appointments for the last few days.”
He looked a little abashed. “The woman who answered the phone said something but I wasn’t listening.”
So he wasn’t lying. The frustration in his eyes was too real.
“You must’ve spoken to Amy, the winery’s PA. Roland was her fiancé.” Poor, poor Amy. She would almost certainly not have remembered to tell Phillip about any appointment. She was perilously close to a breakdown. “So I’m sorry, but Phillip probably didn’t get the message.” But that still didn’t excuse Rafaelo’s harsh behaviour. “Once you realised that a memorial ceremony was taking place, couldn’t you have left?”
“So the memorial service is for Roland? The eldest son?”
His face wore a strange expression. Caitlyn gave up trying to decipher what it meant. “Yes, Roland died in a car accident, several weeks ago.” The night of the annual Saxon’s Folly masked ball. “A terrible tragedy.”
“My condolences.” He bowed his head. Briefly. Politely. Then, like a dog with a bone, continued, “I have travelled many miles, I came with a purpose—I’d made an appointment. I wasn’t to know Saxon knew nothing of it. Nor do I have any intention of turning tail and leaving without fulfilling that purpose.”
“That’s it? That’s all you can say?” Caitlyn stared at him in disbelief. “After that confrontation you just forced?”
“I had no intention of forcing a confrontation—it was you who provoked that.”
He gave her a frown filled with dislike. Caitlyn opened her mouth, then shut it again. Oh, why hadn’t she stayed out of it?
Yet she knew that would’ve been impossible. She’d taken one look at the tall, dark foreigner, heard the sardonic edge to his voice as he harangued Phillip and she’d leapt into the fray to protect her employer. Hell, Phillip was more than an employer. He was her sounding board…her mentor…a dear friend.
“You must understand that the Saxons are like family to me.” It was true. “I could no more leave you to bully Phillip than I could walk away from a delinquent drowning a kitten.”
“I am not a bully,” he growled, blood rushing under his olive skin. “I am not a delinquent. I do not drown kittens. I am a man of honour, something that your employer is not. I would never leave a young woman pregnant and alone.”
Suddenly aware of his height and the strength of him as he loomed over her, Caitlyn felt a whisper of fear and took a step back.
He followed, relentlessly closing the space she’d claimed. “I wanted to face my cowardly father with the fact that he has a son he has never cared to acknowledge—and a woman who he had abandoned without giving her any emotional or financial support.”
Another step and the whitewashed wall of the stables pressed against her back; Caitlyn could feel the roughness of the plaster through the linen jacket. She swallowed nervously. “Maybe he didn’t know—”
“He knew!” Rafaelo loomed over her, dark and menacing, and planted a balled fist on either side of her head. “My mother wrote to him when she first learned she was pregnant.”
“Perhaps—” Her voice cracked as he bent forward. Up close the snapping eyes were full of anger, his mouth drawn into a hard line that highlighted the small white scar below his bottom lip. No sign showed of the good humour that the laugh lines around his eyes suggested.
She didn’t know this man at all.
He was a stranger.
What had possessed her to seek out privacy far from everyone else? Caitlyn swallowed again, horribly conscious of how isolated they were here in the empty stable yard.
Bravely she found her voice. “Perhaps the letter went astray.”
“My mother wrote to him again, she was desperate. Is it likely that two letters went astray? New Zealand is, after all, hardly Mars.”
The turmoil in his eyes twisted Caitlyn’s insides into a knot and her anxiety about her own safety subsided. She fell silent. It did sound bad. But she couldn’t believe Phillip would act so callously. Despite Rafaelo’s accusations, she knew Phillip was a man of honour, a decent man, respected throughout the region for his business acumen and the fund-raising he did for charity.
She had to make Rafaelo understand that.
But before she could try to convince him, he pushed his hands away from the wall. The suffocating space between them widened, and Caitlyn sucked in a breath of relief.
“My mother even contacted him by telephone. Phillip Saxon made it clear that he wasn’t interested in the child he had fathered, told my mother that he wouldn’t be leaving his wife.” There was a corrosive bitterness beneath that exotic accent.
Caitlyn glimpsed pain and suppressed rage in his expressive eyes. Unbidden, her hand came up, driven by an urge to rest it on his shoulder, to comfort him. Then the memory of his head bending over hers—of the suffocating closeness of a moment ago—returned and a sharp sliver of the poisonous fear pierced her. Hastily she dropped her hand to her side.
“There must have been some mistake,” she whispered at last, thinking the response that he roused in her was definitely a mistake. She didn’t want, or need, this.
“It was no mistake. Phillip Saxon abandoned her.”
The edge in his voice took her mind off her body’s incomprehensible reaction and made her think about what it must have been like for his mother to find herself alone and pregnant. Three decades ago it would have been worse; society had been much less accepting.
Yet Caitlyn couldn’t help the wave of sympathy for Kay that flooded her. Poor Kay! How humiliating this must be. How horrible to discover her husband’s betrayal of their marriage vows at a time when she was struggling to come to terms with grief over the loss of her son.
In front of her Rafaelo shifted, his eyes unseeing, focused on an inner hell.
The last lingering vestige of apprehension left her. Caitlyn stepped away from the wall. “You’re not the only one who has suffered.” Surely Rafaelo would see that he had more in common with his father than he believed? “Phillip lost a son recently. Can’t you find it in yourself to show him pity?”
“I’m well aware that I am not the only person to suffer bereavement.” From this close her eyes were level with his mouth. His mouth…
Quickly she glanced up, only to find Rafaelo looking down his haughty nose at her. At once Caitlyn realised that he’d misunderstood her.
“I meant both of you are grieving. Perhaps you can offer comfort—”
“I have no intention of offering him anything,” Rafaelo growled. “I owe him nothing. Nada.”
Caitlyn’s cheeks grew hot at his stubborn intransigence. “He’s your father, and he’s just lost a son. Why don’t y—”
The black eyebrows jerked together. Something violent flashed in the depths of his stormy eyes. “Phillip Saxon is not my real father. My father is dead. My
