The Thorn in his Side

by Kim Lawrence

  ‘I’ll be in touch,’ he promised.

  Impressively the other man walked past him acting as if he got asked to leave via the fire exit every day of the week.

  Rafael closed the door and nodded his approval. In his experience more important than knowing when to ask a question was knowing when not to ask a question.

  The question, Rafael asked himself as he stood a silent observer to the events unfolding in his outer office, was why?

  Why was Libby Marchant here?

  He did not have the faintest idea but he now knew why he paid Gretchen her outrageously high salary—she earned it and then some. On her watch this farcical scene would never have occurred.

  Unobserved he watched Gretchen’s pink-cheeked and harassed stand-in angle a look of narrow-eyed dislike at the young woman sitting on the floor in the middle of the room.

  ‘I am sorry, Ms Marchant, that you have had a wasted journey, but as I have already explained—’

  ‘I don’t need your apology or your explanations.’

  ‘What do you need?’

  At the sound of his voice both women spun around to face him.

  Rafael scanned the face turned up to him, eyes a deep cobalt blue that blazed back at him, no tears, just ferocious contempt and anger reflected in the sparkling surface as she blinked once, then blinked again.

  He saw recognition then shock register in her eyes a split second before her lips parted to release a fractured gasp of horror.

  The soft sound drew his gaze to that lovely lush softness of her mouth. He felt his body harden in helpless response to the images floating through his mind. Images that portrayed those lips moving across his skin, over his body.

  ‘You …?’ Fighting her way through what felt like layers of fuzzy cotton wool in her brain, Libby shook her head to clear the fog. ‘I don’t understand …’

  She would, and when she did he imagined there would be some interesting and possibly noisy fireworks. Rafael resigned himself to the inevitability of it.

  ‘What do you need, querida?’ he repeated his question.

  She didn’t answer and he found himself thinking of what he needed.

  He needed a lot.

  He needed everything.

  He stood for a moment, literally frozen to the spot by a tide of primal lust that washed over him, lust so primitive and potent that for the space of several heartbeats it wiped everything else from his head.

  Clawing his way slowly above the shimmering primal blur dancing across his vision, he raked a not quite steady hand through his dark hair, struggling to rationalise the primitive strength of his reaction to this woman’s beauty.

  Life was not going to return to normal until he did something about this situation, he decided, thinking along the lines of a short-term, passionate affair. Of course the Marchant connection complicated the situation, but the problem was not insuperable.

  While the thoughts were running through his head, somewhere in the periphery of his vision Rafael was conscious of the stand-in, whose name at that moment totally eluded him—hard to think names when you were thinking of being inside the warm heat of a woman’s body—stepping out from behind her desk to join him.

  She remained utterly oblivious to the fact that her presence was surplus to requirements—he might actually give Gretchen a raise—as she directed an accusing glare towards Libby Marchant.

  ‘This person—’ she stabbed an accusing finger at Libby ‘—I asked her to leave, I said—’

  ‘You said he was not in the building.’ Feeling as if she were living a nightmare, Libby turned her attention from the woman back to the man standing there. She shook her head.

  ‘Are you here to see Rafael Alejandro too?’ Unlikely but not impossible and definitely preferable to the other explanation—the one she couldn’t even bring herself to acknowledge.

  The slight negative shake of his dark head drew a sharp little gasp from her throat.

  ‘I came here to see Rafael Alejandro. Are you Rafael Alejandro?’

  He tipped his dark head in acknowledgement. ‘I am.’

  Libby’s hand went to her mouth as she closed her eyes, remembering the moments the previous night when she had sat in the hospital watching the people she loved most in the world unhappy and in pain, able to do nothing but fetch coffee from the vending machine that nobody drank, then fetch some more when it got cold.

  Escaping for a short time into her own private fantasy world had not seemed so terrible, and if thinking about a man’s face, allowing the memory of his lips, his taste, the hard virile strength of his body to fill her mind and block out the nightmare for a short time meant she was able to stay strong for her family and offer the support they needed it, had seemed defensible.

