‘I suppose you will find out about my background at some point, so it might as well be now,’ he muttered.
Juliet suddenly remembered that his sister had said something about how she and Rafael had felt overawed when they had come to live at the Casillas mansion.
‘My mother eloped with my father because my grandfather disapproved of her relationship with him. Ivan Mendoza had a gardening job on the Casillas estate and apparently Delfina fell madly in love with him.’ Rafael grimaced. ‘I remember he could be charming to people when it suited him, but he was never anything other than violent and aggressive to me.’
She froze. ‘Did your father hit you?’
‘Frequently—until I learned to dodge his fists and run away when he undid his belt.’
‘How old were you when he started hitting you?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t afraid of him.’
Juliet felt sick, imagining Rafael as a little boy, perhaps no older than Poppy, being physically abused by his father. ‘What about your mother? Didn’t she try to protect you?’
‘I don’t know if my mother was aware when she married Ivan that he was involved in the drug scene. He was a petty crook, who worked when he could find a job, and had a sideline in drug dealing.’ Rafael exhaled heavily. ‘I think it’s likely that my mother was a drug user then—probably encouraged into that lifestyle by Ivan. I have very few memories of her before she left. She was distant, uninterested—especially in me. I don’t remember her ever showing me affection.’
‘What do you mean when you say that your mother left?’
‘She disappeared out of my life when I was about seven. Sofia would have been around two years old. I didn’t find out my actual birth date until years later, when I saw my birth certificate,’ he explained. ‘My father never said where my mother had gone.’ A nerve flickered in his cheek. ‘I think my sister missed our mother at first and she clung to me.’
Juliet thought of her happy childhood, with parents who had adored her, and her heart ached for Rafael and his sister. ‘Who took care of you and Sofia?’
He gave another shrug. ‘My father was a gitano—a gypsy. The Roma community is tightknit, and gitanos have a strong sense of family. Sometimes the other mothers took care of Sofia and gave us food. But my father was always moving around and we didn’t settle anywhere for long—which is why it was years before my grandfather found us.’
He caught Juliet’s questioning look.
‘My mother had returned to the Casillas mansion. Presumably she missed the wealth and status of belonging to one of Spain’s foremost families,’ he said drily. ‘I don’t know why she did not take us or at least my sister with her when she left. We ended up living with my father in a slum outside Madrid, where drugs were dealt openly on the streets and criminal gangs were in charge. We were there for a few years before Ivan was shot dead in a gang war and Sofia and I were placed in an orphanage. Once there was an official record of our whereabouts Hector managed to track us down, and he brought us to live at the Casillas mansion when I was twelve.’
Juliet was so shocked by Rafael’s description of his childhood that she did not know what to say. It explained the toughness she sensed in him, and his obsessive determination to get what he wanted.
‘Your mother must have been happy to be reunited with you and your sister...’ she murmured.
He gave a short laugh. ‘I was a surly teenager, with a chip on my shoulder and a hot temper. None of my relatives—including my mother—were pleased to have me around, although I’m glad to say that Sofia was made more welcome.’ He gave a faint smile. ‘My sister learned young how to smile and say the right things to people. I was far less amenable. But my grandfather saw something in me and pushed me to catch up on my education. Meanwhile my mother had married a distant cousin, and my half-brother Francisco is a true Casillas, in Delfina’s opinion, and should be Hector’s successor.’
Rafael picked up his coffee cup and swallowed its contents.
‘You said you were made to feel that you did not belong at your ballet school by some of the richer pupils. I understand what it’s like to feel like an outsider, because that’s how I felt when I came to live here with my aristocratic family. Many of my relatives still think that a gitano is not good enough to be a Casillas.’
Juliet stared at him. ‘Yet even knowing that your family would despise me, you brought me here and presented me as your wife. You didn’t consider my feelings. Perhaps,’ she said huskily, ‘you thought I was too unintelligent to have feelings.’
His jaw clenched. ‘I have never thought you unintelligent. I admit that when I first met you it crossed my mind that it would infuriate Hector if my bride was a single mother from a council estate...’
Juliet blanched and he swore.
‘You have shown me that I was wrong to make assumptions about you based on the circumstances I found you in. But I won’t lie to you. I needed to marry quickly, and your financial problems gave me the leverage to persuade you to be my wife.’
Rafael’s voice was indecipherable, and his eyes were still hidden behind his sunglasses so that Juliet had no clue to his thoughts.
‘Was my decision cold and calculating? Yes.’ He answered his own question before she could speak. ‘I told you once that my pursuit of power is a ruthless game, with no place for weakness or emotions—and nothing has changed.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
SOMETHING HAD CHANGED. Rafael suspected it was something inside him, but he refused to examine that unsettling thought and assured himself that the change was entirely in Juliet.
It was not only her appearance, he brooded, studying her where she sat opposite him at the dining table in his mother’s over-fussy suite. The truth was that he hadn’t been able to take his eyes off his wife throughout this tedious lunch with Delfina and her tedious husband.
