A Fiery Baptism

by Lynne Graham

  ‘I’m going out in ten minutes.’ Neither apology nor warning sounded in his intonation. It was an assertion that, no matter what she did, no matter what she said, he had no real intention of listening to her.

  ‘Perhaps you’ll change your mind when you hear what I have to say,’ Sarah fenced daringly.

  CHAPTER THREE

  SARAH was shown into a spacious lounge. It was very untidy. Books lay open on the couch. Cushions were tumbled on the floor and empty glasses littered a fine antique occasional table. And, oddly enough, for a timeless moment Sarah felt more at home and less of an intruder. The chaos which Rafael wreaked on his surroundings was disturbingly familiar and it threw up memories that threatened her self-discipline.

  ‘You have six minutes left,’ Rafael said with flaring impatience.

  Sarah collided with intent golden eyes and hurriedly looked away again, her breath catching in her throat. ‘I saw my parents this morning.’

  His strong jawline hardened. ‘Surely not an unusual event?’ he jibed. ‘Even when we were living in Paris, you contrived to see them three weeks out of every four!’

  Her colour heightened but she decided to ignore the taunt. ‘Until I spoke to them, I had no idea that you returned to England to see me five years ago. Please believe that. They didn’t tell me.’

  His narrowed hawk-like stare was discouraging. He exuded a daunting indifference to the revelation she had made. ‘That I can believe,’ he conceded unexpectedly. ‘What I do not comprehend is what this has to do with the present.’

  Her emotions were running perilously close to the surface. Rigid with strain, she looked at him in stark appeal. ‘Don’t you understand? If…if I’d known, I would have been there…’

  ‘De veras?’ Rafael spread eloquent hands wide in a gesture of disbelief. ‘To greet your adulterous husband with open arms?’

  Sarah visibly flinched from the suggestion.

  Rafael arched a jet brow, his golden appraisal brilliant with contempt. ‘I think not.’

  ‘Since the situation didn’t arise, I can’t say what would have happened. But I would never have lied to you about the twins! Rafael…’ Her tongue tripped clumsily over the syllables. There was so much she needed to tell him but it was incredibly difficult to find the right words. To be open and honest about past events with so little encouragement demanded a degree of bravado that she had not previously exercised in Rafael’s radius. Frustration ran through her like a current. Self-expression was Rafael’s talent, not hers. Nobody ever went in ignorance of how Rafael felt or what he wanted and that ability, she appreciated now, was no small advantage in life. ‘You must see that this isn’t easy for—’

  ‘Have you had breakfast yet? Lord, I’m sorry!’ From somewhere above them another voice had intervened. ‘I was in the shower and I thought it was the television I was hearing! I didn’t realise you had someone here.’

  A breathtaking Scandinavian blonde with wheat-gold hair streaming over her towelling-clad shoulders was looking down at them from the gallery that overlooked the lounge. Sarah stared up at her, silenced, transfixed, every vestige of colour fleeing her complexion. Ludicrous as it seemed to her, the blonde wore a friendly smile of apology which slowly changed into an anxious frown as she skimmed a questioning glance at Rafael before disappearing from sight.

  Shock always made Sarah go cold. A clammy chill was enclosing her flesh in a shuddering embrace. With the cold had come an unwelcome return to sanity. What madness had driven her into coming here? A woman in a time-warp had enacted the last few frantic hours. Had she once paused to think rationally about what she was doing? No, she hadn’t. She had recklessly run Rafael to earth and what she had sown, she had reaped. Her sense of humiliation was choking. Shame burnt like ice through her veins. With what fantasies had she rushed here five years too late? The glowing, utterly unselfconscious blonde on the gallery had recalled everything that Sarah had worked so hard to forget.

  Once Rafael had held her trapped in a silken web more powerful than the strongest steel. And she had lost all self-will. That was what loving somebody like Rafael did to you. Perhaps she should be grateful to her father, she thought feverishly. Perhaps she should be thanking him for her freedom. He had torn her from that web and forced her to survive without Rafael.

