Crime of Passion

'I felt the barrier... I told myself I was crazy... I just couldn't believe it!' Rafael vented unsteadily.

'I don't know what you're talking about '

'Stop it, Georgie,' Rafael grated rawly. 'You were a virgin!'

'Will you stop saying that?'

'Admit it.'

'OK—big deal, I. don't think—you were the first, so go and notch your bloody bedpost!' Georgie shrieked back, a boiling tide of embarrassing moisture dammed up behind her eyelids.

'Dios.. .but how is it possible?' Rafael demanded with a groan.

'Just leave me alone!'

Without warning, he pulled her into his arms. She could feel the raw tension still sizzling through him. She was as rigid as a mannequin in his embrace. Seemingly impervious to that lack of encouragement, he released his breath in a hiss. 'Forgive me... can you ever forgive me for what I have done?' he muttered unevenly. 'But to make such a sacrifice to prove to me how wrong I have been... How can I ever make that up to you?'

Cursing the reality that Rafael always cornered he; when she was least capable of self-defence, Georgie was attempting to fight through the absolute turmoil of her own confusion. But that final incredible statement pierced the tumult and froze her. Rafael actually believed that she had made him a gift of her inexperience simply to prove that he had been wrong about her prom­iscuity all along. It was the most nauseating suggestion Georgie had ever heard.

'Well, you don't need to make it up to me, because I wasn't trying to prove anything! Your opinion of me, Rafael, is absolutely immaterial to my peace of mind.'

'You cannot mean that,' Rafael said with flat disbelief. Georgie fought out of his temporarily loosened hold and grabbed the sheet round her. 'I'm sorry, I do mean it. Such an idea never once occurred to me,' she snapped, thoroughly fed up that he just wouldn't take the hint and leave her alone with the tumultuous mess of emotion that was sloshing around inside her.

'Not that,' he stressed. 'You cannot mean that my opinion means nothing to you after what we have just shared.' 'Wasn't exactly a communion of souls, was it?'

Georgie heard herself say snidely. 'We had sex '

'We made love '

'We screwed,' Georgie broke in, determined to have the last word.

'Don't talk like that!' Outraged golden eyes raked over her.

'Oh, is that one of those expressions which you're al­lowed to use and I'm not? Tough,' Georgie muttered tightly, pleating the sheet between her fingers, recog­nising that she was hopelessly engulfed in bitterness. 'I really can't understand why you're going on like this about something so trivial.'

Long fingers curved round her arms, dragging her round to face him. 'After all that has happened between us, how could it possibly be trivial?' he demanded savagely.

'Not many women go to the grave virgins. For heaven's sake, I'm twenty-three and I just thought it was time.”

“Well, to be honest, I didn't think at all,' Georgie ad­justed with essential honesty. 'But if I had realised there was going to be a heavy post-mortem, I wouldn't have bothered, I can tell you that!'

'You're upset, embarrassed... I am spoiling every­thing,' he breathed starkly.

'You generally do when you open your mouth. I ought to be used to it by now.'

'My conscience... it is eating me alive,' he confessed tightly, reaching for one of her tightly clenched hands and smoothing out the small fingers. 'I have hurt you so much. You tried to defend yourself four years ago and I wouldn't listen to you. Why won't you look at me? Why won't you speak?'

'I'll probably be a bit more slick the next time I have a one-night stand,' Georgie bit out acidly, but she could hear the tremor in her own voice, the thickness of tears she was holding back. She snatched her hand back.

'There won't be a next time.'

No, he was right there. Nothing like learning the hard way, Georgie! Do you ever learn any other way? The last thing she needed was Rafael's guilt. It made her want to scream and claw at him. She had her pride, like anyone else, but it seemed to her that he was set on depriving her of even that. The past was past. She had no desire to reopen that particular Pandora's box.

