‘But I don’t want to marry you,’ she managed in a strange little croaky voice, needing to hide the pain of her real thoughts from him. ‘Marriage is for people who love each other.’
‘But love doesn’t have to come into it. What about wanting—passion? You can’t deny the passion between us.’
‘I’m not denying it …’
She felt as if she was fighting for her life. As if cold dark waters were threatening to close over her head and she was going down, down, down under them.
‘But it isn’t enough to make me want to tie myself to you …’
‘How about as a way of healing?’
‘Healing?’
In spite of a struggle to impose restraint on it Alannah found that her foolish heart had lifted on a breathless little dance. Could he possibly mean…?
‘Both our families have suffered terrible losses. Not just in the present but they’ve lost part of the future as well. You’ve lost a brother. I’ve lost a sister. And my father and your mother have both lost a longed-for grandchild.’
And then she knew exactly where he was going. She should have known it, of course, but just for a moment she had allowed herself to let the hope—the dream—of something else slip into her mind. And because of that the disappointment was so much harder to bear.
‘And your point is?’
Raul’s sigh was one of pure exasperation. How could she possibly be so stupid? the look in his eyes said. Surely it was obvious…?
It was obvious but she was still going to make him spell it out. If he was actually proposing marriage with the cold-blooded purpose she thought was in his mind then he was going to have to say it.
‘We can heal our families, Alannah. We can’t replace what they’ve lost but we can offer them a future. A future with a grandchild to look forward to. There’s one way we can give them that.’
This time Alannah did find the strength to snatch her hand away from his grasp. She couldn’t bear to have him touching her any longer.
‘We?’ she croaked.
‘Of course.’
Raul got up from his place on the carpet and came to sit on the arm of her chair. Now he was looking down at her, and the change in his position made an amazing difference to the way she was feeling. Now he seemed to tower over her, his big body imposing and somehow intimidating, for all that he showed no anger or any intention of using his powerful strength against her. Right now it was the force of his mind that she feared most. The ruthless determination to do what he believed was right—to follow the path he wanted, and to take others along that path with him whether they wanted to go or not.
Of course. She had forgotten—how could she have forgotten?—the dynastic pride and the emphasis on tradition, the line of inheritance that drove this family. Hadn’t it been the only reason that Raul had wanted to marry her in the first place—to provide his family with an heir, a new Marquez Marcín to inherit the estate, to carry on the line?
‘Who else is there?’
‘You could find someone else. There must be lots of women who would want to be Dona Marquez Marcín. You’ve never had any trouble attracting women before—there were dozens before you met me and, if the reports in the papers are anything to go by, there have been dozens of dozens since.’
‘Don’t believe everything you read in the papers,’ Raul snarled, a dark frown drawing his black brows together. ‘And if I’d wanted them, don’t you think I’d have chosen one of them by now? There’s only one woman I want—and don’t you dare say “who?”’
‘Oh, come on!’
The nerves in her stomach twisting into tight, painful knots, Alannah got to her feet in a rush and almost danced away from the chair, she was so much on edge. This couldn’t be happening. It really couldn’t.
How could Raul believe that she could accept such a cold-blooded, cold-hearted proposal? At least the first time he had asked her he had covered up his true intentions by pretending he wanted to marry her for herself. She had even told herself that it didn’t matter that he had never said he loved her—obviously he must do if he wanted to marry her.
It was only later when she had overheard him talking to his father—telling the old man that he had done his duty and found a suitable bride; that he would now be able to provide the grandchild and the heir that Matias so longed for—that she had begun to realise that there was more to it than she had believed. And when she had challenged him, he hadn’t troubled to hide the truth.
‘Of course I want a child!’ he’d declared. ‘Why else would I want to marry you?’
‘You can’t possibly really want to marry me!’ she protested now. ‘You said you hated me.’
‘And your whole family.’ Raul didn’t even try to deny it. ‘You seem to bring death and destruction with you wherever you go. You ruined my chances of giving my father an heir when you walked out on me and then your brother killed my sister and the baby she was carrying.’
‘It wasn’t his fault!’
‘It doesn’t matter!’
An angry gesture with a lean brown hand dismissed the furious protest as totally irrelevant. And Raul too got to his feet in a wild, angry movement that made Alannah think nervously of the savage pounce of a wild hunting leopard leaping onto its defenceless prey. Instinctively she took a couple of hasty steps backwards, out of his range.
‘The end result is the same! My sister is dead and her baby with her.’
‘So—I repeat—why? Why would you want to marry me or have anything to do with me or any member of my family?’
‘Because you owe me!’ Raul tossed at her, his words hissing savagely, eyes black with fury. ‘You owe me a child. An heir. You and your brother destroyed my family’s chances of having another generation to grow up, have our blood in their veins …’
‘To inherit the Marquez Marcín dukedom—the estate …’
‘That as well.’ Raul shrugged off her weak-voiced protest, intent only on what he wanted.
