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‘Alannah … move.’ Raul’s voice was a low, savage snarl of warning, his tone threatening terrible repercussions if she didn’t do as he commanded. ‘Don’t even think of trying to stop me.’
The ferocity of his expression, the danger in his tone kept her mute, but somehow she forced herself to set her mouth tight, lift her chin, as she shook her head in silent defiance, even though her knees were threatening to buckle beneath her as her eyes met the icy blaze of his.
‘Get out of my way …’
‘I won’t—I can’t!’
That ‘can’t’, or something of the desperation in her tone, got through to him, making him still suddenly, his head going back, molten eyes narrowing to sharply assessing slits. That terrible grey tinge to his skin was back and it was that that told her she was right to do this—whatever it took. However he reacted. He was a danger to himself in this state, although, being Raul, he would deny it furiously if she said anything.
‘Can’t?’ he questioned harshly. ‘What the hell—?’
‘I can’t let you go—not like this. I can’t see you walk out into a city you don’t know—on a night like this …’
A curtain of tears was blurring her vision but she could still see the way that his stance changed, becoming slightly less aggressive, less antagonistic. His silence was more eloquent than any words could ever be.
‘You’d care?’ he said at last, his voice cracking on the last word.
‘Of course I’d care.’
‘I’m a big boy, Alannah. I can take care of myself.’
‘I don’t care how big and ugly you are—I’m not letting you go. You’ve had a shock …’ Carefully she lowered her voice, pitched on a softer note. ‘You’re not thinking straight …’
Her tone was gentle, Raul registered. As gentle as it had been when she had come to him earlier; when she had reached out to him from the darkness. And just as it had then, her gentleness touched some needy spot in his mind so that for the first time in a terrible twenty-four hours he was still. Totally still. Even his whirling, raging, aching thoughts seemed to have stopped.
In the silence he watched her ease herself away from the door and come towards him. Once again he felt the softness of her touch on his hand.
‘Stay until Carlos comes,’ she said and still in silence he nodded slowly.
Once again the silence was enough.
‘Thank you,’ she said, in much the same way that he had said ‘Gracias’ to her a short time before, so that he knew without having to be told just how she too was grateful to have someone sharing the darkness with her.
It was then that he caught the faint waft of some perfume, soft and subtly leafy, that came from the shampoo she had used on her hair. But underneath it was another scent, richer, warmer, more sensual, intimate. More womanly. It was the scent of Alannah herself. The scent of her body, her skin and her hair, and it hit straight to his starved senses like a blow, melting the numbness in his head so fast that he reeled under the impact of the rush of blood through his veins. The throb of hunger was so powerful, so primitive that it forced all other thoughts from his mind.
‘Thank you,’ Alannah said again and the hand that touched his moved very slightly, her thumb stroking over his skin.
‘De nada.’
Her kiss was unexpected. It was light, soft, delicate. Just a press of her lips against the side of his cheek, nothing passionate or sensual in it. There, and then gone again. But the feelings it sparked off were far from gentle, far from light.
They were hot and needy and yearning for more.
After the storm of anger, of rejection and blind fury—fury at her brother, the driver of the lorry she had talked of, at fate—there was another storm building inside him now. One of heat and fire—and a hunger he couldn’t stamp down. From feeling dead, lost, empty he began to be warm, vital, alive, sensation and need stinging along every nerve path, bringing his senses startlingly, explosively awake.
He felt sure she must sense it, feel it in the tension in his body, hear it in the changed pattern of his breathing.
‘Alannah …’
His use of her name was thick, rough, his voice raw and thickened by the sensual fire that flared within him. He suddenly found that he had had enough of stillness, of silence. He wanted to assert light in the face of darkness, heat in the face of cold … Life in the face of death.
Turning his head, he caught her lips with his, snatching his hands free to clamp them at the back of her skull, fingers threading through the softness of her hair, twisting to hold her just where he wanted her as he took her mouth with all the ferocity of the need he couldn’t control. His blood throbbed at his temples and heat pounded between his legs, making him so hard so fast that it was almost painful. And as Alannah’s mouth opened under his he felt the red haze of desire flood his mind, driving away the memories he couldn’t bear to remember.
