under her T-shirt at her waist, briefly searing over her skin so that she couldn’t hold back a murmur of response as she arched into the caress like a cat responding to a sensual stroke. His mouth was a teasing torment, his tongue like silk against her lips. The thunder in her blood was drowning out all her ability to think.
She wanted … longed … yearned …
She needed more.
She had always wanted more. It had been Raul who had held back; Raul who had said that they should wait. Proud Spanish aristocrat that he was, he had wanted her to come to his bed untouched. He had wanted to know that he was the only man in her life, that only a virgin bride would be the mother of his child.
And that memory was bitter enough to slice through the heated haze that flooded her mind.
‘No …’
Somehow she managed to make her tongue frame the single syllable. Somehow she managed to force her treacherous body to pull back, away from him, away from his kisses, away from his touch. The few steps she managed took her up against one of the armchairs so that she was forced to stop, not quite as far away from him as she had wanted.
‘No …’ She tried again but with little more conviction than the first time. Every one of her senses cried out in harsh protest at the cruel restraint she forced on them. Every awoken nerve demanded the satisfaction she was denying it.
‘No?’
Raul’s echoing of the single word had so much more behind it that it made her flinch to hear it. There was an open scepticism that questioned her denial, a note of incredulity that made it plain he didn’t believe her, and underneath it all there was the rough thread of dark desire—a desire she had thwarted by drawing away. And the terrible thing was that that desire, dark and disturbing and oh, so dangerous, was what was running through her veins, making her shudder inwardly in response to its burning demand.
But she wouldn’t give in to it. Couldn’t give in to it.
‘This isn’t going to happen. This isn’t what I want.’
‘Isn’t what you want?’ His voice lashed at her, filled with a brutal cynicism. ‘Forgive me if I don’t believe you. I don’t think you know what you want.’
‘Oh, but I do!’ Alannah shook her head violently then stopped abruptly as she realised that she was contradicting her words with the foolish gesture. ‘I do.’
‘Then what?’ he snarled viciously, the burn of frustration still there in his voice. ‘What the hell do you want?’ ‘I want—I want …’
Desperately she snatched at the only thing that came to mind. The memory of what they had been talking about. The reason why she had brought him here in the first place.
‘I want you to forgive my brother. I want you to acknowledge that he and Lorena loved each other and—
And …’
Near-panic had got her this far, the rush of need to say something, anything driving the words out before she had a chance to think. But now, seeing his face, seeing the way that cold fury had turned his eyes opaque, the white marks of rage etched around his nose and mouth, she felt herself falter, felt the words elude her.
‘And …’ Raul prompted icily when she hesitated.
‘And I—we—we’d like to bury them together. We’d like you to give us permission to bury Chris and Lorena in the same grave so that they—they could be …’
Together.
The word sounded inside her head but she totally lacked the strength to say it. She couldn’t have managed another word if her life depended on it. And in the silence that followed she felt as if a window must have blown open in the force of the wind outside, letting in the cold and the wet so that she shivered in the sudden chill of the air as if the temperature had actually dropped to zero around her.
‘You want me to forgive your brother …’
Raul’s tone was so calm, so unemotional that Alannah blinked in confusion to hear it. Was it possible—was he actually going to be reasonable about this? She could read nothing in his shuttered face, his hooded eyes hiding every last trace of what he was feeling from her.
‘And you want me to leave my sister here … and you think that coming on to me is the way to soften me up to give you what you want?’
‘Coming on?’Alannah gasped in shocked disbelief. ‘But I didn’t—I wasn’t! How could you think that?’
The sound of a loud buzzing noise intruded into her stunned protest, making her start in shock and stare round dazedly, looking for the source of the sound.
Raul, however, reacted immediately, pulling one hand free and snatching his mobile phone from his jacket pocket. Sitting on one arm of the settee, he thumbed it on and spoke sharply into it.
‘Sí? Carlos …’
Carlos. Of course.
Alannah tensed sharply as she realised just who was at the other end of the phone. A swift glance at the clock on the wall confirmed her suspicions. The thirty minutes Raul had stipulated were up—just—and almost exactly to the second his driver had arrived to collect him as he had been instructed.
So would Raul leave now, as he had originally planned? Her heart lurched sickeningly at the thought, the tension in her body growing worse. Did she want him to go or to stay? She had no way she could answer that, even to herself.
‘Momento …’ Raul said into the phone, then, still holding it to his ear, he glanced across into Alannah’s outraged face. For a moment he simply watched her consideringly, eyes narrowed in cold assessment, and with a curt, sharp nod of dark satisfaction he turned his attention back to the phone.
‘Yes,’ he said sharply, using English deliberately, she was sure, so that she had no option but to understand what he was saying. ‘Yes, I’m done here—more than ready to leave. I’ll be down in a minute.’
He was going. He was leaving, and nothing was going to stop him; his tone, his expression, the cold gleam in his eyes made that only too plain. He was leaving and. That was as far as she got. She didn’t have time even to finish the thought before Raul snapped off his phone and, still with his eyes fixed on her face, dropped it back in the direction of his jacket pocket. Then slowly, silently, holding her wide-eyed gaze with his own, he stood up and smoothed down his trousers, brushed a speck of something—a purely imaginary speck of something, Alannah was sure—from the front of his jacket.
‘My chauffeur is waiting,’ he said and Alannah actually gasped out loud because it was as if the ice in his voice had been physically real, hitting her brutally in the face as he spoke. ‘And it’s more than time I left.’
‘But …’ Alannah tried, knowing she couldn’t let him go without an answer, though in her heart she knew what it was going to be, something that was confirmed by the look that flashed from those dark golden eyes.
‘The answer is no, Miss Redfern …’
She recoiled sharply, flinching away from the stiff formality of his use of her name.
‘There