‘But—but you can’t do this—you can’t want to—I don’t want to—I don’t want you …’
‘Liar!’
It was low-voiced, deadly as the strike of a serpent. And he actually laughed, throwing back his proud head to let out a crack of laughter that was so harsh, so cold, so totally without any trace of real humour in it that it made her flinch back, wincing as she seemed to feel it splintering in the air around her, sending tiny shards of ice showering over her skin.
‘You know that’s not true and it never has been true. That’s the one thing we have going for us in this, querida …’
His tone turned the word into a sound that was light-years away from the endearment it was meant to be.
‘We can’t keep our hands off each other—never have been able to. And that’s what will make this whole thing so easy—and so pleasurable.’
Alannah could only stare at him in horror, unable to believe what she was hearing.
‘Easy!’ was all she could say. He really thought that this could be easy?
‘Think about it, belleza. From the moment we met again in that hospital, we haven’t been able to stay away from each other—we never could and we still can’t. I want you and you want me. No one else has ever made me burn like this. And you burn too—you can’t deny it—you went up in flames in my arms—in my bed—just now. I want more of that and so, if you’re honest, do you.’
When had he moved? She hadn’t actually seen him take any steps towards her but suddenly he was so close. Close enough to reach out a hand and smooth warm, gentle fingertips down the side of her face. With her mind a battlefield, the mental turmoil seemed to have stopped her thought processes. She wanted to draw back, pull away from him, but somehow her body wouldn’t obey the commands she thought she was giving it. Instead it reacted with the opposite of what she wanted—thought she wanted, told herself she wanted—and she angled her face into the caress like a cat that wanted to be stroked.
Raul’s smile was almost gentle but threaded thro
ugh with a dark triumph that caught and twisted in her soul.
‘See? You can’t deny it—your body won’t let you. You’re mine. Always were mine and always will be mine.’
She had to find the strength to fight the wicked, enticing spell he was weaving, his words curling round her like warm, perfumed smoke, drugging, intoxicating.
‘No—I said no!’
With a wrench that tore at her heart she forced herself away from him, the violence of the movement taking her halfway across the room towards the door.
‘This isn’t going to happen. You can’t expect me to marry you—not like this.’
If she looked into his face, into his eyes one more time she would swear that he could hypnotise her into agreeing, whether she wanted to or not. So she made herself take a step towards the door. And another. He let her get almost close enough to grab at the handle before he spoke again.
‘Running away again, Alannah?’
The words taunted her, his mocking tone seeming to rip away strips of her skin, leaving her raw and vulnerable, totally exposed.
‘You can’t make me stay!’ She flung it over her shoulder at him, still not daring to look round. Just one sight of his face would weaken her, finish her forever. ‘You can’t make me do this!’
‘I might not have to. Fate may have pushed your hand. Think about it—you might already be pregnant. I didn’t use any protection. We didn’t have time—or the presence of mind—to consider it. Even now you might be carrying my child.’
‘And if I am, then why can’t I bring it up on my own? Thousands of women do so every day.’
‘Thousands of women do,’ Raul agreed with stunning calm. ‘But not one of them is carrying my child—my heir. Have my child without marriage and I’ll fight you with every last breath in my body.’
‘Then fight me! If I am pregnant—sue me, take me to court! You can’t force me to marry you!’
She couldn’t take any more. She had to get out of here fast before her thought processes disintegrated into a spinning mist, before she broke down completely. The door handle was solid beneath fingers that trembled so badly she felt she might never get it open. But at last she managed it and stumbled out into the corridor beyond. The walls seemed to dance before her eyes, make her feel dizzy and sick.
And still Raul hadn’t finished with her.
‘You can run but you’ll never get away.’ His voice followed her from inside the room. ‘I’ll come after you. I can’t let you go.’
Now she really was running away, Alannah admitted to herself as she forced her unsteady feet to carry her forwards. The thundering race of her heart, the pounding of blood at her temples told her how important this all was. She was running from Raul, running from herself, running from the truth.
Because the truth was that she longed to say yes.
The truth, the appalling, the terrible but the totally undeniable truth was that she had to face up to the reality of how she was really feeling. And that truth was something that she had been avoiding for days. Ever since this man had walked back into her life.
She had told herself she hated him. And then when she hadn’t been able to keep away from him, when she had fallen into bed with him in denial of self-preservation or common sense or even logic, she had tried to explain that away as overwhelming physical need. A lust so intense and concentrated that it was like some volatile explosive—light the fuse and stand well back to avoid getting caught in the red-hot lava of the fallout.
But it hadn’t been the fallout that had got her. She had been right there at the centre of the explosion. Burning up in the savage heat of all that had blown up around her. And it had been where she most wanted to be. Where she needed to be. The only place she could be because it was where she belonged.
Because she still loved Raul with all her heart and nothing that had happened in the past two years had done anything to destroy that love. And now she doubted that anything ever would.