Or the even more recent past. All that shameless rolling about and moaning she had done for his benefit—well, that was so far in the past that it was pre-civilisation as far as she was concerned. The worst mistake of her life. He treated her like dirt beneath his aristocratic feet and she rewarded him by falling into bed with him. A single tear rolled down her cheekbone, stinging her tender skin on its passage.

'Querida...please...please don't cry,' Rafael groaned. 'Anything you want, anything it takes, I will make it up to you...'

'A flight to La Paz.' Escape. That was all that was on Georgie's mind.

'That isn't what you really want,' Rafael assured her with harsh emphasis.

And that was the last straw. Georgie looked at him, her facial muscles stiff with pure rage. 'How the hell would you know what / want?'

He slung her a thwarted look, raw with a kind of in­credulous frustration, and sprang off the bed to stride into the bathroom.

Georgie flopped back down again. 'Good riddance,' she muttered out loud.

Then she rolled over and buried her convulsing face furiously into the tumbled pillows. Why wouldn't he just leave her alone? Didn't he have his own bathroom? She reined the sobs back, wouldn't cry, wouldn't have cried if he'd held her upside-down over abonfire and tortured her. Making an outsize fool of herself once in one day was enough.

This was the end of something that had started four years ago—no, six years ago, when she had first laid -yes on Rafael Rodriguez Berganza. A terrifying ob­session which had grown out of a teenage infatuation. It was finished now. The act of sex had finished it forever. But what a shame it was that she had to sacrifice her friendship with Maria Cristina on the same funeral pyre. For she would have no other choice. The last con­nection had to be severed. There would be no more letters bearing continuous little snippets of information about Rafael... Sometimes Rafael's sister had written so much about him that Georgie had wondered if her friend's own life was so empty that she had nothing better to vrite about. On the face of it, what possible interest could Georgie have been supposed to have in Rafael's travels, his speeches and his business interests, with never an indiscreet word about the women in his life?

But those letters, she appreciated, had kept Rafael alive inside her mind and her memory. Well, she needed to go on with her life and leave him behind her where he belonged, and she couldn't possibly do that and still stay in touch with Maria Cristina! Her throat thickened with renewed bitterness.

In the midst of her turmoil, Georgie was scooped without warning off the bed. 'What are you doing?'

'I ran a bath for you.'

'Why?' Georgie demanded baldly.

'Because it would appear to be about the only thing I can currently do that might be right,' Rafael delivered shortly, whipped off the sheet which had been wrapped round her and slid her into the warm water before she knew what was happening to her.

In silence, Georgie hugged her knees, dead centre of the splendid marble bath, her tumbled head downbent as she stared blindly down into the water.

'As God is my witness, I will kill him,' Rafael intoned with a murderous quietness that was somehow explosive in the charged silence.

'Kill who?' she mumbled without much interest, too caught up in her own stark sense of failure and inadequacy.

'Nobody important,' Rafael murmured smoothly.

'I want to go home,' she said tightly.

'I thought you wanted to see Maria Cristina and...and George.'

Astonishment held her taut and then drifted away again. Nothing like a rousing dose of guilt for the Latin conscience, she reflected. 'No.'

'No?' Rafael repeated, his disbelief at the careless denial palpable.

'No,' she said again.

'Why? No, forget I asked...' Rafael urged in abrupt retreat.

Later she didn't know how long she had sat

there before she mechanically washed and then dried herself, and padded back to the bedroom. The sheet had been changed. Her cheeks burned. Marvellous, now everybody would know! Well, that was it. She wasn't budging out of this bedroom until he had that flight arranged! Donning a nightdress with shaking hands, Georgie got back into bed, great rolling breakers of misery sub­merging her.

Now—now, why didn't she bring it out and face it? Just when had she fallen in love with Rafael? Six years ago, four years ago or just yesterday? Did the timing really matter? He had turned away from her after slaking his lust. Then, she had suspected herself but, by the time he got around to suggesting the life of a kept woman in Paris, suspicion had become painful fact. That had been the final humiliation. To love a man who had caused her this much pain was insanity.