‘I want you with me.’ His jawline squared. ‘I don’t want you to go to England now. Your father has been premature. When your mother has had results of these tests—’
‘No,’ she broke in stiffly. ‘I’m going now.’
Dark colour barred his high cheekbones. ‘I don’t want you to go. That should mean something to you,’ he said softly.
It was the familiar crack of a whip over her head, telling her exactly what her limitations were. Silently she began folding another garment as if she hadn’t heard him. It was her only defence.
‘Sarah…we should not be apart now. You are carrying my child. It is selfish of your father to distress you like this,’ he protested angrily. ‘But if you must go I will accompany you.’
In spite of her protests, he had, and of course there had been no relaxation for her in the days which followed. Rafael and her parents under one roof would have driven any peacekeeper’s nerves to screaming point.
‘She’s pretending,’ Rafael had diagnosed her mother’s health bluntly within hours. ‘You can travel to New York with me.’
Outraged on her mother’s behalf, Sarah had righteously refused and reproached him for his insensitivity, but she had planned to join him within the week. When it came time for her to leave, however, Louise Southcott had suffered a relapse. Another week had drifted by before Rafael presented her with an ultimatum.
On the phone he cut ruthlessly through her efforts to make safe conversation. ‘Your parents are destroying our marriage,’ he interrupted. ‘I think you have a decision to make. Them or me. I won’t wait forever. I am not a pet dog, querida.’
‘You’re not—’
‘The fool you take me for? I have run out of patience,’ he bit out, anger transforming his husky voice into a throaty growl. ‘You have forty-eight hours. If you’re not with me before the deadline I’ll assume that you’ve decided to stay with Mama and Papa forever. But should you decide to honour your marital vows, muneca mia, you have made your last visit to your parents’ home.’
‘You can’t threaten me like that,’ she gasped.
‘The threat is a promise, querida. You must choose between us. I will no longer stand for their interference in our lives. I have stood enough. Your place as my wife is with me, not with them,’ he delivered harshly. ‘If you cannot acknowledge that reality, I cannot continue to think of you as my wife.’
‘You can’t give me a choice like that…’
‘Can’t I? I believe I just have. And I should have done it sooner.’
He had asked the impossible of her at a time when she had genuinely believed that her mother was developing a heart condition. Her pride, too often battered by his dominance, had warmed to the knowledge that she would for once stand firm. Even so, it was with a fast-beating heart that she had let that deadline approach, acquainted as she was with the volatility of Rafael’s temperament…
As the rain slackened off, she came back to the present with a jolt.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘CRISTO, Sarah!’ A powerful hand fastened on her shoulder and spun her round. ‘You are soaked through.’
She tried to shake free of his grasp. ‘Leave me alone!’
‘No!’ It was raw and unequivocal. Shrugging off his jacket, he draped it round her. His body heat and an evocatively masculine scent that she had almost forgotten enclosed her chilled skin and yet still she shivered.
Her flat was just round the corner. She walked fast, not looking at him. Inside the lift the atmosphere was suffocatingly tense. With a flourish she removed his jacket but before she could return it he closed the distance between them. He slid long fingers very slowly into the damp tangle of her hair. Fierce dark eyes searched her pale, upturned face. Heat rushed up to the surface of her fair skin.
‘Por dios, Sarah,’ he breathed raggedly. ‘What is it that you want from me?’
A dull ache stirred in the pit of her stomach. The thump of her heartbeat filled her eardrums. An overpowering sexual excitement unlike anything she had ever experienced had her entrapped, preventing her from moving away. Yet she didn’t want to move away. That part of her that incredulously and finally recognised what she was feeling was instinctively greedy for the breathtaking high of awareness to continue. It brought her alive. It was heady, new and terrifying.