Juliet looked deliciously cool and elegant in a pale blue silk sheath dress that skimmed her slender figure. The neckline was decorous, but cut just low enough to reveal the upper slopes of her breasts. Those perfect small handfuls that made Rafael’s mouth water when he pictured the dusky pink nipples he had tasted once. He had come to the conclusion that he would have to lick and suckle them again—if his overheated body did not spontaneously combust first.
He forced his mind away from the erotic images and shifted in his seat in a bid to ease the uncomfortable tightness of his trousers stretched across his arousal. Dios, no other woman had ever made his heart pound the way Juliet did, nor made him feel like a hormone-fuelled youth instead of a self-confessed cynic who had become jaded with easy sex.
He was used to having whichever woman he wanted with minimum effort from him, but he had discovered that there was such a thing as too much choice, Rafael acknowledged sardonically.
Juliet’s daughter was sitting beside her. Despite Poppy’s young age she had behaved impeccably during lunch. She was a cute kid, he conceded. But like her mother Poppy had a way of looking directly into his eyes that disconcerted him. As if she saw something inside him that Rafael was quite certain did not exist.
‘I did not expect that you would bring the child with you,’ Delfina had said when he’d carried the little girl into the private apartment. Beside him, Juliet had stiffened as his mother had added coldly, ‘Couldn’t you have left her with the nanny?’
‘Elvira offered to look after Poppy, but I like to spend as much time as possible with my daughter,’ Juliet had replied calmly, but Rafael had caught the gleam of battle in her blue eyes.
Now Alberto was chatting to Juliet about three of Pablo Picasso’s paintings, which he owned. Rafael knew his mother did not share her husband’s interest in the famous Spanish painter, and she’d looked irritated when Juliet had revealed an impressive knowledge of the artist’s work.
‘Did your parents have professions?’ Delfina asked dur
ing a lull in conversation.
‘They both worked at a hospital.’
‘Oh! Were they doctors?’
‘Dad was a porter and Mum was a domestic assistant,’ Juliet said cheerfully.
Delfina’s brows arched in a supercilious expression. ‘Domestic work seems to be a favourite in your family.’
‘Madre...’ Rafael said warningly. His mother could be a bitch and he would not allow her to upset Juliet.
‘My parents worked hard so that I could follow my dream of becoming a ballerina. They were not rich, or particularly well educated, but they loved me and supported me.’ Juliet looked directly at Delfina. ‘They would never have abandoned me in a crime-ridden slum as you did Rafael and his sister when they were young children—Sofia just a baby and Rafael only seven years old.’
Delfina drew a sharp breath, but Juliet was continuing in a fierce voice.
‘How could you have left your children with a father who was cruel and violent? You must have known that Ivan beat Rafael with his belt—’
Her voice cracked and a chink opened up in Rafael’s heart.
His mother had paled and her highly glossed lips were a scarlet slash across her face. ‘How dare you...?’ Delfina breathed.
‘I dare because I am Rafael’s wife. And it is a wife’s duty to stand by her husband. I was appalled when Rafael told me about how he suffered as a child, living in a slum.’
Juliet brushed her hand across her eyes and Rafael felt a jolt of something he could not explain when he saw that her lashes were wet.
‘Hector brought him to the Casillas mansion to be reunited with you and his other relatives but he was made to feel unwelcome and unwanted. You did not defend him, but I will. Rafael is Hector’s eldest grandson and he should succeed his grandfather as head of the Casillas Group.’
In the stunned silence that followed Rafael told himself that the pain he felt beneath his breastbone was indigestion...too much rich food. The ache could not be because Juliet had stood up for him, fought for him in a way that no one had ever done in his entire life. As if he mattered. To her.
His mother picked up her wine glass and drained it before she looked at Rafael. ‘I was ashamed,’ she said tightly.
‘I know, Madre. You have always made it clear that you are ashamed of having a son who is part-gitano. I will never be the perfect son, like Francisco, but the CEO-ship is my birthright and I will claim my place within the family and the company.’
Delfina did not speak again, although as Rafael bade her goodbye and kissed the air close to her cheek he had an odd sense that she wanted to say something to him.
‘Are you angry with me?’ Juliet muttered as they walked through the house back to his apartment.
He glanced at her over Poppy’s head. The little girl was walking between them and had insisted on holding his hand as well as Juliet’s.
‘Why would I be angry? You acted the role of supportive wife very convincingly.’
He opened the door of his apartment and as Juliet preceded him inside her long hair brushed against his arm and he breathed in the lemony scent of the shampoo she used.
Poppy spied her favourite teddy bear and ran across the room.
Juliet turned to him. ‘I wasn’t acting. What happened to you when you were a child was terrible. Your mother shouldn’t have deserted you, and her failure to protect you has had a fundamental effect on you. I think it could be the reason why you have never allowed yourself to fall in love. You’re afraid of being let down and abandoned, like Delfina abandoned you before.’
Her words opened that chink in his heart a little wider, and Rafael didn’t know what to make of that—or her.
‘I think you should stop trying to psychoanalyse me,’ he said drily. ‘And you should certainly stop looking for my redeeming features, because I don’t have any.’
