'Men always want what is out of reach. That was three-quarters of your attraction,' Rafael asserted drily. 'And as I got to know you—or believed I was getting to know you—I also discovered that you were bright, amusing and apparently outspokenly honest, a trait which for me was on a par with your beauty. Having to wait for you undoubtedly increased your desirability tenfold. I had never had to wait for anything in my life before and, while I waited, I endowed you with every conceivable virtue.'
The contempt with which he cynically dismissed what be had felt then angered and hurt Georgie. He resurrected memories of those innocent days and those memories burnt her now like acid. 'I don't believe in looking back,' she said tautly. 'It's a mistake.'
Rafael spread long brown fingers in a gesture of careless disagreement. 'I'm not so sensitive,' he drawled. 'You were a learning experience for me. Different culture, different values. I was young enough to believe that things like that didn't matter... but they do, very much.' 'Why on earth did you bring me here?' Georgie demanded shakily, denying the creeping tide of mortification consuming her.
'An overwhelming desire to punish you, and so far, I have to confess, it has been an extraordinarily satisfying experience,' Rafael murmured without remorse.
'You swine... you utter swine,' Georgie whispered in a stricken rush.
A slanting ebony brow quirked. 'But not yet quite as satisfying as I anticipate. I want you lying under me, gasping with excitement, begging for release. And after I have had you, I will be entirely satisfied. Playing this waiting game merely adds an edge.'
Without even thinking about it, Georgie hit him, the crack of her palm resoundingly loud in the smouldering silence. He didn't even flinch. The reddened mark of her fingers darkened one savage cheekbone. He snaked out a powerful arm and yanked her between his spread thighs, reading the raw apprehension flaring in her wide eyes. Incandescent gold raked over her scared face and abruptly he laughed. 'I'll take it out of your hide in bed. That's a first, Georgie. No woman has ever struck me before.'
'I hate you!' Georgie launched, with a sob of distress snatching at her raw vocal cords. 'I don't know how you can do this to me!'
'So easily, it would terrify you,' Rafael shared almost conversationally. 'In fact, I could develop quite a taste for your tears. Poor Georgie, one last dangerous impulse backed you into the tightest corner of all!' Long fingers forced up her chin, quelling her attempt to evade him. 'So impetuous, so uncontrolled... so very different from me. I was raised to be intensely disciplined, responsible, serious '
'I'm not interested!' she spat back at him, appalled by his insight into her character. 'Let go!'
'And you panic with such naked abandon,' he mur-mured flatly. 'I was a bastard after breakfast, wasn't I? But then I wanted the truth '
'But it wasn't the truth! It was what you wanted to believe!' Georgie condemned hotly. 'What you'd like to believe so that you can excuse yourself for treating me like dirt!'
Rafael laced a hard hand into her tumbling hair and tightened his fingers with painful thoroughness. 'He was your lover. I know it and, before I'm finished with you, you'll admit it,' he swore.
'For heaven's sake, I've never had a lover!' Georgie slung back at him between gritted teeth. 'And I'm sick to death of you acting like I'm some sort of raving ymphomaniac!'
'You've never had a lover?' Glittering dark eyes raked hers with pitying derision. 'Georgie...do you think I believe in those mermaids upstairs?' he asked very drily. 'Why pretend? It doesn't matter any more. But lies infuriate me.'
It was useless. She saw that and regretted her honesty. Please let go of me,' she muttered. Astonishingly, he released her and Georgie backed away on cottonwool legs, trembling in spite of her efforts to control that physical weakness.
'You are ashamed of your relationship with him now,' Rafael breathed with smouldering dark golden eyes pinned contemptuously to her. 'A little too late to impress.'
'Go to hell!' she spat, her throat choked up with tears. detest you!'
'But it's the wanting that hurts most, es verdad?' Rafael dealt her a slashing look of cruelly amused comprehension.
'I'd sooner go to bed with a—with a total stranger!'
'Oh, I'm sure you've done that at least once,' Rafael drawled with laconic certainty. 'Exclusive, you're not.'
Outraged, Georgie stalked back to him. 'Well, then, you're not very fastidious, are you?' she hissed, in a tone shaking with red-hot fury and frustration at her inability to shut him up. 'But brace yourself for disappointment, Rafael. After this morning's little honesty session, I would be certifiably insane to let you anywhere near me.'
He reached for her and she bristled like a spitting cat, ready to claw as she went into startled retreat, registering her mistaken direction only as the wall connected with her taut shoulderblades. 'I will not stand for this!' she erupted in a burst of indignation.
