A Fiery Baptism

Gordon appeared in the midst of these unwelcome confidences. Smoothly cutting in on Karen, he mentioned an early morning meeting with just the right touch of polished regret.

‘Phone me when you get home,’ Karen mouthed, unimpressed.

There was silence in the lift. Her high heels clicked noisily over the pavement. Gordon unlocked the passenger door of his Porsche. Her hands were trembling. She clasped them together on her lap. When a taxi cut in front of them, Gordon cursed, which was most unlike him.

‘It was you in Paris with Alejandro,’ he murmured flatly, abruptly.

Sarah shut her eyes. ‘Yes.’

Silence stretched but mentally she imagined that she heard the crash as she fell off her ladylike pedestal.

‘Just yes?’ Gordon queried, crunching the gears at the traffic lights. He was revealing a flip side character unfamiliar to her. ‘It’s none of my business, but he upset you.’

She straightened out her coiled fingers, rearranging her hands with the care of a small child mindful of adult appraisal. ‘I’m not very good with surprise encounters. I didn’t expect to ever see him again.’

‘You were still at school! What kind of a…?’ His voice broke off harshly.

Sooner or later, Gordon and Karen would both add two and two and make four. She had fallen in love when she was eighteen. Love had sent her off the rails. Love had plunged her into a kind of compulsive insanity that had left her at the mercy of emotions she could neither understand nor control.

For the first time in her life, someone had had more power over her than her parents. The Southcotts had been faced with someone as strong-willed, as ruthlessly manipulative and possessive as they were themselves. Battle had commenced with a vengeance. Stranded in the middle of the war zone, already sinking beneath the pressures of a relationship in which she was hopelessly out of her depth, Sarah had slowly been torn in two.

Rafael was the estranged and unrepentantly unfaithful husband who had had the unmitigated gall to refuse her a divorce. The high-powered lawyer her father had hired had tried repeatedly to break the deadlock. He had failed. Had Sarah been prepared to prove Rafael’s adultery, she would not have required his consent to a divorce. But Sarah had not been prepared to grasp that stinging nettle. Indeed she had shrunk from the threat of the publicity that would have accompanied a contested case. And three months from now the five-year time limit would be up. Technical freedom would be hers once more.

And what difference would it make to her? Sarah had stopped feeling married in the white-walled prison of a luxurious private clinic while she had waited…and she waited for a man who never arrived. What did it do to a woman when she offered understanding, if not forgiveness, and even understanding was rejected? Why had she even bothered to write to him? Time and time again she had asked herself that question. In her darkest hour she had offered an olive branch…in her own parlance, she had crawled. Her husband had committed adultery. And she had crawled. For nothing. That was what was still burned into her soul. She had put her pride on the line for nothing.

It was a blessing that nobody knew his identity. Her parents had gone to great lengths right from the beginning to bury all the evidence. When she had failed to return from Paris, they had told the school that she was ill and when time wore on that she was convalescing abroad. Rafael’s starburst ascent from impoverishment to success beyond anyone’s wildest dreams was a savage irony. ‘An offence against good taste,’ her mother had called it.

She rested her aching head back while Gordon drove her home to her small Kensington flat. ‘I wish you’d talk to me,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry.’

At the door of her flat, he caught her wrist between his fingers. Suddenly he was kissing her, the pressure of his mouth warm and practised on hers. She endured the embrace passively. Unmoving, unresponsive. To respond you had to feel something. Sarah felt nothing beyond an awkward sense of embarrassment.

Gordon drew back, a faint flush on his cheekbones. ‘I don’t win any prizes for timing, do I?’ But he smiled down at her, restored to his normally even temper. ‘I’ll call you.’

Karen had once told her that no man ever believed his interest might be unwelcome to a woman. And Gordon was a very confident man, calmly proving the concept. At the start of the evening the mere idea of Gordon kissing her would have been enough to alarm Sarah, but Rafael had already sent her crashing through the shock barrier.

‘I’ll be very busy this week,’ she replied.

His mouth quirked but he said nothing, standing there until she was safely indoors. Dropping her coat on the hall chair, she kicked off her shoes and walked into the lounge.

Her babysitter was already bundling up her books. ‘You’re early. I didn’t expect you for ages yet.’

‘I was tired.’ Sarah dug into her purse and paid the teenager, who lived just across the corridor. ‘Any problems?’