She shook her head. ‘You took care of your sister—acted as a parent to her when you were just a child yourself. When I met you I thought you had only ever known wealth and privilege. The fact that you spent the first twelve years of your life in a slum doesn’t make you less of a man, it makes you more of one—a better person than any of your pampered relatives who have no right to look down on you.’
‘A better man would not have sat through lunch imagining stripping you naked and having wild sex with you on my mother’s dining table,’ he rasped.
Rosy colour winged along her high cheekbones, but she held his gaze. ‘That itch still bothering you, is it?’
‘You have no idea, chiquita...’ He could not explain the restlessness inside him that seemed to get a whole lot worse when she smiled. ‘I need to disabuse you of the idea that there is anything good in me.’
Juliet tilted her head to one side and looked at him thoughtfully. ‘I wonder why you are so determined to do that,’ she said softly.
Before he could reply—and the truth was that he did not how to respond—she walked away from him in the direction of her dressing room.
‘Sofia has asked me to give Ana and Inez some ballet lessons. We’re going to have our first dancing class this afternoon—unless there’s anything else you want me to do?’
A number of highly erotic scenarios flooded his mind, which had an immediate and predictable effect on his body.
‘I promised to play golf with Tio Alvaro,’ he growled, his feet already taking him towards the door of the apartment and safety—away from the temptation of his wife who was not his wife. Not in any way that mattered. And Rafael was beginning to think that it mattered a lot.
* * *
Three hours spent on the Casillas estate’s private golf course would ordinarily have given him time to clear his head.
‘You seem to be distracted,’ his uncle commented as they walked off the green. Alvaro was jubilant because he had won the game convincingly. ‘I suppose you are thinking about business?’
Rafael hadn’t spared a single thought for any of the business projects which until recently he had been obsessed with. The realisation that his new obsession with Juliet was interfering not just with his game of golf but with his focus on the company was disturbing. Work had always been his number one priority—the only mistress to command his fidelity.
The situation could not continue, he brooded. Juliet had got under his skin and there was only one way to deal with his unexpected fascination with her.
There was no one around when he entered the mansion. Most of his relatives and the household staff took a siesta in the afternoons, but as he walked across the entrance hall he heard music coming from the ballroom. Puzzled, he opened the door—and stopped dead when he saw Juliet dancing.
Rafael knew nothing about ballet, but he could tell instinctively that she was a talented ballerina. Dressed in a black leotard that revealed her ultra-slender figure, she seemed to glide across the floor on the points of her ballet shoes. Ethereal and graceful, strong and yet fragile. She did not simply dance to the music she lived it, breathed it, painting pictures in the air with each twirl and leap as if she had wings and could fly.
He stepped into the room and quietly closed the door, leaning against it while he watched her. He was utterly captivated...mesmerised. As a boy growing up in the slums he’d had no idea that such beauty existed. He could not take his eyes off her supple body, and his breath became trapped in his lungs as desire swept molten and hot through his veins, setting him ablaze everywhere.
Juliet danced with such passion, such fire, and he wanted all of it.
But her performance ended abruptly when she leapt into the air and seemed to land awkwardly. She gave a cry as she crumpled to the floor, trembling like a bird with a broken wing...a bird that could no longer soar into the sky.
Rafael’s heart gave a jolt when he heard the sound of her weeping.
‘Dios, querida, are you badly hurt?’
He was across t
he ballroom in seconds and kneeling on the floor beside her. ‘Juliet, cariño,’ he said huskily as she lifted her face and he saw tears streaming down her cheeks.
‘My stupid leg.’
The words hung there, hurting him as much as she was hurting. Her voice ached with a depth of emotion he could barely comprehend. Loss—of her parents, and her ballet career, and more than that. The loss of the unique gift that Rafael had glimpsed when he’d watched her dance.
He had no idea what to say to her. ‘You must miss dancing.’
‘Ballet was my life,’ she said, in a low voice that scraped his insides. ‘It was like breathing—a necessary part of me. But now it’s gone.’
‘But you can still dance. You are incredible, querida.’
She scrubbed a hand over her eyes. ‘I can manage for a few minutes, but I’ll never be able to dance professionally. My leg isn’t strong enough to cope with the relentless routine of rehearsals and performances, the pursuit of perfection. There’s a reason why the life of a ballet dancer is called a beautiful agony.’
Her wry smile floored Rafael. The lack of self-pity in her voice humbled him, and that chink in his heart opened wider still.
‘Come,’ he said softly, lifting her into his arms.
‘I can walk,’ she protested as he carried her across the ballroom. ‘I’ll have a bath. It helps to relax the muscles in my thigh.’
‘Put your arms around my neck,’ he commanded, liking the feel of her small breasts pressed against his chest when she complied.
He strode up the stairs, and when he entered his apartment headed straight into the en suite bathroom and placed her on a chair. He ran a bath, tipping a liberal amount of scented bath crystals into the water.
He turned to find her watching him, and the lost look in her blue eyes, the shimmer of tears, evoked a reaction inside him that was too complicated for him to deal with right then.
Instead he knelt in front of her and curled his fingers around the edge of her leotard. ‘Let’s get you undressed and into the bath.’
Wed for the Spaniard's Redemption Page 12
