LYNNE GRAHAM - A Fiery Baptism

She could barely follow what he was saying to her. Over four years of silence and then this? Why should Rafael come here now? It made no sense. Her violet eyes were huge against her pallor. ‘How did you find out where I lived?’

‘That wasn’t difficult.’ His hard mouth twisted.

‘What do you want?’ she demanded shakily.

A broad shoulder sheathed in butter-soft leather shifted in an infinitesimal shrug. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I was curious.’

‘Curious?’ she echoed, her voice rising steeply.

He glanced round the small, pleasantly furnished room. ‘This is not how I pictured you living,’ he admitted. ‘I would picture you in the drawing-room at your parents’ home, a butterfly safely preserved behind glass.’

Dialogue with Rafael had never been straightforward. He had a disorientating habit of leaping back and forth, voicing exactly what passed through his agile mind. Jerkily she folded her arms. He bent a long-fingered hand down to the corner of the armchair beside him, twitching up something that had caught his attention. It was a cookery book. ‘You use this?’ he asked, much as if it were a mechanic’s wrench.

Perspiration was dampening her skin. Hysteria was clawing at her. She was too afraid to make sense of his sudden impulsive appearance. ‘Any reason why I shouldn’t?’ she enquired defensively.

Casting the item carelessly aside again, he straightened to his full six feet two inches. ‘When you stand like that, you look like a little fishwife. Mama wouldn’t like it,’ he said cruelly. ‘Who takes care of you here?’

The blood rushed hotly to her cheeks. ‘Nobody.’

‘You have learnt to cook and clean? You astonish me.’

‘If you don’t get out of here, I’ll call the police!’ she threatened in a wild rush.

Rafael dealt her an unmoved glance of contempt. ‘I am still your husband. If I want to be here, I have the right to be here.’

‘No! You do not have that right!’

‘You should be calm. One may have the right without the desire to exercise it for very long,’ he sliced back. ‘Why do you live in a place like this? Don’t tell me—Papa’s finally been caught insider dealing!’

Agonising tension was squaring her slight shoulders. ‘I meant what I said. If you don’t leave, I’ll—’

Rafael bit out a sardonic laugh. ‘Why not? Call the police and entertain me. It is the emptiest threat of all and you know it. You would not court the publicity.’

‘Wouldn’t I?’ He had moved slightly closer and she took a tiny uncertain step backwards, her pale head gradually lowering in defeat. ‘No, I wouldn’t.’

‘I don’t understand why you should be so afraid.’ He paused, brilliant golden eyes clashing with her upward glance in naked enmity. ‘What a lie! You have the intelligence to be afraid. But what of? Violence may be what I feel but it would put me in prison and I have no love of small, closed places. And some couples may celebrate an approaching divorce with a farewell tumble between the sheets but when I become that desperate for a woman I will become celibate,’ he spelt out with brutal candour.

Humiliation pierced her like a knife-point. A primitive need to claw him for that unnecessary taunt charged her but a moment later she wanted to curl up and die. The condemned woman, branded a failure, finally scorned and cast aside. ‘I hate you,’ she framed strickenly.

‘Then it is more than you felt for me before. Even hatred—it is something. There is hope for you yet,’ he responded unfeelingly. ‘Who was the man you were with?’

She spun away, savaged by him as she had been so often before. Only this time she was tormentingly aware that she was betraying her reactions and Rafael was receiving a vulture’s satisfaction from her apparent new vulnerability. Her composure had cracked wide open earlier tonight. Now she was bare, stripped of all poise. ‘Why should you want to know?’

‘It amuses me to ask. It is so liberated to ask such a question of one’s wife.’ Provocation quivered through every accented syllable. ‘Though perhaps not in your case. Hell will freeze over before you invite him into your bed!’

Outraged by his derision, she swung back. ‘Are you so sure?’

Rafael stilled, straight ebony brows lowering over piercing tawny eyes.

‘You and your bloody ego!’ she gasped. ‘Yes! That idea really gets to you, doesn’t it? You can let some trollop crawl all over you six feet from me but—’

‘Trollop?’

‘Puta!’ she spat, her emotions spinning into a fierce spiral of rage and mortification.

‘No es,’ Rafael fielded smoothly. ‘I have never had to stoop to payment, muneca mia. ’

‘Don’t call me that!’ she shrieked at him. ‘I am not a doll!’

As he tilted his head to one side, his whole concentration unnervingly pinned to her, light glistened over the black silk luxuriance of his gleaming hair. ‘You are arguing with me. Increible. You are answering back,’ he breathed in wonderment. ‘You are even shouting.’

His response drained the wild, unfamiliar anger from her, leaving her weak and badly shaken up. ‘Please go,’ she whispered.

‘Who taught you to shout?’ he prompted. ‘It is a very healthy sign. I like it.’

Her hands flew up, covering her ears. ‘You are driving me out of my mind!’

‘That is what you did to me. You threw my heart back at my feet and trampled on it. Two years of torture on this earth,’ Rafael intoned rawly, his sensual mouth compressed into a white line. ‘I gave you everything. You gave me nothing. You had the generosity of a miser. No woman has ever done to me what you dared to do. Por dios, when I think of how I suffered, I marvel that I stand here now and keep my hands from you…’

Involuntarily a hollow laugh escaped her. ‘The sole saving grace of your visit is that you now possess that capability.’

Dark colour scorched his high cheekbones. ‘You throw that in my teeth?’

She knew that intonation. Her tongue moistened her dry lips. It was the untrustworthy quiet before the storm.

‘You think I made unnatural demands of you?’ he raked at her between clenched teeth. ‘Every time I touched you, I was made to feel like an animal. You lay like a block of ice beneath me, tolerating my filthy desires!’

Sarah was the one reddening now, spinning away to present him with a defensive back. ‘Do you have to be so crude?’

He vented a stifled expletive. ‘You are the only woman who has ever called me this…that,’ he corrected in a driven undertone. ‘To think that I was once enslaved by you…it makes me shudder.’

‘The feeling is mutual.’ Waves of pain were tearing at her. Rafael had not lost his impassioned powers of picturesque speech.

‘Crude,’ he repeated again.

Sarah went white, strangely ashamed of herself. On some crazy level she was attuned to the awareness that she had drawn real blood. A lean hand was clenched into a fist at the insult. Her eyes stung. He had never been crude. Indeed, for someone afflicted with his hot-blooded, over-sexed temperament, he had been extraordinarily gentle and patient and kind. Only it hadn’t helped. Her inhibitions had proved insurmountable.

Sex. Just a small thing, not of great importance, something she could endure when she had to as no doubt other women had endured from the beginning of time. The sheer stupidity of her reasoning before their marriage tormented her now. Then she had been secretly flattered by the intensity of the hunger she roused in Rafael. Afterwards she had learnt to be afraid of that hunger, jerking away at his slightest touch.

It was typical of Rafael to be so gloriously and unashamedly wrapped up in his own sufferings, as he called them, she thought bitterly. Had he ever really thought of what it was like for her? To be married to a male so extravagantly gorgeous and innately virile and know you were a disaster in his bed? To live day in, day out with the knowledge that you were losing a little more of him by the hour? And finally to sink so low in a sense of utter inadequacy that she had taken his infidelity for granted. Closing her eyes, refusing to see. Anything just to keep him, anything so long as he stayed, a lesson learnt well at her mother’s knee with a father whose extra-marital affairs were as numerous as they were well known.