him. ‘Why pretend? We’re both adults now, and I know that you take your pleasure where and when you find it… and with any man who attracts you.’
Oxygen rasped in her throat and she trembled under the onslaught of that character assassination, fighting off the memories threatening to assail her. ‘How dare you?’
Insolent dark eyes mocked her ferocious tension and her sudden pronounced pallor. He lifted his other hand calmly and ran a forefinger along the full curve of her taut lower lip. ‘Does it scare you that I know you for what you are? Why should that matter? We don’t have to like each other, we don’t even have to talk,’ he murmured in a deep, dark voice. ‘I just want you in that bed under me once…and I really don’t care if it is sordid, I’ll still be the best lover you’ve ever had.’
The fingertip grazing her lip was sending tiny little shivers through her. Georgie tried and failed to swallow. She couldn’t believe what he was saying to her. She just couldn’t get her mind round the shock of such a proposal. ‘You have to be joking…’
He laughed softly. ‘You were always so honest… in this, if nothing else,’ he breathed, with a sudden edge of harshness roughening his intonation. ‘You want me. I want you. Why should we not make love?’
Georgie shuddered with barely concealed fury, but beneath the fury was a pain she flatly refused to acknowledge. ‘Because I don’t want you! I’m not that desperate!’ she spelt out hotly, and jerked free of him, ashamed that her breasts were swollen and full beneath her wispy bra, ashamed that it should actually have taken will-power to step back, and ashamed that for a split-second she had allowed herself to think of that intimacy she had once craved with the man she loved.
Yes, loved—why continue to pretend otherwise when even he knew just how deeply she had been involved? A small sop to pride? ‘We’re both adults now.’ The ultimate humiliation and he just hadn’t been able to resist the temptation. She was good enough for a sleazy roll in a grotty hotel room, not good enough for anything else, and even with all that smooth sophistication and experience at his fingertips he hadn’t bothered to wrap up that reality.
‘I’d like you to leave,’ Georgie said with as much dignity as she could muster, and it was not a lot.
‘I’ll won’t visit you in London. There will be no second chance. You see, I know where you live,’ he spelt out with sizzling bite, his dark golden features rigidly cast.
Georgie lived in a tiny attic flat of a terraced house which belonged to her stepbrother, Steve. But the significance of Rafael’s reference to that fact quite escaped her. What did where she lived have to do with anything? she wondered briefly, but she was in such turmoil that the oddity of the comment as quickly left her mind again.
She was enraged by the awareness that Rafael had not expected her to refuse that sordid proposition. Rafael had actually expected her to spread herself willingly on the bed. Her narrow shoulders rigid, she turned back to him. ‘Just forget where I live’
‘I try to.’ Rafael dealt her a chilling look of derision, his nostrils flaring. ‘But why else did you come to Bolivia? You knew we would meet again…and that was what you wanted, es verdad?’
Georgie was stunned by his arrogance. ‘Like hell it was! I want nothing to do with you… absolutely nothing!’
‘Prove it,’ he taunted, reaching out without warning to drag her up against him with an easy strength that shook her.
‘Get your hands off me!’ she gasped.
But his mouth crashed down on hers, hard, hungry, hot, forcing her lips apart. And, for Georgie, the world rocked right off its axis, dredging a shocked whimper of sound from deep in her throat. Every physical sense she possessed was violently jolted. His tongue expertly probed the sensitive interior of her mouth, blatantly imitating an infinitely more intimate penetration, and her bones turned to water and she quivered and moaned, electrified by the fierce excitement he awakened. He crushed her slender length to him with bruising hands and she gasped, her thighs trembling, an unbearable ache stirring low in her stomach.
Rafael lifted his dark head slowly. ‘Do I take you on that bed or do I take you to the airport?’ he prompted silkily, blatant masculine satisfaction in the narrowed gaze scanning her rapt face. ‘The choice is yours.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘THE airport?’ Georgie repeated blankly, endeavouring to return to rational thought and finding it unbelievably difficult.
‘For your flight home,’ Rafael extended, with a slashing and sardonic smile.
‘But I’m not going home.’ Georgie broke slowly from the loosened circle of his arms, still reeling from the effects of his lovemaking and trying very hard not to show just how shattered she was by the response he had dredged from her. She was in shock. ‘I’m going to stay with Maria Christina.’
‘My sister is in California.’
‘California?’ Georgie parroted after a shattered pause. Incredulously she stared at him. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Antonio’s mother lives there and Maria Cristina and Rosa are very close,’ Rafael explained smoothly. ‘My sister is expecting her first child and, since her own mother is dead, it is natural that she should want Rosa’s support at such a time.’
Georgie was in a daze. ‘But I received a letter from her less than two weeks ago, inviting me over here. She hoped I’d still be here when she had her baby!’
‘She only decided to go to San Francisco last week. She couldn’t have been expecting you to come.’ Rafael exhibited a magnificent disregard for her natural distress.
‘It was a last-minute decision and I got cancellation tickets,’ Georgie conceded tautly. ‘I tried to phone her the night before the flight but she wasn’t in—’
‘But you came all the same,’ Rafael drawled with an ironic lack of surprise.
‘I wanted to surprise her!’ Georgie slung back. ‘Why didn’t you tell me immediately? Obviously you knew I was here to stay with your sister—’
‘I had hoped you were not that foolish. I told you to stay away from Maria Cristina four years ago,’ he reminded her with grim emphasis. ‘It is a most unsuitable friendship and I made my feelings clear then ’
‘Stuff your bloody feelings!’ Georgie gasped, suddenly swinging away from him, her voice embarrassingly choked. ‘My friendship with Maria Cristina is none of your business.’
Her bruised eyes were filled with tears. So this was what it felt like to be at the end of her tether. She had really been looking forward to staying with her friend. This disappointment was the last straw. She also knew that, as a recently graduated student teacher, who had yet to find employment, it would be many years before she could hope to repeat such an expensive trip.
It was unlikely that Maria Cristina would come to London under her own steam. Rafael’s sister was very much a home-bird, who had only tolerated her English boarding-school education because it had been her late mother’s wish and who had freely admitted that she hadn’t the faintest desire to ever leave Bolivia again once her education was completed. Her marriage to a doctor, no more fond of travelling than she was, had set the seal on that insularity.
‘Anything
