in here, taking over…’
‘Maldito sea! I felt responsible.’
It was the last thing she had expected and it stopped her dead, her eyes wide and stunned, her soft mouth actually falling open a little in shock.
‘You? Responsible? But how?’
The look he turned on her made her stomach quail nauseously. Suddenly she wished she’d never opened her big mouth.
‘It was my car.’
‘Your…’
Through the tumult of emotion inside her head she couldn’t begin to interpret the inflexion he put on the words, the feeling behind them. But she couldn’t stop herself from reacting purely instinctively, recoiling back against the pillow, all colour leaching from her face, one hand coming up to cover her trembling mouth.
‘You—you were driving?’
‘Dios, no! I wasn’t even in England at the time, but my—’ He caught himself up sharply, seeming to hunt for the right words. ‘It was my car that was involved in the accident.’
‘Your car…’ Slowly Serena lowered her protective hand, sitting back up a little, but her face was still clouded with confusion. ‘Was I driving?’
‘No. You were a passenger.’ It was curt to the point of rudeness, obviously deeply reluctant.
‘Then what…? How…?’
‘Miss Martin…’ Rafael used cold formality to freeze her out, stop her questioning in its tracks. ‘May I remind you that I have been instructed not to give you the full facts about your accident? Doctor’s orders, I believe you say.’
But now she was really worried. Being left to remember in her own time was one thing. This dreadful feeling that something was being kept from her because it would be too upsetting to know it quite another.
‘But why? Did something awful happen? Who was the driver? Where is he—she—now?’
‘Miss Martin—Serena…’
‘Rafael!’ It was wrenched from her, her state of mind too disturbed to notice the way she had used his Christian name as she lurched forward, half out of the bed, to grab hold of his hand and clutch at it hard. ‘Please!’
For the space of perhaps two dozen long drawn-out, heart-thudding seconds he hesitated, obviously thinking hard. With his hooded eyes looking down into her own darkly shadowed ones, she saw him come to a decision, change his mind, rethink and change it again.
‘Please!’ she repeated, knowing intuitively that he had decided against her. ‘I need to know.’
His sigh was a blend of exasperation and unwilling resignation.
‘Serena—’ he said at last. ‘The driver…he did not survive the crash.’
‘Oh, no!’
It was the worst she had imagined. The only thing that really explained his reluctance to speak. No, perhaps the worst thing was the way she was feeling—or rather not feeling. She couldn’t even remember who had been driving the car, so she didn’t know what she should be feeling.
‘Who was he? Did I know him?’
But Rafael’s face had closed up, heavy lids and long, luxuriant lashes hiding his eyes and his thoughts from her.
‘That is for you to say.’
‘Oh, that’s not fair!’
But, ‘doctor’s orders’ he had said, and he meant to abide by those orders, no matter what it did to her.
‘I must have done, mustn’t I? I mean—I was there with him—in the car. I wouldn’t have got into a car with a stranger.’
She looked into his face, seeking a response that would help her, but finding only that stony-faced, blanked-off expression that made her think fearfully of the unseeing, frozen faces of the statues of Ancient Greece, carved from cold, unyielding marble.
‘I wouldn’t!’ For some reason she felt the need to repeat it, to emphasise the importance of what she had said. ‘I’m not that sort of a girl.’
He didn’t say a word, but some change in his face, a movement of his head, an expression in those burning eyes, a momentary lift of one black brow that he couldn’t quite control, seemed to question the truth of her assertion.
‘You don’t believe me?’
Angry now, she could no longer stay still. Swinging her legs out of bed, she got to her feet, snatching up the calf-length robe that matched her nightdress and pulling it on, belting it firmly around her slim waist with a rough, jerky movement that betrayed her inner feelings.
This was better. At least her slender height gave her the ability to look him in the eyes, even if he was still some five or so inches above her five-feet-nine.
‘How dare you? You have no right to sit in judgement on me when you don’t even know me—if that is the truth.’
‘I had never set eyes on you in my life until the first day I came to this hospital and saw you lying unconscious in that bed.’
‘Then—then you can’t tell me what I was doing at the time of the accident or just before it and why.’
Her delicate toes curling on the soft carpet, Serena shifted uncomfortably from one foot to another. She didn’t want to think of Rafael standing beside her bed, looking down at her unconscious form from that imperious height. Just the thought of those cold eagle’s eyes watching everything about her, judging, assessing, when she was utterly defenceless, unaware even of his presence, made her blood chill in her veins.
‘You can’t know anything about me—who I am or what I am—so you’ll have to take my word for it that I’m just not that kind of woman.’
‘You may believe that you were not that sort of woman—’
He bit off the sentence swiftly, but not quite quickly enough. Serena pounced on that revealing change of tense.
‘Were not?’ she repeated shakily. ‘Were? What does that mean? What do you know that you aren’t telling me?’
But he wouldn’t meet her eyes. Instead he turned to where little Tonio still lay, sleeping peacefully.
‘I have to leave,’ he said, not even attempting to hide the fact that he was deliberately ignoring her anxious questions. ‘Tonio will need feeding…’
‘No! You can’t do this to me! I won’t let you!’
The sidelong glance he turned in her direction was one of supreme indifference. I can do exactly as I wish, it declared, as clearly as if he had spoken. And you can do nothing to stop me.
Oh, couldn’t she?
Just as Rafael looped the handles of the carrycot over one strong hand she slipped past him, heading