A brown forefinger brushed the base of her throat where a tiny pulse was going crazy. His hand was not quite steady. She stopped breathing. Rafael was not breathing either. He was watching her with burning intensity. His other hand skated down to the shallow indentation of her spine, pulling her into the hard cradle of his pelvis. She knew she only had to say a word and he would free her but she couldn’t find that word, didn’t want to speak it. She knew that just as he knew it, her secret no longer a secret, his knowledge thrown back at her by the glittering onslaught of his narrowed stare. He lowered his dark head so gradually that she trembled before he engulfed her mouth in the scorching heat of his.
Shock reverberated through her but shock was swiftly drowned by sensation. Her hands clenched convulsively into his broad shoulders. His tongue penetrated hotly between her lips, imitating another far more elemental possession, and the ground rocked and fell away beneath her feet. It was a savage awakening to a hunger that had no boundaries, a hunger that boldly seized and controlled.
She was weak and dizzy, wildly disorientated, when he released her mouth and vented a stifled groan into her hair. ‘I don’t know you like this,’ he muttered roughly, angrily.
If he had freed her immediately she would have fallen. Her legs didn’t feel as though they belonged to her any more. She was afraid to test her voice. Her body felt alien, unfamiliar. Taking a jerky step back from him, she bent her head over her bag to fumble for her key. So that’s what it is like, so that is what I was supposed to feel, she was thinking in a fever of disbelief.
‘I suggest that we vacate the lift,’ Rafael murmured gently.
A minute later he reached over her shoulder and extracted the key from her shaking fingers to unlock the door. Her arm brushed against his hard, flat stomach and she flinched away from the contact, suddenly gripped by a very basic need to put as much space as possible between them.
‘When do you collect the children?’
‘I don’t. A girl on the ground floor is giving them a lift back. Her daughter’s at the same school and she’s helping at the party,’ Sarah volunteered in a strained rush, taking refuge in unnecessary detail. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get changed.’
As she turned towards her bedroom door, a strong hand enclosed hers and tugged her relentlessly back. ‘But why should I excuse you when I can he
lp you?’ Rafael enquired in a silky soft purr.
Her lashes fluttered in bemusement. He couldn’t possibly mean what she had thought he had meant for a crazy moment. ‘H…help me?’
‘Why not?’ A sunbrowned fingertip traced the tremulous curve of her swollen mouth, skimmed with aching slowness along her delicate jawbone and finally came to rest in a tiny, blue-veined hollow at the base of her slender throat. By the time he reached that point, every skin-cell in her body was behaving as though it had a life and a purpose all of its own.
Clashing unwarily with luminescent gold challenge, she could feel her hold on reality loosening even more. ‘Don’t…’ she whispered shakily.
‘You speak with such conviction,’ he mocked.
Alarm bells rang loudly in her head as his measuring gaze dropped to the prominent thrust of her small, high breasts and lingered on the pointed buds pushing against the damp cotton, damning indictments of her response to him. He was very still, dull coins of colour overlying his hard cheekbones, his breathing shallow and audible.
‘You say “don’t”,’ he noted in a low-pitched growl.
A peculiar lassitude was sweeping over her. Time seemed to have slowed down to a third of its normal speed.
‘But I say si…I say yes,’ he completed.
In dumb shock she watched brown fingers drop to the first button on her blouse and expertly slide it free. For an endless moment he paused and the silence became a thunderbeat of unbearable tension before he deftly moved on to the next. She was paralysed, unable to think, unable to move, unable to protest. What was happening between them was unreal. An apparently careless forefinger unhooked the front clasp of her bra. The silk dropped away and he curved a dark hand in a possessive statement over one pouting breast. Sarah shivered violently, shutting her eyes as though by denying sight she might deny all responsibility.
With his other hand he pressed her into the invasive heat of his thighs. ‘Feel what you are doing to me,’ he invited hoarsely.
She could not have been unaware. Against her stomach she could feel the mounting male power of him, the predatory readiness of every leashed line of his abrasively masculine body. A drowning, debilitating weakness quivered through her lower limbs. That strange and increasingly painful ache kicked hard at her stomach again. Involuntarily she leant into him for support.