‘Not,’ she repeated, ‘in any way that was scary. He just ran his fingers on my arm.’ She laughed but Rafael didn’t return the laugh and his body language was so taut and still that she wanted to demand to know what was going through his head.
‘Did he now?’
There was a sickness rising up inside Rafael that he barely recognised. He clenched his fists and controlled a powerful and bewildering urge to punch something. Was this what jealousy tasted like? No, couldn’t be. He’d never been jealous before. He’d gone out with women who graced the catwalk, and commanded second, third and fourth looks wherever they went, and he’d never had a problem with that. And if some guy had made a pass at any of them? He’d certainly never felt this roar of rage inside him, this pounding in his head and throbbing in his temples.
Was it because she was his wife? Maybe it was because of that. In name only but perhaps he was more of a dinosaur than he’d ever imagined and the fact that he was married to her had evoked some kind of primal, possessive streak he’d never experienced. That surely must be it?
He thought of Freddy, pictured that weak face, his manicured hand on her arm and one thought ran though his head—he was going to sort him out one way or another. Things had just got personal.
Sofia tugged his hand gently so that he was once again looking directly at her and she could judge something of his thoughts in his stunning dark gaze. He was clever at keeping concealed what he had no intention of revealing, but she had to try and read his expression, and she wasn’t going to do that if he was looking away.
‘When I said that I’d met men like Freddy before I wasn’t kidding. The way I look...?’ She rolled her eyes with self-deprecation, because it was always embarrassing to discuss her looks. She’d been accused, nastily, of vanity too many times as a teenager, and had learned to shy away from drawing attention to her appearance. Blending into the background had been one of her greatest aims. ‘Men have always thought that they could try it on but I learned how to separate the wheat from the chaff at a very young age. Most guys are obvious but the ones to watch out for are the ones who sneak up from behind and Freddy is one of those. He’s a sneaker-upper kind of guy.’
She paused and then took a deep breath. ‘He might not be guilty of out-and-out embezzlement or whatever but you should try talking to some of the young girls who work in the company.’
Rafael was staring at her and she could see the dawning comprehension in his eyes. He said, in a low voice, ‘Tell me more, my darling. I’m all ears.’
My darling...
For a few seconds, Sofia lost track of what she had been saying. He’d called her his darling. Not cara, but darling, and she thrilled inside. Then she collected her thoughts and licked her lips, thinking of the best way to say what she had to say.
‘I think he might be more than just an office pest. He’s a guy who has a lot of power within that company and, from everything you and David have said, he’s been systematically getting rid of the old-school employees who might have had the wherewithal to stand up to him. Have you had a look at the girls in the main admin department?’
Rafael slowly shook his head. ‘I don’t tend to venture down there,’ he murmured. ‘I’ve been too busy dealing with the books to see whether any cooking has been going on. Too busy trying to stall ill-conceived deals that should never have kicked off in the first place. I’ve really only had dealings with the CEOs.’
‘They’re all young and attractive,’ Sofia said bluntly. ‘And a lot of them have only been there a short while.’
‘I’m joining the dots.’ He looked at her thoughtfully but he wasn’t looking at her. His mind was somewhere else. Sofia could see that. Then he was looking at her again, eyes sombre. ‘You said you were accustomed to men like Freddy,’ he murmured. ‘By that you mean seedy creeps who have tried to prey on you?’
Sofia looked away and shrugged. ‘It’s life.’
‘Any of them succeed in doing what you tell me Freddy didn’t do?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Any of them frighten you?’
Sofia reddened, suddenly restless and feeling exposed. Opening up was one thing when you were doing it with someone who truly cared about you. It was a different matter when you were revealing yourself to a guy who didn’t really care.
But there was something in his voice, a questioning gentleness that pierced right to the very core of her.
‘My mother was a very sexy woman. Very beautiful. Men chased after her and sometimes, when they saw me, they thought that I might come as part of the deal. Most just looked. Surreptitiously, making sure my mother didn’t notice. She could be a tiger like that. But I noticed and always made sure to take evasive action. But one night...well...there was a party and I was in bed. Someone came into the bedroom.’ She shivered, living the memory. ‘I was terrified,’ she admitted. ‘He was disturbed before anything could happen but I always knew that that was luck on my side and if luck had been busy somewhere else...’
Rafael reached out and took her hand in his, linking fingers. ‘Shh...’ His voice was low and persuasive. ‘That time has passed. You’re here with me now. Safe.’
Her eyes flickered to his.
Safe? She almost wanted to laugh. She’d stopped being safe with him a long time ago. She’d given her heart and was wandering in alien territory and, the last thing she was was safe. If only he knew...
CHAPTER NINE
SOFIA WAS BASKING in the warm glow of David’s satisfaction. It was writ large in the quiet pleasure in his eyes. He had peppered her with all sorts of interesting anecdotes about some of the people at the company and about deals long done when he had been climbing the ladder of success.