As Rafael closed the distance between them, an appreciative smile slashed his golden features. 'You are so much more entertaining now than you were then. Four years ago, it was, "Yes, Rafael, no, Rafael, whatever you think, Rafael," and I couldn't understand where all your spirit had gone,' he confided, bracing a hand on either side of her head. 'Of course, it was an act put on
to impress. Then you were playing for high stakes. You may not have guessed what was on my mind but your
goal was certainly marriage '
'Like hell it was!' Incensed by the scathing accusation, Georgie's every muscle clenched defensively as he deliberately moved closer. 'Now, back off!'
'But that is not what you want.' Rafael lowered his dark head, veiled eyes a shimmer of hot gold on her wildly flushed face, and she was entrapped by a curious stillness, her breath locked in her constricted throat. 'What you want with every fibre of your being is to possess me as thoroughly as I intend to possess you...'
CHAPTER SIX
George was mesmerised by the savage brilliance of Rafael's sexually explicit gaze and the ragged edge of blatant need in his dark, deep voice. The familiar musky scent of him teased at her flaring nostrils as he dropped a hand to her hip and suddenly hauled her against him. Her heart raced crazily. The hard thrust of his masculine arousal pulsed against her abdomen and then he lifted her up to him with a powerful ease that exhilarated her. For a split-second she was looking down at him and hunger tore at her with cruel claws, ripping away every proud layer of pretence.
A desperate pain pierced her then, a terrible vulnerability. In all this time, all these years, no other man had ever drawn her as he did. In the dark of the night, in the secrecy of her dreams, she had tossed and turned and craved him, and despised herself for that treacherous yearning. But now, as she clashed with devouring golden eyes and burned, she felt the answering tremor of response snaking through his magnificent physique.
His arms tightened fiercely around her and he drew her down, taking her mouth in a deep, shuddering admission of need that sent her every sense rocketing to fever-pitch. And she knew then that the power was not his alone. Wrapped round him like a vine, Georgie kissed him back with all the fire he had awakened. As his tongue penetrated between her parted lips, her nails dug into his broad shoulders, a stifled whimper of excitement escaping her.
Rafael groaned something in his own language and swept her right off her feet with bruisingly impatient, hands. She captured his hard cheekbones between her. palms and stared up at him with dazed eyes, out of focus with passion. He succumbed to the lure of her swollen mouth again somewhere halfway up the stairs and control seemed to go out of the window at that point, because he braced her against the wall and took her lips with a driving, demanding sexuality which reduced her to mental rubble.
'Madre de Dios...' he swore roughly against her throat, struggling for breath, and then he carried her up into the bedroom, tumbled her down on the bed and pinned her there with a wildly exciting lack of cool.
He wrenched his jacket and tie off and ripped at his shirt without break
ing the connection of their mouths once. Her heartbeat thundered in her ears like a pulse-beat of desire. His fingers found the neckline of her cotton top and tore it down over her arms. He curved his hands over the shameless thrust of her pouting breasts and she shivered in violent reaction, helplessly arching her back to increase the pressure on her unbearably sensitive nipples.
He seized on a taut rosy crest with his teeth and the explosion of sensation he released made her cry out, her teeth gritting, her throat extending.
'Perdicion' he groaned, lifting his arrogant dark head to look down at her as he dealt at speed with the re-mainder of his clothing. 'So long.. . have waited so long for this.'
So long, yes, she thought intensely, reaching back up for him with the single-minded motivation of a pro-grammed doll. A relentless hunger seized her as he sealed his virile length to hers. Her whole body flushed with consuming heat and she turned to him, driven by thing much more powerful than she was, and let her hands travel through the light mat of curling black hair across his muscular chest, glorying in the freedom to touch him at last.
Raising his head, he pressed her down to the pillows again, stilling her fluttering hands, the dominant male, sentencing her back to passivity. From below ebony lashes he dealt her a wholly predatory look that made her burn and quiver. He reached down and peeled off her shorts and panties in one impatient movement. He thrust a hair-roughened thigh between hers and fanned out her hair with his fingers so that the vibrant strands surrounded her exquisite face, tumbling in a fiery cascade across the white pillows. From somewhere he had found control again and now he contemplated her with an indolent air of possession.
Georgie trembled and met that look and suddenly remembered about this bed, this room. The significance of their surroundings and the recollection of his savage desire for revenge suddenly chilled her to the marrow.
'No,' she said shakily. 'Not here '