‘Oh, no!’ Angela grinned, digging the notes deep into the pocket of her skin-tight jeans. ‘I let them watch the late film with me,’ she then conceded carelessly. ‘I’ll let myself out.’

Sarah wandered over to the sideboard and withdrew the bottle of brandy which she kept for her father’s occasional consumption. She was pouring a measure into a crystal glass when she thought she heard Angela speaking to someone. With a frown she lifted her head just as the front door rocked on the teenager’s noisy slam, making her wince.

Angela was trustworthy and sensible but she had a soft-hearted tendency to give way to Gilly and Ben’s pleas to get back out of bed. Give the twins an inch and they took a mile. Tomorrow they would be overtired and cross. Tomorrow…her hand shook and she curved an arm over her stomach. Damn him, damn him…damn him.

‘Dios mio.’ It was a purred intervention in the quiet. ‘I should think you would need to drain the bottle to sleep tonight.’

Incredulously, she whirled round. The glass slid between her fingers and fell with a soft thud, spilling out an amber pool of liquid in a slowly spreading stain on the carpet.

CHAPTER TWO

‘LO SIENTO. I’m sorry. Did I startle you?’ Grimly amused by the entrance he had achieved, Rafael uncoiled his lean length from the doorway. He executed the motion with inherent animal grace, strolling soundlessly into the lamplight out of the shadows. From beneath luxuriant black lashes that a woman would have killed to possess, narrowed tiger’s eyes inspected her. ‘It is so unlike you to be clumsy.’

Her tongue unglued from the roof of her mouth. ‘How did you get in?’

‘The girl was leaving. I told her I was awaited. She was surprised but very trusting.’ Even white teeth flashed against golden skin. ‘You have this one trait which I can appreciate now. There was no risk that I would be breaking up a private party for two. You really should tell that pretty tailor’s dummy that he’s on to a very bad bet; I might almost find it within my heart to pity him.’

She could barely follow what he was saying to her. Over four years of silence and then this? Why should Rafael come here now? It made no sense. Her violet eyes were huge against her pallor. ‘How did you find out where I lived?’

‘That wasn’t difficult.’ His hard mouth twisted.

‘What do you want?’ she demanded shakily.

A broad shoulder sheathed in butter-soft leather shifted in an infinitesimal shrug. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I was curious.’

‘Curious?’ she echoed, her voice rising steeply.

He glanced round the small, pleasantly furnished room. ‘This is not how I pictured you living,’ he admitted. ‘I would picture you in the drawing-room at your parents’ home, a butterfly safely preserved behind glass.’

Dialogue with Rafael had never been straightforward. He had a disorientating habit of leaping back and forth, voicing exactly what passed through his agile mind. Jerkily she folded her arms. He bent a long-fingered hand down to the corner of the armchair beside him, twitching up something that had caught his attention. It was a cookery book. ‘You use this?’ he asked, much as if it were a mechanic’s wrench.

Perspiration was dampening her skin. Hysteria was clawing at her. She was too afraid to make sense of his sudden impulsive appearance. ‘Any reason why I shouldn’t?’ she enquired defensively.

Casting the item carelessly aside again, he straightened to his full six feet two inches. ‘When you stand like that, you look like a little fishwife. Mama wouldn’t like it,’ he said cruelly. ‘Who takes care of you here?’

The blood rushed hotly to her cheeks. ‘Nobody.’

‘You have learnt to cook and clean? You astonish me.’

‘If you don’t get out of here, I’ll call the police!’ she threatened in a wild rush.

Rafael dealt her an unmoved glance of contempt. ‘I am still your husband. If I want to be here, I have the right to be here.’

‘No! You do not have that right!’

‘You should be calm. One may have the right without the desire to exercise it for very long,’ he sliced back. ‘Why do you live in a place like this? Don’t tell me—Papa’s finally been caught insider dealing!’

Agonising tension was squaring her slight shoulders. ‘I meant what I said. If you don’t leave, I’ll—’

Rafael bit out a sardonic laugh. ‘Why not? Call the police and entertain me. It is the emptiest threat of all and you know it. You would not court the publicity.’

‘Wouldn’t I?’ He had moved slightly closer and she took a tiny uncertain step backwards, her pale head gradually lowering in defeat. ‘No, I wouldn’t.’