This was what he wanted—to forget—to stop himself from thinking—to lose himself in fierce, mindless response—in fierce, mindless sex. And this woman had always been able to make him forget about anything but her.
To make him think only of her and the wild, blazing fires they built between them.
‘Alannah …’ he said again but this time her name was a whisper of seduction against her lips as he drew her breath into his own lungs. ‘Alannah, querida …’
Alannah, querida. The words seemed to swirl around inside Alannah’s head, taking her thoughts with them as sensation after sensation fizzed through every cell in her body, obliterating logic or control, and only leaving awareness and need.
She should have known that it was a mistake to come close to Raul like this. Should have known that her own memories, her weakness where he was concerned, the sensual burn that he seemed to be able to awaken in her simply by existing, would only risk putting her into his power if she broke through the careful invisible barriers she had tried to put between them ever since the moment she had first seen him in the hospital room. She had weakened then and all but thrown herself into his arms, but the storm of weeping that had overtaken her had driven every other thought from her head.
Her only need then had been of comfort and support. It was when she had recovered a little, when she had calmed enough to draw breath, that she became aware of other feelings, sensations she had thought long since dead and now was forced to realise were only buried, just below the surface, waiting only for a touch, a kiss to break through her defences and leave her aching for more.
She’d known she was in danger when she’d felt that sense of loss as Raul had walked away from her in the kitchen when she had been so sure that he was about to kiss her. Loss and disappointment were the feelings of someone who was still tied to this man in spite of all the time they had spent apart, and her determination to put him out of her mind, out of her heart. She didn’t want to be tied to him in any way. She didn’t love him—how could she love a man who had only ever seen her as a body, a brood mare on which to breed the heirs he and his family longed for?
But you didn’t have to love to want—to hunger for a touch, a kiss, to overreact when he gave her one and feel a sense of loss when he denied her the other.
She had vowed to keep her distance. To keep a grip on herself and the feelings she seemed unable to erase along with the love she had once felt for him. And she would have done so. She would have managed that if she hadn’t come out here and seen Raul with the picture frame in his hands, the terrible look of loss and sorrow draining all the colour from his face as he stared down at the photograph of his young sister. The sister he had so recently learned was dead, just like her own brother.
And she wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t felt for him and needed to go to him to offer compassion and sympathy, to help him in the same way that he had helped her as he’d held her and let her sob out her grief against the strength of his chest, with his powerful arms closed about her.
That was what he’d done for her—and what she had planned to do for him. But she didn’t have the strength that Raul possessed, the self-control—the indifference—that had kept him firmly distant from her even as he held her close. She had only to touch him and she was lost in a world of sensation where common sense and self-preservation had no place. From the moment she had felt the heat of his skin underneath her fingertips, she had wanted more. The scent of his body was so familiar and yet so alien, clean and faintly musky, touched with a tang of something citrus: intensely personal, intensely masculine—intensely Raul.
The fierce rage that had gripped him when he’d learned the truth had clouded that feeling. Clouded but not destroyed it. And moving close again now had been all that it had taken to reawaken it.
She’d told herself that the kiss was simply one of comfort, a gesture of sympathy, but somewhere deep in her soul she’d known that she was only denying the truth even to herself. And the truth was that she might try to fight against him, against the sensual tug of his physical appeal, the way his body seemed to call to hers, but she couldn’t fight herself. That kiss might have started out as a kiss of compassion, but in the instant that her lips had touched his skin, feeling its warmth and tasting the slightly salt flavour of it against her tongue, she had known that she was lost.
Every moment of loss, of longing, of need that she had ever known, ever felt with this man came flooding back into her mind, sweeping away rational thought with the ferocity and speed of a tidal wave and leaving nothing in its place but the whirling, surging wild waters of desire.
