A Fiery Baptism

Sarah took a deep breath. ‘I haven’t brought them.’

An anxious pleat-line formed between Louise’s pencilled brows.

‘You see, I needed to talk to you privately,’ Sarah confided tensely.

Her father appraised her pale face and taut stance. ‘Is there something wrong, Sarah? Sit down and we’ll talk about it calmly.’ Although she had yet to do or say anything that was not calm, there was a cold note of warning to the command.

Sarah swallowed hard. ‘I saw Rafael last night.’

Her mother turned a ghastly shade beneath her well-applied make-up. Her father was not so easily read. He continued to watch her without visible reaction. The silence threatened to strangle Sarah, forcing her to keep on talking. ‘Gordon took me to a party and he was there.’

‘What sort of people are you mixing with these days?’ Louise’s voice betrayed the shaky undertones of stress.

‘Afterwards, he came to the apartment.’

Charles Southcott showed his first response in a chilling narrowing of his gaze. ‘At your invitation?’

Her mother looked at him with reproach. ‘Sarah wouldn’t have invited him into her home.’

‘He didn’t know about the twins,’ Sarah advanced stiffly. ‘He said that he thought I…I had had a termination. He said that that was what he was told.’

A dragging quiet lay over the room. Louise studied her clasped hands, still as a statue. Her father’s features were shuttered, a tiny nerve pulling at the edge of his flattened mouth.

‘I mean…that’s just so ridiculous.’ Sarah was wretchedly conscious of the high-pitched note that had entered her voice.

Charles Southcott expelled his breath shortly. ‘Sit down, Sarah. We don’t want a scene.’

She was feeling sick, shaky. Facing up to her father still had that effect on her. She sank down reluctantly into an elaborately cushioned wickerwork chair, her back a ramrod-straight rejection of its comfortable embrace.

‘Let me make one point clear in advance. We were solely responsible for your welfare,’ her father delivered with an air of strong censure. ‘When Alejandro went to New York and left you here with us, we were extremely concerned about you. Your marriage was destroying you.’

‘He was destroying her,’ her mother chipped in, tight-mouthed with bitterness. ‘He turned you into a stranger. We lost you and you never came back to us.’

Sarah’s throat was closing over, hurting her. ‘He was my husband and I loved him.’

Charles Southcott released a cutting laugh. ‘You didn’t love him, Sarah. You were obsessed by him. It was a sick obsession and you needed help…’

‘Help?’ Sarah repeated chokily. ‘You call locking me up helping me?’

‘Sarah,’ Louise whispered pleadingly. ‘Please…’

‘It was for your own good. I didn’t want to hurt you. I wanted to bring you to your senses,’ her father continued coldly. ‘When Alejandro had the impertinence to show up here again…’

Sarah froze. ‘Rafael came here?’ she prompted in disbelief.

Her mother murmured, ‘We had to keep him away from you, Sarah. You weren’t well. You might have had a miscarriage. We didn’t really lie to him. He jumped to conclusions and we didn’t contradict him.’

An unpleasant smile that was no smile at all had formed on her father’s narrow mouth. ‘I believe it’s relatively common for Latins to believe that sin is inevitably followed by some holy form of retribution,’ he scoffed. ‘I confirmed his suspicions.’

Sarah was leaning dizzily forward. ‘Oh, dear God, how could you do that to him?’ she gasped in horror.

‘Naturally I saw that the letter you intended to send was destroyed,’ he added icily. ‘While it was unhappily not within my power to prevent you from making a fool of yourself over him for two years, it was within my power to prevent you from doing so on paper.’

Sarah shuddered under the lash of his contempt.

‘I loved him,’ she whispered abstractedly. ‘And at the beginning I trusted you. He blames me and he’s right to blame me,’ she vented with a shaken gasp. ‘Nobody has any excuse to be that naive. You made me believe that he had just cut me out of his life as if I didn’t exist. You didn’t care what that did to me. But then you didn’t care what you did to me by putting me in that place…’

‘It was our duty to protect you from yourself.’

‘You took your chance when I was in no fit state to know what you were doing,’ Sarah condemned. ‘You hadn’t been able to buy him off. You hadn’t been able to scare him off. So you lied to him and you lied to me and nothing you can say will change those facts!’

‘Why are we arguing about something that was finished most conclusively five years ago?’ Charles Southcott surveyed her with sharp distaste. ‘I did you a favour. You were well rid of him.’

