by Lynne Graham
Pale golden sand stretched in an unbroken arc all the way from the rocks at the lower end of the strand to the distant headland. On this particular day the sky was a moody almost purplish grey and the breeze was stiff. Head bent, she trudged down through the dunes.
‘Harriet…’
Her head flew up, copper hair flaming back across her pale brow and a flash of dismay in her very blue eyes.
‘How could you possibly not have seen me?’ Rafael looked down at her from the back of his big black gelding. ‘Why aren’t you riding Missy?’
‘Una adores her…’
He quirked a questioning brow and she understood his meaning completely.
‘She wouldn’t dream of commenting if I made equal use of Missy. But I remember how I felt about my first horse, and I think it’s nice for Una to have her all to herself.’
Rafael winced. ‘I can’t believe that I didn’t even think of buying her a horse of her own!’
Comfortable with the conversation, Harriet was already losing her pronounced tension in his presence. ‘Why should you have? As I recall, only a couple of months back you didn’t know how fond Una was of horses.’
In a fluid movement he slid down off the gelding’s back. His eyes sought hers and her mouth ran dry.
‘I love looking at the flowers that grow down here,’ she confided in a rush, nudging a pink lilac striped trumpet with her toe. ‘This is so pretty.’
‘That’s bindweed…’
The dark, deep timbre of his accented drawl wrapped round her like a prison chain. She walked over the cushioned tufts of thrift and down on to the flat sand that bore the imprint of the gelding’s hooves.
‘When my mother was well enough she would walk along the beach with me, naming the wild flowers and the shells. Sea holly and samphire, scallops and whelks,’ Rafael rhymed evenly. ‘I still remember the names.’
Her throat was tight, as if a lump was lodged at the foot of it. ‘Friends?’
‘No way,’ Rafael fielded. ‘I’m only trying to persuade that you don’t need to jump every time I come within six feet of you. You’re not in any danger. In these politically correct times only a stupid man would risk physical contact without clear signs of encouragement.’
Involuntarily she clashed with a scorching gaze that challenged her. Painful colour washed up over her fair complexion.
‘But the oddest thing is that you’re putting out very mixed signals,’ Rafael confided silkily.
‘Please don’t say that!’ Harriet retreated from him with a negative shake of her head that denied that contention, her nerves leaping like jumping beans. ‘You’re mistaken.’
‘If I was a very polite guy, I would agree that I was mistaken, but I won’t lie to you. In fact I would go so far as to say that you are doing enough lying for both of us. Be straight with me.’
‘Stop this now…just leave it alone!’ Harriet spun away from him. ‘I can’t understand why you’re keeping on at me!’
‘Can’t you?’ Rafael fell into step beside her. ‘Think of those long lazy evenings in Umbria when we talked over dinner and were still talking at dawn. Think of the fact that we never had a single argument—’
‘Oh, yes, we did—’
‘But only over complete trivialities. Remember when I brought you fresh cherries from the orchard and you said you had never been so happy.’
‘The fact you were always feeding me was very appealing to a woman who used to live on an almost permanent diet. The wine helped too,’ she put in shakily, memories bombarding her—memories she had refused to take out and examine on the grounds that it would be wrong to revel in what should never, ever have been allowed to happen between them in the first place.
‘It wasn’t the wine, it was the company. I didn’t get bored with you either.’
Harriet laughed, but the sound had an almost hysterical edge, and she was walking so incredibly fast that her calves were aching. She had reached the rocks at the end of the strand and there was nowhere else to go. She spun round to face him, angry at the pressure he was putting on her and torn apart by the most bitter sense of injustice. ‘What do you want me to say to you?’
‘I only want to know what really happened that day.’
‘Only!’ she echoed hollowly.
Rafael gazed down at her, the entire force of his will bent on persuading her to speak. ‘I deserve the truth.’
‘Nobody deserves the truth I got!’ Harriet almost yelled at him in her frustration, lack of sleep and misery combining to devastate her self-discipline.
