Crime Of Passion

Georgie threw her head up, a blaze of raw hostility leaping through her veins. She put that glass to her lips and she drank like a sailor on shore-leave after six months of sobriety. In her rage, she tasted nothing. ‘Thanks,’ she said tautly. ‘I needed that!’

‘Evidently, you did.’ A hard smile curved Rafael’s sensual mouth.

If he fondly imagined she was about to hang her head in shame because one time in her life she had got stupidly drunk, he was wrong!

‘Do you think there would be time before dinner for another one?’ Georgie murmured hopefully, taking up the challenge with a vengeance. If he chose to think that she was a drunk as well as a slut, he was quite free to do so. Anything was better than letting him see that he could still get to her. And displaying a total lack of concern for Rafael’s prehistoric ideal of how a ‘lady’ ought to behave was surely the best way possible to demonstrate her complete indifference to him?

Recalling her own eagerness to please in the past could only make her cringe. All her life she had been extrovert, fiery and opinionated. But Rafael had put a clamp on such emotional excesses, making her feel that to be acceptable she had to tone herself down into a paler version of herself. Afraid that if she couldn’t be what he wanted, she would lose him, Georgie had done a very fair imitation of a doormat until inevitably she had begun to resent his arrogant assumption of supremacy.

Another drink arrived. Georgie swallowed hard in a silence that was beginning to slice along her nerveendings and made herself sip through clenched teeth.

‘I have often wished that I had taken you up on your offer that night,’ Rafael delivered, fixing brilliant golden eyes to her openly transfixed face. ‘But it would have meant breaking every honourable instinct I possessed. I’ve never made love to a woman under the influence of alcohol before, but with you it would have paid dividends. I would have known then that I wasn’t your first

lover—’

‘And I dare say I would have known that I wasn’t yours either!’ Georgie slung back at him in growing outrage. In throwing up her reckless behaviour that night, Rafael demonstrated a savage, unashamed desire to humiliate her.

‘Naturally not… what would you expect?’ Rafael demanded shortly, after a decidedly stunned pause that such an irrelevance as his sexual experience should be mentioned. Dark colour accentuated the fierce angles of his hard cheekbones, his handsome mouth a compressed line.

Georgie tossed back another swig of alcohol, well aware she had disconcerted him. ‘Oops, to think I had one chance in my entire life to be ravished in a Ferrari and I blew it!’ She fluttered her lashes in an attitude of deep regret, beginning to enjoy herself as much as she had thoroughly enjoyed herself in the amateur dramatic society at college. ‘That one perfect spontaneous moment missed… But then, you’re not a spontaneous kind of guy, are you?’

‘Not in a public car park…no,’ Rafael breathed in a driven undertone, with more than a suggestion of gritted white teeth to the reply as he studied her with lancing dark eyes. ‘I find it hard to believe that you can refer to that night so casually.’

Georgie flicked him a glance, adrenalin fairly roaring through her. A determined smile tilted her mobile mouth as she regarded him from below her thick copper lashes. ‘Why not? After all, you weren’t the only one deceived four years ago… I was as well.’

‘You were?’ Rafael breathed, with an incredulous expression.