‘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—’
‘Have you had breakfast yet? Lord, I’m sorry!’ From somewhere above them another voice had intervened. ‘I was in the shower and I thought it was the television I was hearing! I didn’t realise you had someone here.’
A breathtaking Scandinavian blonde with wheat-gold hair streaming over her towelling-clad shoulders was looking down at them from the gallery that overlooked the lounge. Sarah stared up at her, silenced, transfixed, every vestige of colour fleeing her complexion. Ludicrous as it seemed to her, the blonde wore a friendly smile of apology which slowly changed into an anxious frown as she skimmed a questioning glance at Rafael before disappearing from sight.
Shock always made Sarah go cold. A clammy chill was enclosing her flesh in a shuddering embrace. With the cold had come an unwelcome return to sanity. What madness had driven her into coming here? A woman in a time-warp had enacted the last few frantic hours. Had she once paused to think rationally about what she was doing? No, she hadn’t. She had recklessly run Rafael to earth and what she had sown, she had reaped. Her sense of humiliation was choking. Shame burnt like ice through her veins. With what fantasies had she rushed here five years too late? The glowing, utterly unselfconscious blonde on the gallery had recalled everything that Sarah had worked so hard to forget.
Once Rafael had held her trapped in a silken web more powerful than the strongest steel. And she had lost all self-will. That was what loving somebody like Rafael did to you. Perhaps she should be grateful to her father, she thought feverishly. Perhaps she should be thanking him for her freedom. He had torn her from that web and forced her to survive without Rafael.
She had thought that what she refused to acknowledge couldn’t hurt her. But in the end her fearful blindness had ripped her to shreds. While Rafael was in New York, her father had put a private investigator on him. Her father had turned her shrinking suspicions into cold, irrefutable fact. He had framed Rafael’s infidelity in black and white typescript and enshrined it in the unforgettable images of a photograph. He had brought her face to face with the living substance of her worst nightmares. And in expecting gratitude, her father had demanded the impossible from her.
‘Sarah…’
She forced a frozen smile on to lips that for a frightening instant felt too clumsy to obey her. Loathing was emerging from that terrible chilled feeling deep down inside her. Loathing and embarrassment and seething anger were ready to thrust a violent passage through her controlled faade. Their marriage was over, past, dead…something she had briefly allowed herself to forget. Quite how she could have forgotten that reality evaded her understanding.
‘Sarah…’ Ironically, Rafael was now regarding her with the full attention he had earlier been determined to deny her. His penetrating gaze rested on her with unnerving intensity. ‘Presumably you did come here to tell me something,’ he reasoned with a patience that was quite out of character.
‘Did I?’ Her mind was a terrifying blank when it came to sane, civilised responses. Indeed all of a sudden she didn’t know what she was doing here in his apartment. ‘I thought you were in a hurry,’ she said curtly.
‘I feel in less of a hurry,’ Rafael countered lazily. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’
Sarah clutched her envelope bag to her stomach in a white-knuckled grip that betrayed her mood better than any words would have. ‘Because I don’t feel like sitting down now.’
He slanted her a disarming smile. ‘Before we were interrupted, you were about to tell me something,’ he murmured in a coaxing, soothing tone.
‘Was I?’
Rafael moved a beautifully expressive hand. It signified apology for his earlier brevity and indifference, indicated that he was now prepared to be a captive audience. It was marvellous what Rafael could put into one casual gesture. He was poetry in motion, poetry even standing still. In absolute anguish at the rebellious trend of her muddled brain, Sarah stiffened even more.
‘I will give you my time, all the time that you want,’ he proffered with quite unintentional arrogance. ‘I will be quiet. I will not interrupt as I did before. I will listen to what you want to say.’
Yes, she thought sickly…yes, how he would have revelled in hearing what she might have foolishly confessed had not the blonde interrupted them. Five years ago, had circumstances been otherwise, had her father not committed one final, unforgivable act in his determination to destroy her marriage, she would have been at Southcott Lodge when Rafael arrived.
Her father utterly intimidated most people. But not Rafael. Challenged, Rafael could assume an icy, chilling dignity more than equal to anything her father could produce. Sarah had long understood that it was for that reason that she had been forcibly removed from the scene. She had been the weak link in the chain and her father had broken her as he had not been able to break Rafael.
Given the opportunity, Rafael would have told her the truth about that woman in New York. He would have made no excuses for himself. She would have sat there not looking at him and trying very hard not to listen. He would have been perfectly capable of flinging himself at her feet and pleading for forgiveness without losing an ounce of his fierce pride.
And she would have gone back to him. Why? Simply because she loved him, loved him the way she had never dreamt she could ever love anybody, loved him the way she never, ever wanted to
love anybody again. A shudder of repulsion ran through her. Thank God, she had been deprived of that choice. Rafael would have managed to convince her that that woman in New York had only been an isolated episode, much regretted and never to be repeated. At nineteen, she had been very naive, very impressionable and Rafael had considerable powers of persuasion.
Lifting her small head high, Sarah cleared her throat. ‘The twins—’
Rafael broke his vow of silence. ‘The twins?’ he interrupted as though he had been expecting her to refer to something entirely different.
‘They’re happy, well-adjusted children,’ Sarah completed. ‘They don’t need an occasional father. And I sincerely doubt that a pair of curious four-year-olds on scene would facilitate what appears to be a hectic sexual calendar.’
‘Ah.’ Rafael continued to regard her with infuriating cool. ‘And on what do you base this assumption?’
‘In little more than twelve hours, I have seen you with two different women!’ Sarah stressed thinly, holding on to her temper with difficulty.