mumbled something incomprehensible in Spanish.
Sarah bent down to lift her daughter, smoothing a hand over her tousled black curls. Gilly pressed her face into her mother’s shoulder. ‘Who’s dat man?’
‘Never mind.’ Curving protective arms tightly round Gilly’s hot little body, she attempted to brush past Rafael.
A bruising set of fingers closed over her shoulder. ‘She called you Mama. Who does she belong to? Es imposible. Speak!’ he pressed fiercely.
Tearing free of his punishing hold, Sarah sped into the hall. Her sole concern was Gilly. Gilly must not be exposed to Rafael. She’d sink a knife between his ribs before she’d let him come within twenty feet of either of her children! He had accused her of aborting their child. Of course, he couldn’t believe that! A piece of nonsense, that was what it was! Some sly, sneaky gambit aimed at explaining away a four-year uninterest in fatherhood? He must think she was mentally deficient. Well, she wasn’t and where her children were concerned she would fight like a lioness. Had natural curiosity finally pierced his tough hide? Well, it was too late. He was nearly five years too late. He wasn’t walking in here now to exercise rights he had surrendered of his own free will…no way was he doing that!
Her hands were shaking so violently that she had trouble in covering Gilly up again. Her daughter was much too sleepy to notice the state she was in. ‘Is it gone away?’ she mumbled.
‘Far, far away,’ Sarah soothed tremulously, scanning the other single bed with frightened eyes. Ben was just a bump under the duvet, not a centimetre of him in sight. In sleep, Ben was a burrower. Gilly was a sprawler, kicking the bedding off while she slept.
Rafael was blocking her exit from the bedroom. She raised her hands. ‘You can’t come in here.’
He wasn’t moving anywhere. Neither forward nor back. ‘Madre de Dios,’ he muttered weakly, lapsing into Spanish, accented syllables rising and falling disjointedly.
Her palms planted against his broad chest. She thrust him bodily from the room, hauling the door closed behind her, denying him even the view. In none of these instinctive reactions did she recognise herself. Fear and rage were consuming her in equal parts. ‘Go!’ she gasped. ‘I don’t want you here!’
A brown hand collided abruptly with her shoulder, forcing her back to the wall. ‘My daughter…she’s got black hair. She has to be mine. She has to be!’ he grated.
‘Not yours. Not unless you can call basic biology paternity!’
Hooded tiger’s eyes bore down on her. ‘And the other one?’
‘Twins!’ she snapped.
A flaring, incredulous fury had entered his dark features. Before she could retreat, he slammed a hand to the wall an inch or two from her ear. The reverbation tremored through her pounding temples. He frightened her half out of her wits. ‘So you lied to me. All of you lied! The abortion story? A lie. Por dios, a lie!’ he vented in the soaring crescendo of all-encompassing black fury. ‘All this time, all these years a lie to enable you to steal my children from me. You think you can do this with impunity? You think I would let a frozen vixen raise my own flesh and blood? For this you will pay. You will lose them. I will take them away.’
Sarah was beyond understanding a tithe of what was happening to her. She grasped only that final, searing threat. ‘You can’t do that!’
He withdrew his hands. ‘I will see you and your family in court. I have papers. There is no reference to my children. I have proof of what has been done to me. No judge will award custody to a woman who is both a liar and a cheat!’
Sarah gazed at him in horror. He wasn’t even looking at her. He was heading out of the door. She raced after him, heedless of her bare feet. In panic she clutched at the sleeve of his jacket and he shook her off in violent repudiation. ‘Liar!’ he roared at her loud enough to wake the entire building.
But still she skidded in his wake. The instinct to pursue was her only driving purpose. When the lift doors slotted closed, she fled down the stairs two at a time, round and round and round again until she charged dizzily across the small, polished foyer.
‘Mrs Southcott!’ The security man exclaimed, jumping out of his seat to follow her.
A black Lamborghini raked off down the street with the speed of a jet on a runway. Sarah stood in the centre of the pavement, strands of pale hair falling round her fevered cheeks.
‘What happened?’
Dumbly she faced the anxious guard, not at all sure what she was doing outside in the evening air. ‘Nothing…nothing,’ she said again.
Shivering, she stepped into the lift. Angela’s mother was standing at her flat door, peering in. ‘I heard someone shouting. My goodness, you look dreadful! My dear,’ she gushed.
‘I’m sorry if you were disturbed.’ Sarah backed hurriedly into her own flat and shut the door.
How had her tranquil world suddenly exploded into a nightmare? Rafael had uttered insane threats. Why had she panicked? But questions without viable answers were circulating in her spinning head. Rafael did not tell lies. Not even social lies. In times gone by he had used blunt candour as a weapon against her parents, watching them reel in civilised shock from the stinging bite of unapologetic honesty.
A monstrous suspicion was growing in her mind. She relived Rafael’s shattered response to Gilly’s appearance, his floundering speech…his silence. She remembered the documents she had signed unread almost five years ago. I have proof, Rafael had hurled in challenge. And if that was true, it meant that her father had deliberately concealed the twins’ birth by ensuring that no mention of them appeared on paper. That thought plunged her into a black hole and spawned other thoughts that brought her out in a cold sweat of fear.
Had Rafael ever received her letter? No matter what her father had done, she had still had faith in her mother. What choice had she had? When you were ill, you were dependent on others. A damp chill enclosed her body. Tomorrow she would have to tackle her parents. There had to be some reasonable explanation, there just had to be. Somewhere along the line a misunderstanding had occurred and Rafael had been the victim. But as she lay sleepless in her bed, her mind revolving in frantic, frightened circles, she failed to see just how such a gross misinterpretation of past events could innocently have taken place.
And try as she might she could not help but remember that fateful three weeks in Paris. A tide of colourful, unforgettable impressions was surging back to her. The intriguing bookstalls on the corner of the Pont au Double; the evocative scent of the mauve blossoms weighting the empress trees on the Rue de Furstenberg; the dazzling array of fresh fruit and vegetables at the Mouffetard market; the sinfully sweet taste of Tunisian honey cakes from the Rue de la Huchette…
In her final year at school, she had been lonely and isolated, too quick to grasp at any overture of friendship. She had blocked out the awareness that her classmates thought Margo a spiteful, unpleasant girl. Margo’s invitation had been a much-needed confidence booster, her subsequent behaviour a painful slap on the face.
Margo had invited her to Paris solely to please her widowed father. On the day of her arrival, the other girl had made it resentfully obvious that Sarah would not have been her choice of a holiday companion.
‘Dad thinks you’ll cramp my style
