Rafaello's Mistress

She looked at Rafaello but only when he was not looking at her. It struck her that his hard-boned features had fined down since she had last seen him. He was so tense as well. He was obviously hating every moment of their enforced proximity, she thought painfully.

‘I’m so sorry about all this,’ she muttered as she hurried into the hospital lift in advance of him.

As the lift doors whirred shut, Rafaello surveyed her with impenetrable dark eyes, his lean, strong face taut. ‘Please don’t misunderstand me when I say that I don’t feel comfortable with your gratitude. You don’t owe me any apologies either. I did what I had to do. It wasn’t much. Let’s leave it at that.’

Glory lowered her wounded gaze to the floor. She so badly wanted to feel his arms around her again but she knew that that was not going to happen. A gulf the challenging depth and width of an ocean now separated them. Sam was in the waiting room. He rushed to greet her with relief but the whole time he was hugging her his every conversational sally was addressed over her shoulder to Rafaello.

‘I can’t believe that you got back here with Glory so fast!’ Sam was saying. ‘I knew you said you would but I thought there would be delays and stuff. Most of the time I’ve just let Maud sit with Dad—’

‘I’d like to see him,’ Glory slotted into her brother’s fraught flood of speech.

‘Maud will have to come out,’ Sam told her. ‘Only one person is allowed by his bed in the ICU. There just isn’t the space for more.’

Rafaello vanished from the doorway.

‘He’ll sort it,’ Sam muttered, his lanky length sagging into a weary slouch. ‘He’s done everything. Dad would be dead right now if it wasn’t for Rafaello. Did he tell you that the surgeons here said they couldn’t operate on Dad?’

‘No…’

Her brother explained that the only surgical procedure capable of giving their father a fighting chance of survival had not been done in the UK before. Rafaello had had to fly in a top-flight neurosurgeon from New York to perform the operation. This was the same guy who could not stand to be thanked, Glory reflected wretchedly. Rafaello had moved heaven and earth to help her and her family.

Ushered into the ICU by a kindly nurse, Glory focused on her father and all the machinery surrounding him and then breathed in deep. She stopped thinking about herself and her own problems and started praying instead and willing the older man to come through. Around dawn her father’s vital signs began showing a marked improvement and, revitalised by that information, Glory went in search of her brother.

But it was Maud Belper who hurried forward when she entered the waiting room, Maud, whose existence Glory had entirely forgotten. In a guilty rush at that awareness, Glory shared the good news. Tears of release from severe stress swam in the older woman’s red-rimmed eyes. She gripped Glory’s hand. ‘Would you mind if I went back in for a while?’

‘No, I’ve been very selfish. Go ahead,’ Glory encouraged. ‘Where’s Sam?’

‘Mr Grazzini took him back to his city apartment. Sam was out on his feet. Will you phone them?’ Maud begged, her impatience to be back by the side of the man she so obviously loved palpable.

Lingering only long enough to pass on the phone number, Rafaello’s housekeeper disappeared. Glory called. Rafaello answered almost immediately and agreed that her news was wonderful but he also insisted that Sam should be left to sleep for as long as possible. She was taken aback by that insistence on the score of her own brother but was too drained to argue. Curling up in a corner seat, she waited out what remained of the night hours.

Mid-morning, Rafaello brought Sam back to the hospital. By then the general prognosis was that Archie Little was on the road to recovery. He had regained consciousness, squeezed Maud’s hand and recognized his daughter with a weak smile. As Sam hurried off to take her place by his father’s side, Rafaello studied Glory. ‘You can come back to my apartment now and sleep—’

‘No, thanks,’ she said tightly.

‘Don’t make this more difficult than it already is,’ Rafaello told her with a look of reproof. ‘Are you planning to kip on a park bench just to score against me?’

Glory folded her arms with a jerk. She was so close to tears, she could not trust herself to speak. She felt frankly surplus to everyone’s requirements. From the doorway of the ICU she had watched her father look at Maud’s wan but smiling face and had appreciated that he took much greater strength and comfort from the older woman’s presence than from hers. Then there was Sam, rushing in beside Rafaello, bopping about like a very large, clumsy puppy and then punching Rafaello’s shoulder in that exclusive all-male way to bid him goodbye and barely awarding his sister a second glance.

Sam seemed to have succumbed to a severe case of hero worship where Rafaello was concerned. Indeed, Glory was amazed to see Sam, who could be so very reserved with strangers, so relaxed in Rafaello’s company. After all, they hardly knew each other. Obviously her father’s illness had brought down barriers but Sam was not behaving in what she considered to be an appropriate way. Rafaello was their father’s boss, for goodness’ sake, not a best mate or a big brother or something!

‘I’m not trying to score against a-anybody.’ Glory faltered to a charged halt at the rise of the sob that made her stammer.

Rafaello banded an arm round her hunched shoulders, swept up the handbag lying on the seat she had vacated and walked her into the lift. Too busy fighting to keep the tears in check, Glory was rigid for fear that she might suddenly succumb and fling herself against his chest and start sobbing all over him. Her family no longer needed her. They had got used to getting by without her. She was the needy one and Rafaello was busy supporting all of them like a positive saint. Yet he didn’t want her thanks and she didn’t want to have to be grateful. If she couldn’t have his love, she wanted nothing to do with him.

Rafaello tucked her into the limo with careful hands. ‘You’re wrecked. You need rest. Have a good cry if it makes you feel better.’

‘Stop being so nice!’ Glory gasped accusingly, throwing herself over to the far corner of the rear seat and ducking down her head.

Without warning, a pair of lean and very determined hands settled round her waist and dragged her inexorably across the space she had opened between them. Glory loosed a strangled squawk like a chicken on the run from a meat cleaver. Rafaello brought his mouth crashing down on hers and her hormones seemed to erupt like a volcano in response. She went from raging emotional turmoil and tears to raw excitement within seconds. Instantly she was kissing him back, running her hands over his shoulders, his hair, any part of him within r

each, and her heart was hammering and breathing was a luxury no longer required.

It felt so good to be back in his arms, she had no control, no thought of what she was doing. Only the elemental surge of her own love and desperate hunger guided her. The pleasure was explosive, primal, almost too hot to bear. When he threw back his head and deprived her of that connection she suffered a cruel sense of loss.

Rafaello stared down at her, golden eyes shimmering like bright sunlight in his lean face, dark colour accentuating the fierce slant of his cheekbones, his jawline clenched hard. ‘My only excuse is lack of sleep and a low patience threshold. My apologies, cara,’ he breathed in a gritty undertone. ‘But if it happens again, try pushing me away.’

Trembling and disorientated by a similar amount of sleep deprivation, Glory could not meet his gaze. Her cheeks fired up but that final comment of his filled her with rage. Yet still she had an almost overwhelming urge to haul him back to her, to lose herself in that wild heat and excitement where she did not have to think but only feel. Her emotions were all over the place. A combustible mix of love and hatred was tearing her apart.