The last thing she heard was that raw, hungry muttering of her own name as his head turned, his mouth taking hers. But from that moment the world and everything else in it faded into the red, swirling haze that was all that was in her mind. Her eyes closed as his mouth took hers, his kiss crushing her lips apart, breath mingling, tongues tangling together. Such was the force of his kiss that she swayed violently and would have fallen if the steely strength of his arms hadn’t come round her, fastening tight and holding her up, clamped hard against the lean power of his body.
‘R-Raul …’ She choked his name in a sound of need, of pleading, huskily hungry—and the only word she could think of; the only thought in her head.
She felt his smile against her mouth. His hands were hard against her back. Big hands, hot hands, heavy hands, fingers splayed out along her spine, burning her skin through the protection of her T-shirt, holding her where he wanted her as he took another kiss and then one more.
‘You’re beautiful,’ he muttered against her cheek.
‘Beautiful.’
Those stroking hands were never still, always moving, always tracing hot erotic patterns over her back, sliding under her T-shirt at her waist, briefly searing over her skin so that she couldn’t hold back a murmur of response as she arched into the caress like a cat responding to a sensual stroke. His mouth was a teasing torment, his tongue like silk against her lips. The thunder in her blood was drowning out all her ability to think.
She wanted … longed … yearned …
She needed more.
She had always wanted more. It had been Raul who had held back; Raul who had said that they should wait. Proud Spanish aristocrat that he was, he had wanted her to come to his bed untouched. He had wanted to know that he was the only man in her life, that only a virgin bride would be the mother of his child.
And that memory was bitter enough to slice through the heated haze that flooded her mind.
‘No …’
Somehow she managed to make her tongue frame the single syllable. Somehow she managed to force her treacherous body to pull back, away from him, away from his kisses, away from his touch. The few steps she managed took her up against one of the armchairs so that she was forced to stop, not quite as far away from him as she had wanted.
‘No …’ She tried again but with little more conviction than the first time. Every one of her senses cried out in harsh protest at the cruel restraint she forced on them. Every awoken nerve demanded the satisfaction she was denying it.
‘No?’
Raul’s echoing of the single word had so much more behind it that it made her flinch to hear it. There was an open scepticism that questioned her denial, a note of incredulity that made it plain he didn’t believe her, and underneath it all there was the rough thread of dark desire—a desire she had thwarted by drawing away. And the terrible thing was that that desire, dark and disturbing and oh, so dangerous, was what was running through her veins, making her shudder inwardly in response to its burning demand.
But she wouldn’t give in to it. Couldn’t give in to it.
‘This isn’t going to happen. This isn’t what I want.’
‘Isn’t what you want?’ His voice lashed at her, filled with a brutal cynicism. ‘Forgive me if I don’t believe you. I don’t think you know what you want.’
‘Oh, but I do!’ Alannah shook her head violently then stopped abruptly as she realised that she was contradicting her words with the foolish gesture. ‘I do.’
‘Then what?’ he snarled viciously, the burn of frustration still there in his voice. ‘What the hell do you want?’ ‘I want—I want …’
Desperately she snatched at the only thing that came to mind. The memory of what they had been talking about. The reason why she had brought him here in the first place.
‘I want you to forgive my brother. I want you to acknowledge that he and Lorena loved each other and—
And …’
Near-panic had got her this far, the rush of need to say something, anything driving the words out before she had a chance to think. But now, seeing his face, seeing the way that cold fury had turned his eyes opaque, the white marks of rage etched around his nose and mouth, she felt herself falter, felt the words elude her.
‘And …’ Raul prompted icily when she hesitated.
‘And I—we—we’d like to bury them together. We’d like you to give us permission to bury Chris and Lorena in the same grave so that they—they could be …’
Together.
The word sounded inside her head but she totally lacked the strength to say it. She couldn’t have managed another word if her life depended on it. And in the silence that followed she felt as if a window must have blown open in the force of the wind outside, letting in the cold and the wet so that she shivered in the sudden chill of the air as if the temperature had actually dropped to zero around her.