  She had thought that what she refused to acknowledge couldn’t hurt her. But in the end her fearful blindness had ripped her to shreds. While Rafael was in New York, her father had put a private investigator on him. Her father had turned her shrinking suspicions into cold, irrefutable fact. He had framed Rafael’s infidelity in black and white typescript and enshrined it in the unforgettable images of a photograph. He had brought her face to face with the living substance of her worst nightmares. And in expecting gratitude, her father had demanded the impossible from her.

  ‘Sarah…’

  She forced a frozen smile on to lips that for a frightening instant felt too clumsy to obey her. Loathing was emerging from that terrible chilled feeling deep down inside her. Loathing and embarrassment and seething anger were ready to thrust a violent passage through her controlled faade. Their marriage was over, past, dead…something she had briefly allowed herself to forget. Quite how she could have forgotten that reality evaded her understanding.

  ‘Sarah…’ Ironically, Rafael was now regarding her with the full attention he had earlier been determined to deny her. His penetrating gaze rested on her with unnerving intensity. ‘Presumably you did come here to tell me something,’ he reasoned with a patience that was quite out of character.

  ‘Did I?’ Her mind was a terrifying blank when it came to sane, civilised responses. Indeed all of a sudden she didn’t know what she was doing here in his apartment. ‘I thought you were in a hurry,’ she said curtly.

  ‘I feel in less of a hurry,’ Rafael countered lazily. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’

  Sarah clutched her envelope bag to her stomach in a white-knuckled grip that betrayed her mood better than any words would have. ‘Because I don’t feel like sitting down now.’

  He slanted her a disarming smile. ‘Before we were interrupted, you were about to tell me something,’ he murmured in a coaxing, soothing tone.

  ‘Was I?’

  Rafael moved a beautifully expressive hand. It signified apology for his earlier brevity and indifference, indicated that he was now prepared to be a captive audience. It was marvellous what Rafael could put into one casual gesture. He was poetry in motion, poetry even standing still. In absolute anguish at the rebellious trend of her muddled brain, Sarah stiffened even more.

  ‘I will give you my time, all the time that you want,’ he proffered with quite unintentional arrogance. ‘I will be quiet. I will not interrupt as I did before. I will listen to what you want to say.’

  Yes, she thought sickly…yes, how he would have revelled in hearing what she might have foolishly confessed had not the blonde interrupted them. Five years ago, had circumstances been otherwise, had her father not committed one final, unforgivable act in his determination to destroy her marriage, she would have been at Southcott Lodge when Rafael arrived.

  Her father utterly intimidated most people. But not Rafael. Challenged, Rafael could assume an icy, chilling dignity more than equal to anything her father could produce. Sarah had long understood that it was for that reason that she had been forcibly removed from the scene. She had been the weak link in the chain and her father had broken her as he had not been able to break Rafael.

  Given the opportunity, Rafael would have told her the truth about that woman in New York. He would have made no excuses for himself. She would have sat there not looking at him and trying very hard not to listen. He would have been perfectly capable of flinging himself at her feet and pleading for forgiveness without losing an ounce of his fierce pride.

  And she would have gone back to him. Why? Simply because she loved him, loved him the way she had never dreamt she could ever love anybody, loved him the way she never, ever wanted to
love anybody again. A shudder of repulsion ran through her. Thank God, she had been deprived of that choice. Rafael would have managed to convince her that that woman in New York had only been an isolated episode, much regretted and never to be repeated. At nineteen, she had been very naive, very impressionable and Rafael had considerable powers of persuasion.

  Lifting her small head high, Sarah cleared her throat. ‘The twins—’

  Rafael broke his vow of silence. ‘The twins?’ he interrupted as though he had been expecting her to refer to something entirely different.

  ‘They’re happy, well-adjusted children,’ Sarah completed. ‘They don’t need an occasional father. And I sincerely doubt that a pair of curious four-year-olds on scene would facilitate what appears to be a hectic sexual calendar.’

  ‘Ah.’ Rafael continued to regard her with infuriating cool. ‘And on what do you base this assumption?’