Sofia listened, quietly marvelling at how far their relationship had come. She had been so antagonistic to start with, so convinced that there could be no meeting ground between them, no place where they could join hands and look to any kind of future without the past being a stealthy, toxic intruder. How wrong she had been. She was guiltily aware that she should have had a bit more faith in her mother who would not have given her heart so completely to someone who wasn’t worth the gift. She had never loved again, even though she had carried on searching for love, and it was as though she had lost her compass, choosing all the wrong kinds of guys, desperately becoming a woman who relied on her looks to find her what she was looking for.
She wondered what she would tell David about her visit to the company because looking around had not been the straightforward meet-and-greet she had anticipated, interrupted as it had been by Freddy and his threatening behaviour. But she had selectively decided to omit that aspect of her visit and concentrate, instead, on her genuine delight at seeing where everything had started all those years ago.
Freddy and what was going to happen to him was something she had left at Rafael’s door. Certainly, after her revelations, Rafael had looked like a man on a mission. She would have felt sorry for the younger man if she hadn’t known, in her gut, just how much of a creep Freddy could turn out to be—already was.
She sneaked a surreptitious glance at her watch, already counting down to when she would see Rafael. In front of her was an assortment of cakes but she wasn’t going to fill up on them because she had cooked earlier and would be eating dinner with Rafael when she was back at the house a bit later.
‘Tell me what you thought of the History Room,’ David was saying excitedly, fussing and bustling and pouring her another cup of tea.
‘I loved it.’ Sofia smiled. ‘I think it’s very inspirational to have photos of all the hotels and all the work that went into them framed for your employees to see.’
‘Rafael’s idea, don’t you know.’
‘Was it?’ She leaned forward with interest. Every word uttered about Rafael was of interest to her. She had gleaned so many titbits over time—had gone through old photo albums, taking her
time, with Rafael sitting next to her, amused by her fascination, telling David that lengthy chats about youthful nonsense wasn’t of interest to man nor beast. She had almost no photos of herself.
‘Oh, yes,’ David was saying. ‘Years ago. He was busy trying to get his own house in order after his parents were killed but still had time to think about me when I was redesigning the headquarters when I bought over the building next door. Sort of chap he is, but I expect you’ve reached that conclusion yourself.’
‘Conclusion?’
‘I’ve seen you two together, my dear.’ He sat and gazed longingly at the plate of morsels and sighed with resignation when she wagged a finger at him, warning him off eating more than the two he had already had.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The way you are together. The way you interact.’ He looked at her with satisfaction. He waved one hand, brushing off some distant point in the past he no longer considered relevant. ‘I know that as marriages went this was perhaps not the sort you had ever envisaged for yourself, my dear girl, but I sense that what started out as an arrangement may well have taken wings.’
Sofia was enjoying this, a guilty sort of enjoyment, because every word was music to her ears. If David had noticed a change in the relationship she and Rafael shared, then surely there was something there?
‘What do you mean?’ she prompted, and David shot her a sly, all-knowing look from under his bushy eyebrows.
‘Never seen him like this before,’ he confessed. ‘Not with any of those women he’s dated in the past. Sure, you’re married, but we both know that that was not a real marriage, and yet now...you’re both somehow different around one another.’
Sofia could agree with that verdict. The truth was that there was a physical familiarity between them that neither of them ever bothered to conceal. Intimate, passing touches that were very different from the obvious displays of affection they had made sure to demonstrate for the public at the very beginning.
‘You know,’ David said thoughtfully, ‘I can’t even remember Rafael being like this with his first wife.’
From a long way away, Sofia was aware that her temperature was dropping, that she was getting as cold as a block of ice. She could almost feel her vital organs slowing down as she wrestled to make sense of what had just been said.
David was bustling again, the way he did, lifting the lid of the teapot, looking at the dainty bell on the table as though debating whether to summon ‘the old dragon’, as he fondly referred to his live-in nurse.
‘Yes...first wife...’
‘Gemma. Must have told you about her?’
Sofia’s head was spinning. Suddenly hearing about a wife she’d known nothing about was something she didn’t want to come from her father’s lips. It felt as though she had stumbled on a stash of secret love letters, buried deep, stored where they were destined never to be found.
‘Gemma...’
As a real wife, this was something she would already have known about, but a real wife she wasn’t—even though she had been lulled into thinking that somehow she had turned into one.
She had to go. Had to think and clear her head. She leapt to her feet and for a few seconds stared in silence at a startled David, while she tried to think of a suitable excuse for flying out like a bat out of hell.
‘I’ve—I’ve suddenly remembered,’ she stammered lamely. ‘I have an appointment...with...with the dentist!’
‘You have?’
‘The cakes have reminded me! A filling needs seeing to before it becomes...er...’
What was the next step after a filling anyway? Wasn’t a filling the last thing that happened after a toothache?
‘Painful.’ David looked concerned, which immediately made her feel guilty.
‘I’m really sorry, Dad.’
They both stared at one another at that slip of the tongue.
‘David.’
‘You can call me Dad,’ he returned gruffly. ‘And shoo! Call me when you’re next coming over.’