Rafael kept up the pressure. ‘Why? What truth was that?’
‘That your father was my father as well!’ Having been betrayed into that admission, Harriet went limp, her eyes blank with shock, for she had reached breaking point without realising it. The forbidden words had flowed from her almost without her volition.
Rafael continued to study her with dark-as-night eyes, only the very stillness of his bronzed features revealing that he had heard what she had said. ‘What kind of nonsense is that?’
Her breath feathered in her throat. ‘I only wish it were…’
‘It’s a disgusting idea!’ Rafael reached down and closed both his hands squarely over hers. ‘Of course it is nonsense. How could it be anything else?’
Stress had momentarily drained her of energy and resolve. Her fingers flexed weakly in his. ‘That day I went to see my mother. She told me that Valente Cavaliere was my father.’
‘Your mother…?’
‘She has no idea that you live here, or that I know you or had got involved with you. In fact I don’t even know if she’s aware you exist. I’ve been asking her for quite a while to tell me who my father was…and finally she did, and she named Valente.’
‘It’s a filthy suggestion.’ His hands almost crushed hers, and with a muttered apology he released her fingers. ‘It is impossible.’
‘Is it?’ Harriet was clinging to his every word, hypnotised by every fleeting expression that crossed his lean darkly handsome face. ‘Is it impossible?’
‘It must be…For my sanity, it must be impossible.’ He swore vehemently. ‘Without prejudice, I can tell you that it is an unlikely possibility. My mother was alive when you were conceived. I don’t think Valente even came to Ireland during those years. He had nothing to do with my mother after the divorce. His staff brought me on my visits here—’
‘But why would my mother lie now, when she has kept my father’s identity a secret for almost thirty years?’
The healthy bronze of his skin was steadily retreating, to leave him ashen pale. But his eyes blazed. ‘You weren’t going to tell me.’
‘I shouldn’t have told you—’
‘Why? Am I a little child to be protected?’ Rafael raked back at her in raw condemnation, and it shook her because it was the first time she had seen him openly betray anger.
‘No. But what is the point in both of us feeling as we do now?’ Harriet whispered, in an agony of regret that she had failed to withstand his pressure. ‘We can’t change anything.’
Rafael stared down at her with fulminating intensity and then, without warning, he looked away from her again. He sucked in a stark, ragged breath. His stubborn jawline clenched hard; his beautifully moulded mouth flattened into a grim line. He was in severe shock. She recognised that. She could see him battening down the hatches and holding back on saying anything. She wanted to reach out and hold him, and knew she could not. In every fibre of her being she felt the pain that she had caused by failing to keep silent—and she despised her own weakness. He was as appalled and as utterly unprepared for that genetic bombshell as she had been.
‘I have to deal with this…’ Rafael breathed in a roughened undertone.
Jerkily she nodded, her eyes filled with tears, her hands clenched so tightly in on themselves that her fingers were numb. How could she have told him when there was no need for him to know?
‘Are you OK?’
Again she jerked
her head.
‘Of course you’re not.’ He sprang back into the saddle and she swung away to gaze out to sea at the breakers rolling in, for she did not trust herself to watch him ride back across the sand.
*
His half-sister. Rafael asked himself how he could deal with the unimaginable. He had never allowed himself to hate Valente. Hatred, like most uncontrolled emotion, was anathema to Rafael. He had despised Valente, and from adulthood on had triumphed over his father with superior intellect and self-discipline. But it seemed that Valente might have the last laugh after all. For his father was dead and untouchable and the past was unalterable. Rafael had to ask himself why Harriet’s mother would choose to tell such a lie after so many years. He discovered that he could not come up with one good reason.
