by Lynne Graham
Sweeping her up, Raul settled her into the saddle, where she hunched in sudden complete terror.
‘I can’t ride... Raul, do you hear me? I can’t ride!’ Polly cried.
‘I know...’ Raul murmured, so softly she had to strain to hear him as he shortened the stirrups and slotted her feet into them. ‘I’d have to be a complete idiot not to know.’
‘You kn-know?’ Polly gasped in disbelief as he swung up on El Lobo with fluid ease.
‘Dios mío...how could I not guess? Your body language around the horses yesterday was not that of an experienced horsewoman. And I could hardly miss the fact that you hadn’t a clue what I was talking about,’ Raul delineated very drily.
Polly turned a dull red. ‘I thought you’d find it a complete bore if I admitted I was a greenhorn.’
His stunning dark golden eyes gleamed with grim amusement. ‘Are you really so naive about men? Is there any male who doesn’t relish imparting his superior knowledge of a subject to a woman?’
‘I told Patrick I couldn’t ride last night...he offered to take me through the basics this morning,’ she volunteered in an embarrassed rush. ‘It was stupid of me.’
In response, Raul shot her a chilling glance as piercing as an arrow of ice. His lean, strong face was hard. ‘Infierno! I suspected something of the sort last night. Let me tell you now that I do not expect my wife to make furtive assignations with my employees!’
‘It wasn’t an assign—’
‘And from now on you will ensure that you are never in Patrick Gorman’s company without the presence of a third party.’
Thoroughly taken aback, Polly exclaimed, ‘Don’t be ridiculous! ’
His brilliant eyes flashed. ‘As your husband, I have the right to demand a certain standard of behaviour from you.’
Polly was outraged and mortified. ‘But you’re being totally unreasonable. “The presence of a third party”!’ she repeated in a fuming undertone of incredulity.
‘If you disobey me, I’ll dismiss him.’
Raul held her shaken eyes with fierce intensity, and then simply switched channels by telling her that she was sitting on the mare’s back like a seasick sack of potatoes. The riding lesson which followed stretched Polly’s selfdiscipline to the limits. She had to rise above that abrasive exchange and concentrate on his instructions, and Raul had high expectations.
Finally, Raul led her out onto the Ilanos at a walking pace. ‘You’re doing very well for a greenhorn, mi esposa,’ he drawled, surprising her.
Polly focused on his darkly handsome features. As her tummy lurched with reaction, she despised herself. Not an hour ago Raul had been talking like a Middle Eastern potentate who thought no woman could be trusted alone with a man.
A frown line forming between his brows, Raul reined in his mount a few minutes later. A rider was approaching them—an elderly llanero with a bristling silver moustache, clad in an old-fashioned poncho and a wide-brimmed hat.
Raul addressed him in Spanish.
‘My grandfather, Fidelio Navarro,’ he told Polly flatly.
With a sober look of acknowledgement, his posture in the saddle rigid, the older man responded in softly spoken Spanish. He was as unyielding as Raul. Polly glanced between them in frustration. Raul and his grandfather greeted each other like strangers, each as scrupulously formal and rigid with unbending pride as the other.
Polly leant out of the saddle to extend her hand, a warm and determined smile on her face. After some hesitation, Fidelio Navarro moved his mount closer and briefly clasped her hand. ‘It would please me very much if you came to see our son, Luis,’ Polly said quietly.
‘He doesn’t speak English,’ Raul breathed icily.
Not daring to look at him, conscious that he was angrily disconcerted by her intervention, Polly tilted her chin. ‘Then please translate my invitation. And could you also tell him that as I have neither parents nor grandparents living, it would mean a great deal to me if Luis was given the chance to know his great-grandfather?’
Silence followed, a silence screaming with tension and Raul’s outright incredulity.
Then Raul spoke at some length. His grandfather met Polly’s hopeful gaze and sombrely replied.
‘He thanks you for your warmth and generosity,’ Raul interpreted woodenly. ‘He will think the idea over.’