  Defensible …!

  A violent wave of shame and revulsion washed over her. The man she had fantasised about was the reason they were there; he was the reason why Meg and Ed’s tiny baby was in an incubator unable to breathe without the aid of machines.

  She opened her eyes and admitted to herself, This man, that face—and hated herself.

  She hated him.

  Rafael watched the expressions flicker across her face before finally settling into contemptuous fury.

  ‘You knew who I was yesterday?’ Of course he did. Libby swallowed the bubble of hysteria lodged in her aching throat. ‘You are a despicable man!’

  He angled a sardonic brow. ‘A little harsh.’

  ‘A little harsh?’ she echoed. ‘You ruined my father.’

  A spasm of irritation tugged at the corners of his mouth. ‘I did not ruin your father. Your father—’ He broke off, shaking his head. ‘It is not relevant—that was business.’

  ‘Business?’ she said, looking at him incredulously. ‘It feels pretty personal to me!’

  The stand-in turned to Rafael, her expression apologetic. ‘I asked her to leave and she became abusive.’

  Libby’s brows rose in indignation. ‘If you think that was abuse you’ve led a very sheltered life!’

  ‘I’ve called Security, sir. I told her and she just sat down. I think she’s a bit …’ a wary eye on Libby, the woman tapped her head significantly ‘ … not quite right.’

  Rafael’s eyes did not leave Libby’s face as he rapped back flatly, ‘Then uncall them.’

  The woman’s mouth fell open. ‘But …’

  Rafael looked her way and arched a brow. The woman blenched and starting nodding. but Rafael was already walking across to where Libby was still sitting.

  ‘The sit-in is quite unnecessary,’ he said, stretching out a hand towards her.

  Libby looked at his hand, gave a contemptuous snort and got to her feet unaided.

  Hands on her hips, she tilted her head back to direct a challenging stare at his face. The silence stretched as her eyes were drawn to the strips stretched neatly across the wound on his head; the white plaster stood out against his olive-toned skin.

  ‘Yes, it is painful if that makes you feel better.’

  ‘It does,’ she admitted, thinking, You do not know the meaning of pain.

  Pain was what she had seen in the eyes of her brother as he kept vigil by his baby daughter’s cot. ‘Do you know where I have just come from?’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me, as you are clearly aching to do so?’

  ‘The hospital’ At least that wiped the smug smirk off his face. ‘Because of you my sister-in-law went into premature labour. If anything happens to her or her baby it will be down to you! And if it does,’ she promised, eyeing him with contempt, ‘I will make you wish you had never been born.’

  Rafael took on board the information but did not react to the threat; instead he studied her.

  Yesterday’s mud-stained fashionable outfit was gone, replaced by a pair of jeans that clung to the slim curves of her thighs. It was topped by a cashmere sweater a shade paler than her incredible eyes.

  With no make-up, she looked as though she had just stepped straight from a shower with her
still damp wildly curling hair hanging loose around her clean-scrubbed pale face.

  She looked so young he suddenly felt old and jaded by comparison.

  She also looked dead on her feet and perilously close to collapse. Not happy to identify the emotion that tightened his chest as concern, he barked, ‘What in the name of God were your family doing letting you come here in this state?’

  This pretence of concern enraged her further. ‘My family … my family are devastated. My father is a broken man. Imagine how he feels right now!’

  Rafael tried and failed. He had never had family support to fall back on, just his own wits. How would it feel to be part of a family that was ready to do battle on his behalf?

  His glance drifted over her angry face.

  Or at least one member was.

  Rafael didn’t have a clue, but he suspected that there would be many who, broke or not, would envy Philip Marchant.

  He did not include himself in this number.

  ‘Did you know he only had a heart attack last year? Did you know he had a triple bypass?’ she demanded, her voice quavering at the memory of walking into his study and finding her dad lying on the floor clutching his chest.