  ‘In little more than twelve hours, I have seen you with two different women!’ Sarah stressed thinly, holding on to her temper with difficulty.

  ‘There is something strange about this?’ Rafael queried, gently ironic.

  ‘If you think that I intend to expose my children to your immorality, you are very much mistaken!’ Sarah told him hotly, flags of pink highlighting her cheekbones. ‘I insist that you stay out of our lives!’

  Rafael inclined his dark head. ‘Or is it that you wish to insist that I stay out of other beds?’ he prompted, silky soft, his eyes gleaming rapiers on her flushed features.

  Sarah blinked, completely thrown by the enquiry. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Indeed you might,’ he riposted. ‘But I am prepared to dispense with the apology. This conversation…it has immense entertainment value.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Sarah snapped frustratedly. ‘I’m not going to apologise for stating my views.’

  ‘Your views are most unnatural for a woman who has been separated from her husband for five years by her own choice.’

  For several tense seconds, Sarah ruminated fiercely over that incomprehensible response. ‘Unnatural?’ she repeated sharply. ‘I intend to protect the twins from your influence.’

  ‘But who is to protect them from yours and that of your parents?’ Rafael asked with devastating derision. ‘I would not in conscience permit one of you to raise a hamster in captivity.’

  ‘How dare you say that to me?’ Sarah was outraged by the insult.

  Before she could stalk past him, he shot out a long-fingered hand and enclosed her slim forearm in a grip of iron. ‘How…dare…I?’ he demanded in a raw, incredulous undertone, an outrage a hundredfold greater than her own blazing in the extraordinary depths of his tiger’s eyes. ‘Had I less self-control, I would show you how I feel. You have denied me my children. I have lost four irreplaceable years of their lives. I am their father and I am a stranger to them. They could walk past me in the street and I wouldn’t know them. I don’t even know their names! For what you have selfishly stolen from me and from them, I could quite happily kill you!’

  In a movement of grim repudiation, he released her numbed arm and she reeled back from him, white and shaken, her knees trembling supports. ‘I never dreamt that you didn’t know about Gilly and Ben!’ she protested weakly.

  ‘You expect me to believe that?’

  ‘I’m telling you the truth!’

  He vented a harsh laugh, swinging lithely away from her. ‘Do you think I do not know what brought you here?’ he sliced back at her chillingly. ‘You are afraid of what I can do.’

  Sarah fixed her distraught gaze on his darkly handsome features in a mixture of fear and defiance. ‘You can’t do anything!’

  His mouth curved into a hard, glittering smile. ‘Sarah, in some matters you are still so naive. You cannot have legal custody of the children. That can only be achieved by agreement between husband and wife or a judicial decision,’ he pointed out. ‘There has been no such agreement, no such decision. And should you oppose my claim, the lies and deception employed to keep me in ignorance of my children’s very existence will scarcely help your case. In court, nothing will be concealed…’

  A giant mailed fist was suddenly pounding a tattoo behind her temples. ‘We…we don’t have to go to court.’ She had to force the words of appeasement past her bloodless lips. ‘We…we could talk.’

  ‘Talk? I have heard you talk.’ Rafael dealt her a blistering look of condemnation. ‘In the future if you desire to talk to anyone you may talk with my lawyer here in London. He may have more patience than I.’

  He had mastered his anger and that frightened her more. In anger, Rafael could still be reached. ‘I don’t want to talk to your lawyer,’ she muttered tightly.

  Rafael swept a jacket off the couch and sent a flaring glance of impatience down at the thin gold watch on his wrist. ‘This is sad. For you, not for me. Now, if you don’t mind…?’

  ‘All right, I’m going!’ Sarah took the decided hint with moritified alacrity, hurrying out to the hall to let herself out of the apartment.

  When Sarah was deeply upset, it was not unusual for her to take refuge in the mundane practicalities of everyday life. She wouldn’t let herself think about Rafael’s threats while she negotiated the traffic and recalled that she had not yet done the weekly shopping. So she hurtled busily into a crowded supermarket, raced up and down the aisles and ended up staring sightlessly into a freezer compartment before her defences gave way and the full horror of Rafael’s confident threats about lawyers and courts and judicial decisions washed over her like a tidal wave.