‘You want me to forgive your brother …’
Raul’s tone was so calm, so unemotional that Alannah blinked in confusion to hear it. Was it possible—was he actually going to be reasonable about this? She could read nothing in his shuttered face, his hooded eyes hiding every last trace of what he was feeling from her.
‘And you want me to leave my sister here … and you think that coming on to me is the way to soften me up to give you what you want?’
‘Coming on?’Alannah gasped in shocked disbelief. ‘But I didn’t—I wasn’t! How could you think that?’
The sound of a loud buzzing noise intruded into her stunned protest, making her start in shock and stare round dazedly, looking for the source of the sound.
Raul, however, reacted immediately, pulling one hand free and snatching his mobile phone from his jacket pocket. Sitting on one arm of the settee, he thumbed it on and spoke sharply into it.
‘Sí? Carlos …’
Carlos. Of course.
Alannah tensed sharply as she realised just who was at the other end of the phone. A swift glance at the clock on the wall confirmed her suspicions. The thirty minutes Raul had stipulated were up—just—and almost exactly to the second his driver had arrived to collect him as he had been instructed.
So would Raul leave now, as he had originally planned? Her heart lurched sickeningly at the thought, the tension in her body growing worse. Did she want him to go or to stay? She had no way she could answer that, even to herself.
‘Momento …’ Raul said into the phone, then, still holding it to his ear, he glanced across into Alannah’s outraged face. For a moment he simply watched her consideringly, eyes narrowed in cold assessment, and with a curt, sharp nod of dark satisfaction he turned his attention back to the phone.
‘Yes,’ he said sharply, using English deliberately, she was sure, so that she had no option but to understand what he was saying. ‘Yes, I’m done here—more than ready to leave. I’ll be down in a minute.’
He was going. He was leaving, and nothing was going to stop him; his tone, his expression, the cold gleam in his eyes made that only too plain. He was leaving and. That was as far as she got. She didn’t have time even to finish the thought before Raul snapped off his phone and, still with his eyes fixed on her face, dropped it back in the direction of his jacket pocket. Then slowly, silently, holding her wide-eyed gaze with his own, he stood up and smoothed down his trousers, brushed a speck of something—a purely imaginary speck of something, Alannah was sure—from the front of his jacket.
‘My chauffeur is waiting,’ he said and Alannah actually gasped out loud because it was as if the ice in his voice had been physically real, hitting her brutally in the face as he spoke. ‘And it’s more than time I left.’
‘But …’ Alannah tried, knowing she couldn’t let him go without an answer, though in her heart she knew what it was going to be, something that was confirmed by the look that flashed from those dark golden eyes.
‘The answer is no, Miss Redfern …’
She recoiled sharply, flinching away from the stiff formality of his use of her name.
‘There is no way that I will leave my sister here to be buried alongside the man who killed her.’
‘But he didn’t …’ Alannah tried again but Raul ignored her interjection, talking over it as if it had never happened.
‘My family and yours should never have had any contact—we should have stayed at the opposite ends of the earth.’
‘Why? Because my ordinary family just aren’t good enough to mix with the likes of the high and mighty Marquez Marcín dynasty?’
Alannah no longer cared what she was saying or how she sounded. She only wanted to lash out, hurt him as she was hurting. Make him bleed as she felt that she was bleeding to death inside. She no longer knew or cared if it was for herself or her brother—or for poor little Lorena that her heart was breaking. Only that she had to scream out the agony or break down completely.
‘Well, let me tell you that I wish to God we’d never met. That it was the worst thing that ever happened to me—the worst day of my life—when you walked into it.’
If she thought that by lashing out she’d get through to him, make him react, then she was bitterly disappointed. Where she’d expected anger there was simply coldness, where she would have thought there would be emotion there was a frozen stillness, a terrible quiet in which he looked down his long, straight nose at her, his mouth twisting in vicious contempt.