  She would never forget the sheer terror and utter helplessness she had felt as she’d held his cold, clammy hand and waited for the ambulance to arrive. The minutes had felt like hours. She still relived them regularly in her nightmares.

  ‘No, I did not know.’

  Her blue eyes darkened with distaste as they came to rest on his face. ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference, would it?’ she charged contemptuously. ‘You don’t give a damn who you hurt.’ The exhaustion that was creeping over her slurred her words as she yelled, ‘My brother is still at the hospital.’

  ‘Is the baby very premature?’

  ‘I’m not going to discuss my family with you!’ she raged.

  ‘I thought that was what you were doing,’ he observed before turning to the hovering stand-in who was eating up every word. ‘When Gretchen gets back tell her to cancel my appointments for this afternoon.’

  ‘Come.’ He slung an impatient look Libby’s way. ‘You need to sit down.’ He gestured towards his office door.

  She shook her head mulishly. ‘I was sitting down. You made me get up.’

  ‘Let me rephrase that—you can walk under your own steam or I will carry you.’

  She looked at him in horror. ‘You wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘Wrong reply,’ he said, casually swinging her into his arms.

  She responded with kicks interspersed with squeals of outrage.

  ‘You remind me of a piglet I used to know,’ he said, placing her back on her feet in the middle of his office. ‘I’d say take a seat but I’m afraid that might trigger another act of civil disobedience. You know, you really should have called the press if you wanted to exploit the situation to the full.’

  Libby stood there breathing hard. ‘How dare you manhandle me? And how do you know I haven’t called the press?’ she challenged.

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘I called the local news station,’ she lied inventively as she made a great show of consulting her watch. ‘I’d say they should be arriving just about—now.’ She lifted her head and smiled. ‘They’ll love seeing a crying woman ejected by your bully boys.’

  ‘Never play poker—you’d lose.’ Rafael scanned the face turned up to him; the eyes, a deep cobalt blue, that blazed back at him were dry.

  ‘You’re not crying,’ he pointed out mildly.

  ‘I will be,’ she promised grimly, and then, just in case he didn’t believe her, she produced her party trick. Allowing her eyes to fill with tears, she blinked to allow one to escape the shimmering depths before wiping it away with the back of her hand and angling a challenging stare up at the tall man who had casually brought ruin to her family.

  How many other families had he casually ruined? He didn’t care—men like him were geared to achieving a goal and to hell with whom they hurt in the process.

  She sat down in the chair that was pushed behind her, just managing to bite back the polite thank you—good manners were as hard to break as bad habits and frequently much more inconvenient.

  Not as inconvenient as her weird physical response to this man.

  It wasn’t just the fact he was very easy on the eye, the most beautiful man she had ever seen or even imagined. She could not have reacted more strongly if she had turned her head and seen a jungle cat standing in the air-conditioned office.

  Or is it just me? Libby pushed away the half-formed thought.

  His dark brows sketched upwards in mock admiration. ‘An impressive trick with the tears, although one you can only employ once.’ Far from being moved by women’s tears, he usually reacted to such displays of emotion with irritation.

  Ironically it was her bogus tears that had got to him.

  ‘It always worked with my brother.’ The reminder of Ed brought a fresh rush of tears to her eyes, this time for real. Her shoulders slumped as exhaustion washed over her, taking with it her appetite for the fight.

  Why had she come? What do I really expect to achieve? she asked herself dully.

  ‘This is pointless. I shouldn’t have come. I should get back … they’ll be wondering …’ Her voice trailed away. Had she even told anyone where she was going?

  She banged her head with the heel of her hand and screwed up her face in a mask of concentration as she struggled to recall the exact sequence of events that had brought her here.

  She was able to recall getting the idea of confronting the man responsible for the nightmare on her way back to the hospital with a change of clothes for Ed; presumably those clothes were still in her car. Her next clear memory was of landing outside this building, but no matter how hard she tried the in between remained fuzzy.

  ‘You were limping?’