  She squeezed her eyes shut in a futile attempt to stem the tears flooding her eyes. She had not said what she’d intended to say. She had not said what she should have said. But on one count she had told him the whole truth. She could not face a future studded with flying visits from Rafael. Not when the mere sight of him with another woman still turned her into a seething cauldron of bitterness and defeat. Rafael was a cruel reminder of everything she did not want to remember. She should never have gone near him. Instead of pouring oil on troubled water, she had lit another torch.

  He had already made several lightning-fast deductions. She did not have legal custody of the twins. Until Rafael had mentioned the fact, she had not even thought of the matter. Gilly and Ben had always been hers, solely hers. From the moment of their birth, they had been the centre…no, the entirety of her life. She had nothing else, had never wanted anything else, had never feared that anyone, least of all Rafael, might seek to take her children from her.

  But what chance would she have in a court? In a court where ‘nothing would be concealed’? Her blood ran cold. She had terrifying visions of Rafael dredging up the facts of her own unhappy childhood and the subsequent effect on her development and building on those facts to insinuate that she couldn’t possibly be a good mother.

  Nor would it stop there. Rafael didn’t know everything. But he could find out, couldn’t he? Wouldn’t any good lawyer go digging to establish exactly where she had been and what she had been doing for every month of the past five years? Rafael had a whole barrage of weapons he had yet to discover. Beads of perspiration formed on her short upper lip. An emotion that was nothing short of sheer terror spread to the depth of an abyss inside her.

  ‘Are you feeling all right, dear?’

  Blankly she looked at the little old lady staring at her. From somewhere she dredged the self-possession to nod and force stiff legs onward in a semblance of normality. Dear God, she had nearly told all to Rafael in her urge to wipe the slate clean and establish her own innocence of duplicity. But had she confessed all, what a weapon she would have been giving him! He didn’t think she was fit to bring up the twins as it was.

  All the way back home, she made frantic, crazy plans to pack up lock, stock and barrel and disappear with the children into thin air. When fantasy ran out of fuel on the balance of her bank account, she came back down to earth. She had to talk Rafael out of taking her to court
. That was the only alternative to flight, and since she had never managed to talk Rafael out of anything with the smallest degree of success she could not feel too hopeful of the outcome. Why should he listen to her now? It was a question she asked herself over and over again for the remainder of the day and the sleepless night that followed.

  She slept in the next morning. Awakening she glanced at the clock and groaned. The twins had missed Sunday school and she couldn’t possibly get dressed in time to take them to church. The day continued as it had begun. Lunch was a burnt offering and afterwards she decided to take Gilly and Ben to the park across the road from the flat.

  They had only been there about ten minutes when the twins began fighting over a bucket in the sandpit. As Ben triumphed, Gilly lost her balance and fell. With a screech of temper, she sprang up again and threw her whole weight at her brother. Ben grabbed a handful of black, curling hair and yanked. A scream that would have wakened the dead erupted from Gilly.

  Sarah waded in. ‘Stop it!’

  ‘I don’t want your dirty ol’ bucket!’ Gilly shouted ferociously and raced off towards the swings.

  Ben swiftly took off in the same direction. The bucket was forgotten. Now that his sister didn’t want it any more, it had lost its appeal. Grimly conscious of the pitying and superior glances of two other mothers nearby, Sarah retreated to a bench. Even at a distance it was obvious that her children were enjoying a heated dispute over the one vacant swing. She heaved a guilty sigh of relief when another child abandoned a swing and Ben took possession. Today the twins had been particularly argumentative and perhaps she was partly responsible, she reflected wryly. Nervous tension was making her feel like a novice tightrope walker and children were highly sensitive to atmosphere.

  Glancing away from the twins, she caught sight of the tall, black-haired male standing beneath the trees some thirty yards from the swings. Tautening in alarm, she scrambled upright, made a jerky movement forward and then stilled again.