The bottom line was simple: he could not have Harriet. He should never have had anything to do with Harriet, and he would never be able to be with Harriet again. Harriet was forbidden fruit. She could be his business partner only. How often would he see her in a business line? As a friend? Could he do the friend angle? If he had been the sort of guy who fell in love Harriet would have been the one, he acknowledged bleakly. He was so lucky he didn’t do love. At that point he went down to the cellar and dug out a bottle of brandy. He felt seriously weird, and thinking was making him feel worse. He decided that he would feel much better when he had drunk enough to blot out all rational thought. It was the first and last decision he made for some time.
*
Tolly called on Harriet that evening. He wasted no time in getting to the point of what had etched the furrows deep in his brow. ‘Rafael’s drinking and he’s a man who doesn’t drink. Is there something I should be knowing?’
Harriet went white and bent her head. ‘No.’
‘But it’s all off between you…?’
‘Yes.’
‘And obviously you’re both very happy about that.’
‘We have no choice,’ she said chokily, for she could not bear the idea that Rafael was alone and upset.
‘There’s always a choice.’
‘No. Sometimes it’s made for you and it’s very cruel!’ she bit out, and, excusing herself, fled into the office to hide her distress.
*
On the third day Albert the rooster wakened Rafael with a more than usually loud chorus. Rafael groaned. The previous forty-eight hours were a blur of nightmares and desolation. Enough was enough. He hauled himself out of bed and into the shower. Harriet. The thought of her hit him like a punch in the gut. Strong black coffee awaited him when he returned to the bedroom. Tolly was always one step in advance, he thought ruefully, grimacing at the ache in his head.
‘Breakfast…all your favourites,’ the old man promised him from the back of the hall, treading softly, as though he knew that only fierce will-power was keeping Rafael from resorting back to the fleeting oblivion offered by alcohol.
Rafael stared out at the beautiful timeless view that now had the folly as a central focus. He wondered what Harriet was doing. He pushed away his plate, all appetite fading. ‘After my parents divorced, how often did Valente visit Flynn Court?’
Tolly gave him a bemused look. ‘He didn’t.’
‘I know I have no memory of him visiting. But perhaps he came to the village and stayed somewhere else?’
‘Why would he have? As far as I know your father didn’t set foot in Ireland again until months after your mother was buried. I remember that first visit well,’ Joseph recalled with quiet assurance. ‘It was the talk of the village. He had a special memorial mass said for your mother at St Patrick’s. He had the house blessed. He was a superstitious man, and his conscience made him nervous. He came that once, and he was too uneasy to stay even one night below this roof. It was years more before he stayed again.’
‘How good is your memory?’ Rafael enquired.
‘As good as yours—perhaps even better.’
Dark eyes flashing with renewed energy, Rafael drew his plate back and began to eat. The old man’s memory tallied with what he himself had always believed to be fact. He could check it out. He could ask questions. But first and foremost he could bite the bullet and organise DNA tests. Harriet’s mother might not have lied, but there was a chance that she could be mistaken, wasn’t there? She would not be the first woman to make a false assumption.
‘Were there any rumours linking Valente to any woman apart from Una’s mother?’ Rafael enquired as an afterthought.
Tolly’s shrewd gaze narrowed. ‘None that I ever heard.’
Rafael drove down to the little church on the outskirts of the village. Although he had made liberal contributions to the restoration fund, he had not set foot there since his mother’s funeral, more than twenty years earlier. He went inside. He breathed in deep and slow and moved forward. He reached for a candle, lit it, and said a prayer to St Jude, patron saint of impossible causes. He needed a heavy-duty saint up to a major challenge.
‘Rafael…’ Father Kearney had come to a startled halt just inside the entrance. The little priest was striving to conceal his shock at finding the most stubborn black sheep in the parish on holy ground.
*
Harriet was discussing holistic schooling methods with a client when Rafael strolled into the stable yard. Inclining his handsome dark head in polite acknowledgement, he went into the office to wait for her.
Her client, the sensible mother of three little girls, expelled an ecstatic sigh and shot Harriet a comical grin of apology. ‘He looks just like a movie star. I know it’s rude to stare, but I always do.’
