Kate Walker - One Night in Madrid

And with that moment etched so brutally on his mind, and knowing that Alannah was going through something of the same thing, how could he have turned away?

‘Thank you for taking me home.’

Having emerged from her withdrawn silence at last, Alannah seemed determined to make herself continue the conversation. Raul could hear the effort she was making to speak in the stiffness of her words, the flat, monotone delivery.

‘It’s very kind of you.’

Another brusque gesture waved away her words.

‘No es nada,’ he returned, finding it impossible to pitch his voice at anything other than a growl, and he watched her pull her jacket tighter round herself as if she was cold.

‘I could have caught the bus.’

Now it was her voice that had a distinct chill to it. Every last trace of the woman who had wept in his arms had vanished and in her place was a cool, collected and totally distant female. He could practically feel the ice forming in the car as she spoke. Probably, like him, she was now deeply regretting that she had ever given in to the weak impulse to cry on his shoulder. He need be under no delusion that it meant anything. She had been on the edge of breaking down from the moment he had walked into the room, and he had been the only person there. He had no doubt that if there had been anyone else she could possibly have chosen then she would. ‘In this weather?’

This time his gesture indicated the driving rain that was lashing against the car windows, the swish of the hard-working wipers and the splash of tyres through puddles almost drowning his words.

‘You would have been drenched before you even made it to the bus stop. Besides, Carlos was waiting to drive me into town anyway and, as we found, we have to go past your flat to reach my hotel.’

And he was not at all prepared to leave her alone on a night like this and in the state she was in. She might have stopped crying, those appallingly harsh, wrenching sobs subsiding slowly into a ragged, gasping near-silence, but her slim body had still been shaking in his arms, her eyes swimming with tears.

‘I’ve done it before.’

‘I’m sure you have but with my car available there was no need for you to do it tonight.’

He wondered what she would have done if he had told her that he knew exactly what she was feeling. That he was going through the same hateful experience himself and because of that he’d known he couldn’t let her face even the short journey alone.

When a sudden vicious memory of just why he was using her company to keep the darkness from his own thoughts, why he needed her presence to fill the emptiness he was feeling forced itself past the temporary barrier he had tried to erect in his mind, he shook his head roughly, needing to drive away the desperately unwanted images.

‘I could have managed!’

Alannah’s tone told him that she had seen the abrupt movement and misinterpreted the reason for it.

‘I’m not always a wreck like this! I can usually cope—it’s just that tonight things—got on top of me.’

‘Believe me, I understand. But was there no one else who could have been there with you? Your mother perhaps?’

‘My mother is in a far worse state than I am.’

Her voice was low and she was staring out of the window, assuming an intense interest in the passing cars as she spoke.

‘It goes against everything in nature for a mother to hear of the death of her child and she has barely recovered from losing my father. She’s in pieces—can’t sleep … won’t eat.’

She shook her head, her mouth twisting, fighting, he knew, against more tears.

‘The only way she can cope is with the help of the sedatives the doctor prescribed. At least they knocked her out tonight. But she can’t manage anything practical. Everything that has to be done is up to me.’

There was a terrible, raw edge on that last sentence, one Raul recognised only too well. The memory of how she had looked in that hospital room, so lost and alone, with no one there to help her, no support, no company, sent a wave of cold anger running through him.

‘So where the hell was he?’

That brought her head up, shadowed eyes meeting his sharply.

‘Where was—who?’

‘The man in your life …’

The man she had left him for.

‘Your lover—your boyfriend—whatever you call him.’ ‘Oh …’

Realisation dawned slowly on Alannah’s numbed brain. He was talking about the man she had claimed to be leaving him for. A man who had never existed and still didn’t. A man she had totally invented, and she had never met anyone with even half a chance of turning that claim into a reality. How could she have let a new man into her life when she had never fully recovered from the old one?

She’d tried. Since she’d found out just what he really wanted from her and been forced to recognise that her dreams of being loved and cherished to the end of her days were just that—dreams and delusions—she had tried to turn her life around and move on without the happy future with Raul Marcín in it.

But she hadn’t succeeded. The few dates she’d been on had been miserable failures, no man seemed to spark even a flicker of the interest and excitement Raul had been able to create just by existing. So just lately she had determined to concentrate on her career and put all thoughts of a romantic life out of her mind. She would have liked to put all thoughts of Raul out of her head too, but her older brother’s own new-found romance had made that impossible. And now the tragic conclusion of that fledgling love affair had brought Raul himself back into her life. The slashing anguish of that thought made her flinch in pain. Would she ever be able to think of Chris again without this terrible rush of agony, the burn of tears?

‘Well, at least you’re not coming up with some excuse for him.’

Raul had misinterpreted the reason for her silence, thinking it was because of his question about her supposed new partner.

‘There’s no need for an excuse.’ She flung the words at him before she had time to think if they were wise or not.

‘No? If you were mine, I would not leave you to handle all this on your own. I would be at your side, every moment of the day.’

‘But I’m not yours, am I, Raul?’

And she never had been his, not truly his. Not in the way she had most wanted, most longed to be. Of course he had seen her as his. In his mind she had been his woman, his possession, to do with as he pleased. Because no thought of love had ever entered his mind, he had never considered that she might need more than the little he was prepared to offer her.

She couldn’t allow herself to think of how much it would mean to have a man like him, powerful, determined and so capable, by her side in these dark, desperate days. A man who would help her, support her. Whose strength would be used for her good, to ease her path as much as he could. There was no point in even letting herself dream of it. That man would never be Raul and he would never be there for her, her actions two years before had made sure of that. It was even more foolish, even more soul-destroying to allow the thought that perhaps as her husband he might have taken on that supporting role. But he would never have been the husband she had dreamed of having.

And the savage truth was that if she had married him then this weekend’s tragedy would never have happened and she would never have been in this desperate need of support from anyone.

‘And not everyone is a millionaire who can be where he wants to be for as long as he wants to be at the drop of a hat.’ Memory made her voice bitter. ‘Someone who doesn’t have to worry about taking time off work or leaving other commitments …’