertone that still sliced through the throbbing silence.
'I feel nothing... nothing!' Georgie threw back tremulously over her shoulder, wildy disconcerted by the direction of the dialogue, it having been the last subject she would have believed him likely to refer to. She had thought herself safe from any reference to the past, had been grimly aware of his aloof detachment. Now the tables were turned with a vengeance.
Rafael reached out a strong hand and spun her back to face him. 'Why pretend? We're both adults now, and I know that you take your pleasure where and when you find it... and with any man who attracts you.'
Oxygen rasped in her throat and she trembled under the onslaught of that character assassination, fighting off the memories threatening to assail her. 'How dare you?'
Insolent dark eyes mocked her ferocious tension and her sudden pronounced pallor. He lifted his other hand calmly and ran a forefinger along the full curve of her taut lower lip. 'Does it scare you that I know you for what you are? Why should that matter? We don't have to like each other, we don't even have to talk,' he murmured in a deep, dark voice. 'I just want you in that bed under me once... and I really don't care if it is sordid, I'll still be the best lover you've ever had.'