he didn’t …’ Alannah tried again but Raul ignored her interjection, talking over it as if it had never happened.
‘My family and yours should never have had any contact—we should have stayed at the opposite ends of the earth.’
‘Why? Because my ordinary family just aren’t good enough to mix with the likes of the high and mighty Marquez Marcín dynasty?’
Alannah no longer cared what she was saying or how she sounded. She only wanted to lash out, hurt him as she was hurting. Make him bleed as she felt that she was bleeding to death inside. She no longer knew or cared if it was for herself or her brother—or for poor little Lorena that her heart was breaking. Only that she had to scream out the agony or break down completely.
‘Well, let me tell you that I wish to God we’d never met. That it was the worst thing that ever happened to me—the worst day of my life—when you walked into it.’
If she thought that by lashing out she’d get through to him, make him react, then she was bitterly disappointed. Where she’d expected anger there was simply coldness, where she would have thought there would be emotion there was a frozen stillness, a terrible quiet in which he looked down his long, straight nose at her, his mouth twisting in vicious contempt.
‘Then the feeling is entirely mutual,’ he tossed at her. ‘I can assure you that I feel exactly the same. I wish to hell that I had never met you—never set eyes on you …’
‘Never …’
Twice Alannah tried to add to the single word. But both times she opened her mouth and had to close it again hastily because nothing came out. Raul just watched her, hands clenched into fists and pressed tight against his narrow hips.
‘Wished you’d never met me,’ she finally got out. ‘Then why would you have wanted to marry me?’
Oh, why couldn’t she stop? Why did she have to keep stabbing at him, pushing him to come back at her with something even worse?
Which of course he did.
‘You know why. I needed an heir.’
Well, she’d always known that. She’d just never expected him to come right out and say it so bluntly.
She’d hesitated a moment too long and those sharp golden eyes had caught the faint flicker of unease in her face, the way she had recoiled from his words.
‘Oh, come on, Alannah,’ he mocked cruelly. ‘You surely didn’t think I was going to say that I loved you? You can’t have wanted that?’
This time she had no trouble finding the words, or the strength of voice to throw them at him.
‘You’re damn right I wouldn’t! I wouldn’t have wanted any such thing from you—it would disgust me—repel me—and besides, I doubt very much that you know what love is. It’s certainly not a feeling that you’ve ever experienced for any woman, even one you once asked to marry you.’
‘I’d have to agree with you there.’ Raul drew himself up and inclined his head in a cold, controlled acknowledgement of her accusation. ‘Love is a very unreliable foundation on which to base one’s choice of bride.’
‘No, you put more emphasis on the fact that no other man has ever slept with her than any such untrustworthy feelings.’
‘Well, that didn’t last long, did it?’ Raul mocked. ‘As soon as I asked to marry you, you realised that you weren’t made for monogamy and set out to make up for what you’d been missing.’
‘But the one thing I didn’t miss was you!’
With her head defiantly high in the air, she stalked past him and out into the tiny hallway, flinging open the door with a wild gesture that had it banging into the opposite wall.
‘And now I’d prefer it if you left. Your chauffeur is waiting and you wouldn’t want to keep him hanging around. And this time I’d be grateful if you stayed away—for good.’
‘Don’t worry.’
Raul headed for the door with an alacrity that would have been positively insulting if she had had enough left in her heart to feel a further insult.
‘I’m not likely to want to come back. It’ll be a cold day in hell before I ever want to see you or any member of your family ever again.’
‘Well, that suits me,’ Alannah tossed after him as he strode out the door. ‘Believe me, if I was forced to see you again then I’d know that I was very definitely in that hell you mentioned.’
She slammed the door shut after his retreating form, hearing the sound echo throughout her flat as she sank back against the wall, her whole body shaking with the after-effects of the emotional storm that had had her in its grip.
CHAPTER SIX
RAUL tossed the last of his clothing into the case that lay open on the bed and then brought the lid down on it with a bang. Fastening the zip with a rough, wrenching movement, he pulled it off the bed, carried it through into the adjoining sitting room and deposited it beside the door, ready for the hotel porter to come and collect it. Another hour, and he would be out of here.
And it couldn’t happen soon enough. He’d known from the start that this trip to England was going to be hell on earth, but the truth was that he had never imagined how hellish it could be. Accepting the appalling news of Lori’s death, getting through the formalities and arranging for her funeral had been terrible enough. But then there had been the added twist of torture that had come in the meeting with Alannah, the discovery that it had been her brother who had …
‘No …’
He aimed a vicious kick at the side of the suitcase as his mind shied away from thinking of the crash that had killed his sister. The passage of four days since the news had broken had done nothing to blunt the sharply jagged edges of that pain and the news he had received just that afternoon had only stirred up all the sorrow even more.
Rubbing the palms of his hands fiercely across his face, over his aching, burning eyes, Raul could only wish that he could wipe away the memory of the past few days as he did so. He had thought that it couldn’t get any worse, but fate had had one last little trick in store, one further twist of the knife that made the loss of his sister even more unbearable to think of.
But if he didn’t think of Lorena then there was only one path his thoughts went down and that was one that was no more comfortable than the first.
The image of Alannah Redfern’s lissom body, her stunning face and the clear, emerald-green of those almond-shaped eyes was always ready to slide into his mind if he let his guard down. It was there in his memory during the day, distracting him from work, heating his blood and making him hard and hungry in the space of one heavy beat of his heart.
He could still feel the brutal kick of disgust that had landed on his senses with the realisation of just why she had kissed him, why she had responded to him so eagerly, so—for a moment at least, he had actually believed—sweetly. Disillusionment had set in fast and the rage that had replaced it had been coldly savage. If he had thought that he hated her before, then it had been nothing to the way he felt now. He had had to get out of her flat before his rage had got the better