‘Then the feeling is entirely mutual,’ he tossed at her. ‘I can assure you that I feel exactly the same. I wish to hell that I had never met you—never set eyes on you …’
‘Never …’
Twice Alannah tried to add to the single word. But both times she opened her mouth and had to close it again hastily because nothing came out. Raul just watched her, hands clenched into fists and pressed tight against his narrow hips.
‘Wished you’d never met me,’ she finally got out. ‘Then why would you have wanted to marry me?’
Oh, why couldn’t she stop? Why did she have to keep stabbing at him, pushing him to come back at her with something even worse?
Which of course he did.
‘You know why. I needed an heir.’
Well, she’d always known that. She’d just never expected him to come right out and say it so bluntly.
She’d hesitated a moment too long and those sharp golden eyes had caught the faint flicker of unease in her face, the way she had recoiled from his words.
‘Oh, come on, Alannah,’ he mocked cruelly. ‘You surely didn’t think I was going to say that I loved you? You can’t have wanted that?’
This time she had no trouble finding the words, or the strength of voice to throw them at him.
‘You’re damn right I wouldn’t! I wouldn’t have wanted any such thing from you—it would disgust me—repel me—and besides, I doubt very much that you know what love is. It’s certainly not a feeling that you’ve ever experienced for any woman, even one you once asked to marry you.’
‘I’d have to agree with you there.’ Raul drew himself up and inclined his head in a cold, controlled acknowledgement of her accusation. ‘Love is a very unreliable foundation on which to base one’s choice of bride.’
‘No, you put more emphasis on the fact that no other man has ever slept with her than any such untrustworthy feelings.’
‘Well, that didn’t last long, did it?’ Raul mocked. ‘As soon as I asked to marry you, you realised that you weren’t made for monogamy and set out to make up for what you’d been missing.’
‘But the one thing I didn’t miss was you!’
With her head defiantly high in the air, she stalked past him and out into the tiny hallway, flinging open the door with a wild gesture that had it banging into the opposite wall.
‘And now I’d prefer it if you left. Your chauffeur is waiting and you wouldn’t want to keep him hanging around. And this time I’d be grateful if you stayed away—for good.’
‘Don’t worry.’
Raul headed for the door with an alacrity that would have been positively insulting if she had had enough left in her heart to feel a further insult.
‘I’m not likely to want to come back. It’ll be a cold day in hell before I ever want to see you or any member of your family ever again.’
‘Well, that suits me,’ Alannah tossed after him as he strode out the door. ‘Believe me, if I was forced to see you again then I’d know that I was very definitely in that hell you mentioned.’
She slammed the door shut after his retreating form, hearing the sound echo throughout her flat as she sank back against the wall, her whole body shaking with the after-effects of the emotional storm that had had her in its grip.
CHAPTER SIX
RAUL tossed the last of his clothing into the case that lay open on the bed and then brought the lid down on it with a bang. Fastening the zip with a rough, wrenching movement, he pulled it off the bed, carried it through into the adjoining sitting room and deposited it beside the door, ready for the hotel porter to come and collect it. Another hour, and he would be out of here.
And it couldn’t happen soon enough. He’d known from the start that this trip to England was going to be hell on earth, but the truth was that he had never imagined how hellish it could be. Accepting the appalling news of Lori’s death, getting through the formalities and arranging for her funeral had been terrible enough. But then there had been the added twist of torture that had come in the meeting with Alannah, the discovery that it had been her brother who had …
‘No …’
He aimed a vicious kick at the side of the suitcase as his mind shied away from thinking of the crash that had killed his sister. The passage of four days since the news had broken had done nothing to blunt the sharply jagged edges of that pain and the news he had received just that afternoon had only stirred up all the sorrow even more.
Rubbing the palms of his hands fiercely across his face, over his aching, burning eyes, Raul could only wish that he could wipe away the memory of the past few days as he did so. He had thought that it couldn’t get any worse, but fate had had one last little trick in store, one further twist of the knife that made the loss of his sister even more unbearable to think of.