Lynne Graham - Crime Of Passion

‘But I don’t have to be stuck with you!’

Unexpectedly, Rafael sent her a shimmering, sardonic smile. ‘A lamb to the slaughter… I don’t think.’

‘I don’t know what the heck you’re getting at, but I do know you could have left me in my hotel…or thrown a few backhanders in the right direction the way you did to get me out of my prison cell!’ Georgie derided, horrified at the prospect of being forced to accept his grudging hospitality.

He went white beneath his dark skin, his facial muscles freezing. ‘How dare you accuse me of sinking to such a level?’ he ground out incredulously. ‘I have never stooped to bribery in my life!’

Georgie licked at her dry lips. ‘I saw you give the policeman the money,’ she whispered.

Rafael surveyed her with growing outrage, registering with an air of disbelief that his denial had not been accepted. ‘I do not believe that I am hearing this. The policeman, Jorge, took the money straight to the village priest! The roof of the village church has fallen in and my donation will repair it, thereby enhancing Jorge’s standing in the community but granting him no personal financial gain,’ Rafael spelt out with biting emphasis. ‘I wanted to reward him for his efforts on your behalf. Although he did not believe that you were entitled to claim my friendship, and he was afraid of being made to look foolish, he telephoned me. Were it not for his persistence and his conscientious scruples, you would still be in that cell!’

His explanation made greater sense of the villagers’ response to him than her own hasty assumption that he had used cash to grease the wheels of justice. She reddened, but she did not apologise.

‘The young truck-driver had lied about you but he withdrew his story,’ Rafael continued icily. ‘You were then free to leave without any further output from me. I did nothing but straighten out a misunderstanding.’

She bent her head, her empty stomach rumbling. ‘Do you think you could feed me while you lecture me?’

‘Feed you?’

‘I haven’t eaten since breakfast yesterday.’

‘Por Dios,’ Rafael grated with raw impatience. ‘Why did you not say so?’

A microwaved meal arrived at speed. Georgie ate, grateful for any excuse not to have to speak while she attempted to put her thoughts in order. ‘I am taking you home with me,’ he had said, as if she was a stray dog or cat. ‘Home’ was the ancestral estancia on the vast savannah bounded by the Amazon. And the concept of Rafael taking her back there quite shattered Georgie. Even when she had been Maria Cristina’s best friend at school, Rafael had blocked his sister’s every request to bring Georgie out to stay on the estancia with them during the holidays.

Memory was taking her back, although she didn’t want it to. Georgie had won a fee-assisted place at an exclusive girls’ school to study for her A levels. She had met Maria Cristina in the lower sixth. At half-term, she had invited her friend home for the weekend but, in some embarrassment, the Bolivian girl had explained that her brother, Rafael, who was her guardian, would not allow that unless he had first met Georgie and her parents.

Georgie’s father had been amused when he received

a phone call from Rafael, requesting permission to take Georgie out for the afternoon in company with his sister.

‘Charming but very formal for this day and age,’ he had pronounced. ‘You’d better mind your “p"s and “q"s there, my girl. I think you’re about to be vetted.’

Georgie still remembered coming down the steps in front of the school as the limousine swept up. She had guessed just by the way Maria Cristina talked that her friend was from a wealthy background, but she had not been prepared for a stretch limousine complete with chauffeur and security men. Then Rafael appeared and Georgie had been so busy looking at him that she had missed the last step and almost fallen flat on her face.

He had reached out and caught her before she fell, laughing softly, dark eyes rich as golden honey sweeping her embarrassed face. ‘My sister said you were accident-prone.’

As Maria Cristina introduced them, his hand had lingered on hers, his narrowed gaze oddly intent until rather abruptly he had stepped back, a slight flush accentuating his hard cheekbones.

He had taken them to the Ritz for afternoon tea. Georgie had been quieter than she had ever been in her life before and painfully shy, a condition equally new to her experience. Right from that first moment of meeting, Rafael had attracted her to a frighteningly strong degree. And Georgie hadn’t known how to handle that attraction. It had come out of nowhere and swallowed her alive, draining her of self-will. She had sat there on the edge of her seat, barely able to take her eyes off him, terrified he would notice.

After the Ritz, he had taken them shopping in Harrods. Maria Cristina had casually spent an absolute fortune on trifles, and when Rafael had bought his sister a gold locket he had insisted on buying one identical for Georgie, smoothly dismissing her protests. Then he had ferried them back to her parents’ home where he had been invited to stay to dinner.

Newly conscious of just how rich her friend and her brother were, Georgie had been uncomfortable at first, fearfully watching for any signs of snobbish discomfiture from either of them. Her father was a primary schoolteacher and her stepmother, Jenny, a post-office clerk. Their home was a small, neat semi-detached. Half the neighbourhood had come out to stare at the stretch limousine. But Rafael and Maria Cristina had made themselves perfectly at home with her family… Steve hadn’t been there that first time, Georgie recalled absently.

‘Do you want to know the only thing Rafael asked about you?’ Maria Cristina had laughed after her brother had gone, shaking her head in wonderment. ‘Is that hair natural?’

For the remainder of her time at school, Georgie had been included in all of her friend’s term-time outings with her brother. Gradually she had lost her awe of Rafael, learning to judge her reception by the frequency of that rare and spontaneous smile of his that turned her heart inside out, but also learning to accept that he observed strict boundaries in his behaviour towards her and was prone to cool withdrawal when her impulsive tongue came anywhere near breaching that barrier.

‘Rafael likes you,’ Maria Cristina had said once—just one of many desperately gathered little titbits.

‘You make him laugh…’

‘He thinks you’re very intelligent…’

‘He wonders why you aren’t studying Spanish…’ What an agony of hope that had put her in! But then, it hadn’t all been good news.

He thinks you flirt too much…

‘He said if you wore your skirts any shorter, you’d be arrested…’

‘He believes that the two of us will only be adults when we stop telling each other absolutely everything!’

But Georgie had never told Maria Cristina whose photograph she kept in that locket which she wore constantly. She had been horribly embarrassed the day her friend chose to tease her about that secrecy in front of Rafael. He had silenced his sister. Dark eyes had intercepted Georgie’s anxious gaze and he had smiled lazily, and she had known that he knew perfectly well that it was his photo, taken by her with immensely careful casualness the previous year.

She had met Danny Peters at a sports event a few months before she sat her final exams. They had run into each other several times, quickly forming an easy friendship. Danny had just been ditched by his steady girlfriend and Georgie had supplied a sympathetic ear. When he had asked Georgie to attend his school formal with him, she had agreed, well aware that he merely wanted to save face in front of his friends. It had been a fun night out, nothing more. But Maria Cristina had gone all giggly about it and had insisted on talking about Danny as Georgie’s boyfriend. Had she mentioned Danny to Rafael?