She didn’t go directly back to Rafael’s house. He wouldn’t have been back at any rate. Instead, head in a daze, she trekked through London, soaking up an atmosphere she had very quickly taken for granted. Everyone was in a hurry. The pavements were packed: shoppers...people hurrying out of offices because it had gone six...tourists drifting without a care in the world, getting in the way...
She’d changed over the months. It wasn’t just the clothes, the trappings of great wealth. It was her. Something deep inside her had changed. She had become confident in a way she’d never been and it wasn’t just because she could afford stuff. It was because Rafael had made her so. He had allowed her to be herself and had encouraged her to shed the defensiveness that had once been part and parcel of her personality.
He had made her feel secure.
What a joke.
He knew her inside out and she had kidded herself into thinking that she knew him as well, even if he couldn’t see it, even if his stubborn pride prevented him from accepting it.
She didn’t know him at all and that felt like a crushing blow. She wandered in and out of shops before heading back to his place a little after eight.
He was already there when she quietly let herself in. He’d obviously been waiting for her to show up because he was in the hall before she had time to sling her jacket over the banister.
‘I’ve been calling,’ was the first thing he said, moving towards her.
‘Have you?’ Sofia dodged past him and headed straight into the kitchen. ‘I’m sorry. I haven’t looked at my phone at all.’ She heard a tell-tale hitch in her voice and cautioned herself against giving in to self-pity. So she was here, stripped bare of all her illusions, and she only had herself to blame. He’d never promised her more than he could deliver and if she’d hoped for more then that was her fault.
Love had been a handicap, making her question less, demand less and accept more.
‘David said that you had some kind of emergency appointment with the dentist?’
‘I haven’t been to the dentist, Rafael.’ She spun round on her heels and looked at him, arms folded, eyes cool.
Rafael stared back, hesitant.
What was going on here? Astute as he was at reading situations, he was finding it difficult to get a grip. As a general rule, he had no time for any sort of hysterical behaviour. He didn’t like confrontations or arguments, preferring to walk away from histrionics, and this was shaping up to be all of the above mentioned. Judging from her expression, at least.
‘Then where were you?’
‘Out. Walking around.’
‘Out? Walking around?’
‘Thinking.’
Rafael remained silent, a dark flush delineating his aristocratic, high cheekbones.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me what I was thinking about, Rafael?’
‘I expect you’re going to tell me whether I ask you or not.’
‘I found something out today.’ Sofia heard the wobble in her voice and anchored herself firmly back in the reality of what she was dealing with—a guy who, in the end, cared so little for her that he hadn’t seen fit to tell her about what had probably been the biggest thing in his life to date.
Had it been a happy marriage? Sad? Disappointing? Something in between all three? How long had it lasted? Had it been love at first sight? What had she looked like? What had happened in the end?
She had asked David none of those questions, had not wanted to know any details at all except the ones that came from Rafael. Was she overreacting? She didn’t think she was, although some might. As far as she was concerned, this revelation felt like the summing up of everything she’d feared—that this wonderful, complex, infuriating, adorable and strangely vulnerable man felt no real attachment to her. Yes, he wanted her, but that was never going to be enough. And, yes, he
liked her well enough but that didn’t touch the surface of what she wanted him to feel. She’d been greedy and this was the price she was now having to pay.
The truth was that, if he had had the connection with her that she had with him, he would have confided in her, slotted in that piece of the jigsaw puzzle that was such an important part of the whole picture. That was how relationships worked, wasn’t it? Had she found out sooner about this, maybe it would have been different. She might have been able to ease it into the conversation and excuse his reticence on the grounds that they were still finding a way forward with one another, still learning to have a relationship within the confines of their convenient marriage. But to find out when she thought that what they had was something special was truly painful.
‘David mentioned that you’ve been married once before.’ She didn’t bother beating about the bush.
The silence settled between them, suffocating and dense, becoming more and more uncomfortable with each passing second. The shutters had snapped down and his expression, his stunning dark eyes that had warmed when they rested on her, were as remote now as the cold, grey waters of a wintry sea.
‘He thought I would have known,’ she laboured on. ‘Of course, that was the first I was hearing of any such thing. I didn’t ask for details. I... I couldn’t. I thought those details would be better coming from you.’
Rafael’s gaze narrowed, his lean, darkly handsome face betraying immediate and instinctive rejection of what he viewed as a blunt battering ram aimed against his privacy. Things had been going so well between them that this felt like an attack out of the blue and, as with all attacks, his initial reaction was to repel. Taut with frustrated tension, he was at a loss as to the direction he should take, but the mere thought of having to explain himself to her or to anyone was like a drawbridge being slammed down.
Some things had the power to change the course of a person’s life and his brief and disastrous marriage had been one of those things. He’d been a fool, had been sucked in by a gold-digger and had managed to get out of it in one piece. End of story. Being called upon to revisit that intensely disillusioning and personal slice of his past evoked a primitive, negative response and a searing resentment that the matter had been raised at all. Gut reaction bypassed common sense.
Shock Marriage for the Powerful Spaniard Page 14