But there had been more than that in Fidelio’s sun-creased dark eyes: a slight defrosting of his discomfiture, an easing of the rigidity round his unsmiling mouth. As they parted to ride off in different directions, she heard Raul release his breath in a stark hiss.
‘Caramba! How can you justify such interference in what is nothing to do with you?’ Raul gritted in a tone of raw disbelief that actually shook with the strength of his emotion. ‘Do you think I have not already invited him to my home without success?’
‘Well, if you glower at him like that when you ask, I’m not surprised. Maybe he thought you were only asking out of politeness, privately recognising the relationship without really wanting to get any closer...’ Daringly, Polly proffered her own suspicions. ‘I think you and Fidelio are both so scared of losing face that you’re afraid to talk frankly to each other.’
‘I am afraid of nothing, and how you can dare—’
‘I did it for Luis,’ Polly lied, because she had spoken up first and foremost for Raul’s benefit—Raul, who definitely wanted closer ties with his grandfather. ‘Neither of us have any other family to offer him.’
‘What do I know about family?’ Raul growled, spurring on El Lobo in the direction of the ranch.
‘What do I know either?’ Polly thought of her own less than perfect childhood, with her controlling, judgemental father. ‘But we are a family now, and we can learn like everybody else!’
‘A family?’ Raul repeated in frowning acknowledgement, and with perceptible disconcertion. ‘I suppose we are.’
Only sparing the time to inform her that they were leaving for his villa on the Caribbean coast that afternoon, Raul took his leave. Polly went for a bath to ease her tired muscles. It was all swings and roundabouts with Raul, she thought heavily. One moment he was alienating her with his tyrannical and utterly unreasonable threat to dismiss Patrick Gorman simply because she had unthinkingly stepped over the formal boundary lines Raul expected her to maintain. And the next?
The next, Raul was filling her with an almost overwhelming desire to close her arms round him in comfort and reassurance. For Raul, she recognised, the years between birth and adulthood had been dogged by traumatic experiences.
What had it been like for him? The son of Eduardo Zaforteza’s mistress, his mother isolated by a relationship that had been flaunted rather than more acceptably concealed. Behind her lover’s back, Pilar must have been shunned and despised, and how had that affected Raul? Until his father had adopted him, nothing had been certain or safe in Raul’s life.
Raul must have developed his own defences at an early age. After his mother’s death, he’d lived as a bitter bone of contention in a destructive, acrimonious marriage. He had once remarked that in disputes between couples the child was often the weapon, that she had to know that as well as he did, only at the time she hadn’t picked up on what he was telling her about his own background. In the same way, she remembered his unexpected outrage when she had made a crack about what he might consider a ‘decent mother’. She had never dreamt what a sensitive subject that might be, and now winced at the recollection.
Finally she was beginning to understand the man she loved, but her dismay increased in proportion to that new understanding. At some stage in that damaged childhood and adolescence Raul had begun protecting himself, by keeping emotional ties that might threaten his equanimity on a superficial level. It showed in his relationships with women, even in his hopelessly defensive attitude to his estranged grandfather. He didn’t risk himself, he held back, and yet he didn’t hold back with Luis, Polly conceded painfully. He loved their son with unashamed intensity, and was conte
nt, indeed happy to focus his emotions on their child.
And that meant that she herself was still chasing hopes that were unattainable. Raul would never love her. If their marriage was to survive, she had to get her priorities in order and stop expecting more from Raul than he was capable of giving her. And yet, according to Melina, a little voice gibed with cruel effect, he had loved her...
Sprawled with elegant indolence on the rattan seating, a look of amusement on his bronzed features, Raul studied Polly while she watched the dancers on the beach with unconcealed fascination. The tambores—African drums made out of hollow logs—supplied the frenzied beat for the male and female figures twisting and shaking with abandonment.
‘I thought you would enjoy this,’ Raul murmured with lazy satisfaction. ‘That’s why I organised it.’