That was the reason she was here, wasn’t it? She might as well admit that right from the start she had used the need to return his mobile phone as just an excuse to come here and see him one last time. She could have packed it up and put it in the mail, or had it sent round to him as he had been going to send Carlos to her flat to pick it up once he had realised it was missing. But no, she had had to bring it herself and, even as she had been denying that she ever wanted to see him again, she had been making moves that guaranteed she would have to do just that.
‘We can heal our families, Alannah.’
Raul’s voice sounded inside her head, all the more devastating because she knew he told the truth. This would help her mother heal. It might even save her life. The thought of a future, of new life coming into the world where there had been so much loss and tragedy, would give her something to live for. And it would be the same for Raul’s father, the old man that she had grown fond of in the short time she had known him.
And what if she was already pregnant?
Alannah’s arms folded round her body as the thought hit home. Her stumbling footsteps slowed, halted.
She might already be carrying Raul’s child.
And the sudden, devastating surge of joy that welled up inside her at just the thought told its own story. She wanted to be carrying Raul’s baby. She longed for it to be true. Because the truth was that she loved this man so much that the thought of being pregnant with his child was something she’d always cherished.
The thought of being pregnant with his child and married to him.
But how could she consider marrying him when she knew he was only doing it because of the child he wanted so desperately? The much-needed heir—and the blazing, all-consuming passion that flared between them at a touch, a look. There was no denying that passion, or the need that it fired.
But was it enough?
Could a relationship survive when only one person loved and the other simply wanted?
Without realising it, she found that she had actually turned where she stood so that now she was facing back down the corridor, looking towards where the door to Raul’s suite still stood open. Subconsciously it seemed that she had already made the decision.
So he only wanted her for passion and for the child he needed. At least this time she knew where she stood. He was being totally open about it all. And if she loved him and his child, and he loved his child, then surely it could be enough.
It would have to be enough because the alternative was one she couldn’t live with. She couldn’t face a life and a future without Raul in it.
‘You can run but you’ll never get away.’ Raul’s voice echoed inside her head. ‘I’ll come after you. I can’t let you go.’
I can’t let you go. If that was as much as she was ever going to get she’d learn to live with it.
So she walked slowly back, knowing Raul was right, she might run from him but she would always have to come back. She was at the mercy of her own love for him, a love that she could never live without. It was as essential to life itself as the beat of her heart. Without Raul she was only half a person and yet with him she could never be truly complete because the part that needed his love would always be left empty and unfulfilled, like a raw, bleeding wound. But if she walked away now then her whole life would be that way. It wasn’t much of a choice but it was the only one that she had.
She’d said goodbye to him once and she had barely survived it. She had spent the next two years trying to cope without him and never managing it. Because of that she had fallen straight into his arms as soon as he had reappeared in her life. She couldn’t put herself through that again. It was one thing doing it blind as she had done the first time. Making herself face it again when she knew what the agony was like was emotional suicide.
In a choice between two agonies, then the misery of knowing that Raul didn’t love her was the one she could bear more than the desolation of knowing she would never, ever see him again.
She had thought that after this there was
no possibility of going through anything more, that she had endured every emotional upheaval she could possibly undergo. But the dreadful thing was that as she walked back into the room it was to find that Raul was still standing exactly where he had been before. The only thing that was different was that he had folded his arms across his chest as he stood there, waiting.
Just waiting.
He hadn’t troubled to take a single step after her or even try to stop her leaving.
He had known all the time that she would come back. Have to come back to him and accept his terms.
And he had just been waiting for her to do so.
CHAPTER TEN
FOUR months and not a sign of a baby.
Alannah sighed as she stared out of the window high up in the Castillo de Alcántara, her thoughts far away, her eyes not even seeing the dramatic silhouette of the Guadarrama Mountains where they rose high on the far horizon, way beyond the vineyards that gave the Marcín family so much of their wealth. When she had arrived here at the huge, sprawling, ancient castillo that was Raul’s family home, those mountains had been tipped with snow at the skyline. But as the time had passed, and the sun had grown stronger, the snow had gradually melted and disappeared.
Now, like the snow, those terrible days in the early spring when the tragedy of the car crash had brought Raul back into her life were slipping into the past and time had started to blur the memories of how bleak and devastating the loss had been. She had learned how to move on into life again. Even her mother had seemed to find a way, as someone had once said, to live around the hole where Chris had once been.
‘We can heal our families, Alannah.’
Once more Raul’s words sounded inside her head and in the privacy of her thoughts she acknowledged the fact that he had been right—so right—in his assessment of the situation. From the moment that she had told her mother that Raul had asked him to marry her, that they were planning on marrying as soon as possible and trying for a baby straight away, it was as if a new spark had lit inside Helena’s heart. She still grieved desperately for her beloved son, but there was a reason for living, a reason to get up every day, and she had welcomed it with open arms.
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