Harriet walked slowly past the loose boxes. Rafael made her want to stare as well. In Italy, every morning that she had wakened beside him she had looked at him with fresh appreciation. But now looking at Rafael with pleasure was yet another prohibited act. That admission made her feel more wretched than ever. Peanut pelted out of the office and across the cobbles in ecstatic pursuit of her ball. She was touched that Rafael had given way to the pig, and her eyes prickled with stupid tears.
Rafael straightened as she walked in. ‘OK…I want you to listen. I’m still not convinced we’re blood relations. The facts don’t tally enough to satisfy me yet—’
‘But—’
‘Exactly what did your mother tell you?’
Harriet shared the few facts that she had been told.
‘Valente didn’t smoke. It may well be the only vice he didn’t have,’ Rafael remarked drily. ‘And if he had been a smoker he would have sent his chauffeur to buy the cigarettes. He never did anything for himself that he could pay an employee to do for him.’
Harriet frowned uncomfortably. ‘Those are only small points.’
Level dark golden eyes rested on her. ‘I accept that. But we need to know if he was your father, and we need to know beyond all possible doubt. The only way of achieving that is by utilising DNA testing.’
‘No…I’ve spent two weeks struggling to come to terms with this, and chasing rainbows at this stage is pointless,’ she argued heavily. ‘I don’t like what my mother told me, but I’m not going to fight it. I’m accepting it.’
‘I don’t have an accepting attitude to very bad news. It will take DNA tests to convince me.’ Rafael banded an arm round her before she could guess his intention, and for an instant their reflections twinned in the age-spotted glass of the mirror above the fireplace. ‘Looks-wise, we could not be more different. I know that it’s possible for siblings to be dissimilar, but it’s rarely so pronounced. I’m into science, not chasing rainbows.’
Harriet tore her attention from the mirror. ‘I prefer just to close the book on what we’ve found out and live with it.’
‘But I require scientific confirmation. Valente left a sample of his DNA in store. Don’t laugh…my father hoped that one day he would be cloned. I will be DNA-tested too. It’s only a saliva swab. You may not want to take the test, but for my sake you must. Your identity should be fully established. After all, if you’re Valente’s kid too, yo
ur days of travelling economy class are over for ever.’
Harriet took an angry step back from him. ‘Don’t you dare say that!’ she told him in fierce repudiation. ‘I don’t want anything—least of all money. That’s the very last thing I’d be interested in. If I’d realised what my stupid questions were likely to dig up, I’d have happily lived a lifetime without knowing what I know now!’
‘Do you think that I feel any different? ‘The bleakness in his lustrous dark gaze swallowed her anger alive and pierced her deep.
Eaten alive by guilt, Harriet twisted away. ‘I’m so sorry…I should never have told you.’
‘You’re the only person I’ve ever met who thinks that she needs to protect me.’ Rafael vented a roughened laugh. ‘I’m not at all breakable.’
Harriet compressed her lips and tactfully passed no comment. But, after all, she wasn’t the one who had spent three days on an alcoholic binge! Under pressure, Tolly had kept her informed, and she had worried day and night about Rafael. She had been desperate to go to him and offer support, but the unhappy fact was that she had to be the last person he needed in such a role. Yet she was painfully aware that just seeing Rafael in any capacity lifted her spirits and made the day a little more bearable. In turn that made her feel guilty and ashamed and horribly weak.
‘Will you agree to the tests?’
‘Yes…if it makes you happier,’ she conceded.
‘Excellent. It’s organised for four this afternoon at the Court.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Today?’
‘I want the testing done quickly and discreetly. The results will take a few days to come back.’
The tests were done within minutes of her arrival at the Court. The bespectacled chemist who performed the simple procedure behaved as though there was nothing out of the ordinary about it. Rafael accompanied Harriet back out to her car. ‘Do you ever wear the brooch I gave you?’