Meeting his stunning dark golden eyes, Polly burned. She had to drag her attention back to the dancers. The intensely sensual movements of the gyrating couples were becoming ever wilder.
Raul curved a long arm round her and she felt her whole body quicken with instant awareness. Over the past twelve days Raul had taught her to value every hour that they spent together, and every morning she got up, apprehensively waiting for him to announce that they were leaving the villa. After all, this coming weekend the fiesta would be held at the ranch. But right now Polly wanted time to stand still, because here nothing else seemed to touch them.
Raul made a lot of phone calls and used a computer to stay in touch with the world of business, but he was with her almost all the time, more relaxed and less restless and driven than she had ever known him to be. He never seemed bored. In fact he was rather like he had been in Vermont, she registered, with slight surprise at that acknowledgement. Talking to her, interested in her, amusing, entertaining, even tender, all the tension gone, the sole difference being that sexual intimacy now deepened their relationship.
As the dance appeared to be reaching a climax, Polly was astonished when another woman stepped in. With frantically twitching hips she shoved the original female dancer away from the male and triumphantly took her place.
‘A comment on the fickleness of the male sex,’ Raul drawled, amused at her bemused frown over such an unromantic development. ‘You’re so innocent, querida.’
Not so innocent, Polly reflected tensely, enervated by that unexpected change of partners that came too close for comfort to her own deepest fears.
How long was she going to live with the secret terror that Raul might some day return to his discreet liaison with Melina D’Agnolo? Melina had already made it abundantly clear that she was prepared to wait for him, and no doubt she was equally ready to do whatever it might take to get him back. When would fidelity become a challenge to a male who didn’t love her? At what stage would her novelty value in the marital bed become boring and predictable? Disturbed by the insecure thoughts with which she was tormenting herself, Polly shut them down.
After thanking the dancers, they went back indoors to the marbled splendour of the spacious villa. Set beside a secluded palm-fringed beach of golden sand, complete with crystal-clear water to bathe in, the villa rejoiced in the surroundings of a tropical paradise.
They tiptoed in to see Luis, out for the count in his cot. Raul curved his arms round her from behind. ‘He really is special,’ he said huskily.
‘Naturally...he’s yours,’ Polly teased. ‘And because he’s your son, he is the most super-intelligent and advanced baby on this planet!’
‘You think so too, querida,’ he reminded her in a sensual growl as he slowly spun her round to crush her soft, willing mouth hungrily under his own. Her body sang with feverish hot excitement.
He carried her through to their bedroom and settled her on the bed, standing over her, intent golden eyes roaming over her slender length with the bold and unashamed desire that never failed to ease her secret fears. How could Raul want her so much and have room to even think of any other woman? How could he make love to her day after day and night after night with a seemingly insatiable appetite for her body and find anything lacking in her?
In heaven, Polly closed her eyes as he peeled off her clothes, piece by tantalising piece, pausing to kiss and caress every newly revealed curve and line of her until there wasn’t a single part of her quivering, wantonly aroused being that didn’t ache for him to possess her.
‘I’m going to teach you to dance like that with me,’ Raul murmured.
Polly’s eyes opened very wide on his devastatingly handsome face. He actually looked serious.
‘But only in private. I don’t want anyone else seeing the way you look at me, the way you move against me...’ he admitted hoarsely.
He was so intense about sex. In fact, for someone who had informed her that sex was merely another physical appetite, Raul seemed to be set on proving that every time he touched her it was another variation on an endlessly fascinating theme that pretty much absorbed him more with every passing day. He couldn’t keep his hands off her. He had gone from being a male who was not remotely tactile out of bed to a male who usually had her anchored in some way to him no matter where they were.
She framed his cheekbones with possessive hands and let the tip of her tongue dart provocatively between his lips. With a groan of hunger, Raul practically flattened her to the bed and kissed her with a fierce sexual need that melted her skin over her bones. And all cool was abandoned at that point.
