Kate Walker - One Night in Madrid

The dark pools of his eyes above the pallor of his cheeks and the appalling, almost greyish tinge to his skin were alarming. They made Alannah bite her lip hard in distress as she saw him try to take in what she was saying. She knew how much he had doted on his young sister and it tore at her heart to think of what this was doing to him.

‘Don’t you think you would be more comfortable if we sat down …?’

She couldn’t finish the sentence when he suddenly took a couple of steps towards her, rejecting her suggestion with a violent shake of his head, a terrible mixture of anger and pain darkening his eyes.

‘I don’t want to sit down and I sure as hell don’t want to be comfortable ! I want to know—’

‘They were seeing each other,’ Alannah blurted out in a rush, desperate to get it said, to get this over with. ‘Chris and Lori were a couple. They met one time when she came to see me here and—they were crazy about each other.’

‘She never said anything.’

‘Of course she didn’t. She knew how you’d react. You wouldn’t have wanted your sister to date my brother; admit it—you’d have hated it.’

The dangerous expression that flashed across his face told her she was right before a curt nod of Raul’s dark head acknowledged the truth of her words.

‘I know …’ she began but Raul’s brutal tones cut across her stumbling words.

‘Then you’ll know how I feel about the fact that she ever came here to visit you. I told her not to contact you—never to see you again. You broke her heart when you walked out.’

Broke her heart, Alannah noted bitterly. Not his—not Raul’s. But then she doubted that Raul had a heart to break. At least where she was concerned. His sister Lori had been quite a different matter. And her own heart ached desperately in sympathy for him over that.

‘And she was dating your brother. If I’d known …’

‘You couldn’t have stopped her, Raul. She was a grown woman.’

‘She was twenty-one!

‘Old enough to know her own mind. And her own heart!’

She had been twenty-one when she’d met him. She’d known her own heart then—known that she wanted to stay with this man for the rest of her life. Until reality had stripped the rose-coloured spectacles from her eyes.

‘Her heart …’ Raul’s scornful laugh dismissed the claim. ‘She didn’t love him—she couldn’t have done.’

‘And why not?’

This time Alannah was the one to take a step forward, defiance driving her close to Raul’s powerful form in a way that in any other mood she would have avoided at all costs.

‘Why couldn’t she have loved Chris? Why is that so hard to believe? Or is it just that you don’t think that any member of my family is lovable? That because I walked out on you then no Redfern is worth bothering with? Don’t take your own bitterness out on—’

‘Bitterness!’

Raul’s laugh this time was pure cynicism, so harsh it made her flinch back as he tossed it right into her face.

‘Don’t kid yourself, querida! There’s no bitterness—that’s not what I feel. The truth is that I feel nothing—nothing at all. Except perhaps a trace of relief that you refused my offer of marriage when you did. I dread to think what my life would be like now if you’d accepted—a living hell, I should imagine.’

‘Then we’ve both cause to be grateful it never happened!’

Alannah flung the words at him, putting the bite of conviction into each syllable.

‘But you can’t blame my behaviour on Chris! He is—he was,’ she amended painfully, faltering as the black memories hit home, ‘a very different person. And he adored Lori. He would never have hurt her—not …’

Another tidal wave of memory crashed over her head, killing the words on her tongue, drying her throat painfully. And the terrible glitter in Raul’s dark eyes told her that he had noticed and even as she began to feel the fear, to dread what was coming, he pounced with lethal perception.

‘Not?’ he echoed viciously. ‘Not what, querida? Your brother would never have hurt Lorena, not …?’

He let the sentence trail off, obviously expecting her to complete it. But Alannah couldn’t find the words, or the strength to use them.

‘Tell me.’

It was a tone that had in it all the command, all the arrogance of the generations of aristocrats who had made up the Marcín dynasty. It was the voice of a man who was used to being obeyed and expected nothing less right now. And Alannah felt her legs start to tremble at the sound of it, her knees threatening to give way beneath her.

‘Raul—please …’ she tried but he swept the words aside with a savagely imperious gesture.

‘Tell me!’ he ordered. ‘And tell me the truth—all of it; I shall know if you lie.’

She’d no doubt about that, Alannah acknowledged privately. She wouldn’t dare to lie to him, fearing the consequences if she did and he found out. His ability to read the truth in her face came close to being psychic and she was afraid of what he would see in her eyes if she met his. But how could she say …?

‘He was driving!’

The words echoed her thoughts so closely that for a dreadful moment she thought she had spoken them out loud. But then to her horror she realised that it was even worse. Raul had seen in her expression the words she couldn’t bring herself to say and now he spat them out in savage fury, his eyes pure ice, his expression dark with disgust.

‘Your brother was driving the car that crashed, wasn’t he? Wasn’t he?’ he demanded again, with brutal emphasis when she flinched away from answering him.

‘Yes …’

It was just a whisper, a thin thread of sound. But, hearing it, Raul flung up his arms in a gesture that expressed the violence of his thoughts more than any words could ever manage. Spinning away from her, he paced the width of the living room back and forth, back and forth, making Alannah think fearfully of a caged, ferocious tiger, one that was too big and too powerful to be confined in the small space of her tiny apartment.

‘Raul …’ she tried but he ignored her, flicking off her trembling use of his name with a brusque shake of his head.

‘He wouldn’t hurt her,’ he muttered, low and dangerous. ‘Oh, no, he wouldn’t hurt her—wouldn’t harm a hair on her head—he just killed her!’

‘CHRIS didn’t kill her!’

Alannah struggled to control her voice, to stop if from shaking so much that her words were incomprehensible.

‘He wouldn’t—’

‘Was he drunk?’

‘No—it wasn’t like that.’

Suddenly aware of the way that she was holding out her hands to Raul, seeming to implore him to listen, Alannah dropped them again hastily, pushing her fingers into the pockets of her jeans to hide the way they shook with nerves.

‘Then what was it like?’

At least he had stopped the restless pacing. He had come to a halt but over on the opposite side of the room, well away from her as his molten copper eyes blazed into hers. The physical distance between them might be small in reality, but in Alannah’s mind it had suddenly opened up like some huge, unbridgeable chasm, stretching wide and deep to separate them totally.

‘It was an accident—a lorry driver lost control and veered right across, knocking them into the central reservation—no one’s fault—just …’

‘Just an accident.’ Raul’s tone put a spin of total disbelief on the words. ‘But it wasn’t an accident that Lori was here in the first place, was it? That was because you and your brother worked on her. She would never have gone against my wishes …’