  Libby glanced down with lack of interest at her throbbing foot. ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Let me be the judge of that.’

  ‘Because I value your opinion so much?’ She laughed scornfully at the suggestion and added, ‘I turned my ankle, that’s all.’ It seemed a very long time ago.

  ‘Let me see.’

  She looked at the dark head of the man kneeling at her feet and wondered how he got there. She closed her eyes but the room carried on spinning.

  ‘Your foot.’

  Libby extended her leg. She was unable to repress a wince of pain as he eased the shoe off her swollen foot.

  ‘That looks painful.’

  ‘It’s not too bad.’

  Ignoring her protest, he continued to turn her ankle from side to side, viewing the extent of the damage. His touch was clinical but surprisingly gentle. It took him a few minutes before he ventured an opinion.

  ‘I don’t think anything is broken.’

  ‘I could have told you that.’

  He flashed her a look. ‘But I think you’d be a lot more comfortable with a supportive strapping.’ He aimed an assessing look at her pale face. ‘Wait there.’

  Rafael was relieved to find that Gretchen was back at her post. She raised a brow of enquiry. Who knew what garbled story the other woman had told her? But she didn’t waste time asking questions when he told her what he needed.

  Back in the office he found Libby where he had left her looking if anything even paler. Her expressive eyes turned his way but remained worryingly blank.

  He cursed softly under his breath. She had been running on adrenaline and hate and the tank had finally run dry.

  ‘You’ll be more comfortable here, I think,’ he suggested, nodding towards a sofa—one of a pair set against one wall of his office. He had slept on it himself on more than one occasion when after a late meeting it had not seemed worthwhile going home only to return a couple of hours later.

  He was laying her down when Gretchen walked in carrying everything he’d asked for.

  ‘Been making maidens swoon again?’

  Rafael ackno
wledged the riposte with a twisted grin. ‘I think it might be a good idea to bring some tea—make it sweet.’

  ‘I’ll make it now, and a couple of aspirin?’ Gretchen said, glancing at Libby. ‘Hello again.’

  Libby had to blink hard to bring the woman’s face into focus and wondered why the beautiful blonde looked familiar.

  ‘I’m just going to put some ice on this. It will help the swelling.’

  Libby winced as the ice touched her bruised skin.

  Leaving the compress in place, he selected an appropriate bandage from the first-aid box Gretchen had brought.

  Gretchen herself returned a moment later carrying a tray. ‘Tea is … too late.’ She nodded towards the sleeping girl. ‘Out flat. A friend of yours?’

  ‘More an acquaintance,’ Rafael said shortly.

  ‘Any idea how she got like this?’

  Rafael considered her pale sleeping face, refusing to identify the emotion he felt break free as tenderness. ‘Some …’

  Gretchen produced a printed slip from her pocket. ‘Does this offer any clues?’

  It was a boarding pass for a transatlantic flight. Rafael studied the time and date.

  ‘So she was getting off a flight from New York at …’ His eyes widened as he bit out a curse. His mental calculations suggested that his vengeful redhead had been on her feet for a hell of a long time.

  The surprise was not that she was out for the count, it was that she’d stayed upright as long as she had! Refusing to acknowledge the emotion he felt tighten in his chest, Rafael turned abruptly away.

  He had made it a point never to place himself in a position where he felt responsible for someone else; to this end he had successfully avoided emotional ties.

  This woman might need a keeper, but it wasn’t him.

  CHAPTER SIX

  LIBBY shook herself free of a deep sleep, stretching like a kitten as she tried to work out where she was and how she got here.

  Rafael saw the moment her memory returned.

  ‘Oh, God!’ she whispered, sitting bolt upright.

  Libby turned in the direction of the drawled, ‘Hello there.’

  ‘What have you done to me?’

  ‘Other than drugged you and had my wicked way with you, you mean?’ Rafael, who was slouched elegantly in a leather-backed swivel chair, closed the lid of the laptop open on the desk in front of him and got to his feet.