A long while later, she lay limp with satiation while Raul abstractedly wound a strand of her hair round a long brown forefinger. ‘Tell me about the first time you fell in love,’ he invited without warning.
Polly glanced at him in surprise. Raul didn’t ask things like that. And it was an awkward question. One crush and one short-lived infatuation were all she had to talk about, barring himself.
He shrugged a bare bronzed shoulder. ‘Curiosity.’
‘He was called—’
‘I don’t want to know his name,’ Raul intervened instantly, jawline hardening.
Somewhat disconcerted by that interruption, Polly breathed, ‘Yes...er, well, he was another student—’
‘I don’t need to know that either... what I want to know is how you felt,’ Raul stressed.
‘How I...felt,’ Polly echoed. ‘Silly and dizzy, and then gutted about covers it. The minute I got to know what he was really like, I couldn’t understand what I’d seen in him.’
‘You fell out of love again that fast... what did he do?’ Raul enquired darkly, raising himself up to stare down at her.
‘He hustled me into a bedroom one lunchtime and told me it was my lucky day.’
She now had Raul’s interest. ‘You’re kidding?’
‘When I said no, he got abusive. He thought I’d be a push-over.’
‘Major misjudgement,’ Raul framed, a slight shake in his dark, deep voice. ‘How old was this guy?’
‘Nineteen.’
‘All teenage boys think about is scoring.’
‘You weren’t much older when you and Melina... I mean—’ Biting back the remainder of that impulsive remark, Polly coloured at the sudden narrowing of the shrewd dark eyes above hers. ‘Well, she mentioned you’d once been an item.’
‘Did she really?’ His black spiky lashes screened his gaze, his wide, sensual mouth hardening on that information.
Polly lowered her eyes, more disturbed by that silence than she would have been by any explanation. Why was it that the unknown was always so much more threatening?
‘We’ll fly home on Friday morning,’ Raul informed her.
‘But the fiesta...’ Polly groaned, torn between relief and anxiety. ‘There must be loads of arrangements to make, and I haven’t even made a start—’
‘After all these years of practice, the staff could stage it on their own.’ Rolling over onto his back, Raul reached for her again. His gleaming scrutiny raked over her pink face with unsettling efficiency. ‘Have I ever told you how extraordinarily expressive those gorgeous blue eyes are,
mi esposa?’ he asked huskily. ‘Do you know they close every time I kiss you?’
Polly studied him with the focused intensity of a woman in love, a kind of agony coiling tight as a spring inside her. If he betrayed her, she would die. If their marriage ended, her future would end with it. She could not bear to think of life without him. She wanted to cling like a vine, but clinging would be as much out of order as probing personal questions which might well have answers she’d be better off not hearing.
And suddenly he was kissing her again, evoking a wild hunger that clawed at her slim body, awakening all over again that frantic, feverish, elemental need that overwhelmed every restraint and blanked out every thought.
Polly woke up alone on the morning of their departure. There was nothing unusual about that. It was a challenge to keep Raul in bed after dawn. Early rising and a twohour break at midday were the norm in Venezuela. Trying not to feel sad that they were leaving the villa, she went for a shower.
As she leafed through a wardrobe that had grown mightily in size since leaving the ranch, she hugged precious memories of their stay to herself. Strolling hand in hand along the Paseo Colón boulevard in Puerta la Cruz, enjoying the cool breezes coming in off the ocean; speeding in a motor launch through the eerie mangroves in the Mochina National Park; eating crispy churros with hot chocolate for breakfast and supper on Margarita Island; driving up to Caracas to shop in the CCCT and Paseo las Mercedes malls, discovering that there was such a thing as a male who loved shopping and indeed that there were no greater worshippers of the consumer society or the art of being beautiful than the Venezuleans.
She was happy—yes, she had to admit it, she was very, very happy. Feeling good in a beautifully tailored leafgreen short skirt and top, she glanced into Luis’s room and smiled at the sight of the empty cot. Luis was probably sitting in his infant seat watching his father work and enjoying a somewhat one-sided conversation in between times.