Sarah sprang upright on a wild surge of anger. ‘What did you know about our marriage? Did it ever occur to you that I wasn’t the perfect wife? Why did you assume that I was such a precious gift?’ she demanded strickenly. ‘And at least Rafael didn’t treat me the way you treat my mother!’

She dashed a trembling hand across her streaming eyes. Until that moment she hadn’t realised that she was crying. The silence was so familiar, chilling, suffocating. ‘I should have known,’ she framed tremulously, defying the icy silence to the last. ‘I should have known.’

She walked out and they let her go as she had known they would. They would give her time to calm down and in a few days they would approach her, expecting family loyalty to have haltered her out-of-control emotions. Only this time that wouldn’t happen. Sarah only visited for her mother’s sake. She had always made excuses for her mother but now she had to face the fact that Louise had been in full collusion and agreement with her husband and she was nauseated by the knowledge that her parents had deliberately set out to break up her marriage and continued to rejoice in their success. Neither of them was remotely concerned about the high costs she had had to pay five years ago.

She sat in her car in the driveway for several dazed minutes. Her brain was roving off in a dozen different directions until it abruptly settled on one overwhelming necessity, a thread of seeming sanity in the nightmare of confusion. She had to find out where Rafael was staying. She had to see him, speak to him.

Karen answered her phone with a grumbling yawn. ‘Sarah,’ she muttered. ‘Why are you using a callbox?’

‘Do you know where Rafael Alejandro is staying?’ In the lengthy quiet that settled on the line, Sarah regretted her impetuosity and improvised awkwardly, ‘Someone I know needs to get in touch with him urgently.’

‘And you need to see a man about a dog.’ Karen was suddenly sounding very alert. ‘Actually I do know. Elise let it drop last night in a temper.’

‘Elise?’

‘The lady who brought him. Or should I say, the lady he allowed to bring him?’ Karen extended with irony. ‘I think we need a trade-off here, Sarah, my pet. Information for information.’

‘Karen, please!’ Sarah said impatiently.

Karen surrendered with bad grace and supplied the address.

‘Thanks. Thanks!’ Sarah said again. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

It was a small but exclusive apartment block in Belgravia. Pushing a nervous hand through the damp hair adhering to her forehead, Sarah stepped into the lift. She felt hot and bothered, utterly bereft of her usual cool. A little belatedly, she was wondering what she intended to say to Rafael and whether, in the heat of the moment, she might have been too hasty in her urge to immediately seek him out. She flinched when the lift doors whirred back and then she walked uncertainly along a corridor floored with a soft, deep carpet. The nasty suspicion that she might be about to make a gigantic fool of herself increased her reluctance.

A vase of beautifully arranged flowers sat in an alcove to one side of the entrance. Did Rafael own this place? Rent it? Whichever, this luxury was a far cry from the sort of flats they had once shared. She smoothed moist palms down over the tailored navy jacket and straight skirt she wore. Rafael hated navy. Frowning at the irrelevancy that her subconscious had served up, she pressed the bell.

She was midway through a second prolonged ring when the door jerked wide, framing Rafael. He was in the act of donning a white silk shirt, his thick hair damp and tousled from the shower. Drops of crystalline moisture still glistened on the wealth of black curling hair hazing his muscular chest. Involuntarily Sarah averted her eyes from the endless expanse of lean, golden flesh on view. Dry-mouthed, she swallowed. An odd tingling sensation ran down her backbone before she forced her head up again.

Raking golden eyes skimmed over her taut face and the brilliance of the unconscious appeal in her amethyst gaze. His superb bone-structure hardened, his ruthlessly sensual mouth tightening. Sensual…yes, those clean sculpted lines belied by that wholly passionate curve were uniquely sensual. The obscure thought-train surged up on Sarah out of nowhere, shocking her, sending rebellious heat to warm her skin. Her chaotic responses smashed her concentration and she was further confused by his silence. Silence from Rafael was an unknown quantity that unnerved her.

‘I need to talk to you.’ It emerged more as a plea than as the adult acknowledgement she had intended.

He took a fluid step back, employing body language to concede agreement. But it was a grudging invitation. He didn’t have to speak to tell her that. Rafael could put out vibes like placards. She was acutely conscious of the burning hostility he emanated.