sea—what sort of a fool was he? He should have known.
He had let himself believe that two years was a long time. Told himself that in the two dozen months since he had last seen her, since she had walked out of his life without a backward glance, that he had been able to forget her—put her right out of his mind.
Forget her! Hah!
‘What?’
Without realising it, he had let the short snarl of bitter laughter escape from his lips as a real sound and the woman slumped beside him on the back seat of the powerful car stirred briefly from the silence into which she had lapsed after the total outpouring of grief and lifted her head to look at him, her eyes just pools of shadow in a white face.
‘Nada—nothing …’ He waved a hand dismissively and she subsided back into silence, head down, preoccupied by her own thoughts.
What was he doing here with her? How had he managed to end up escorting her home like this when he already knew that he had made one of the biggest mistakes of his life in taking her in his arms in the first place? His fingers still stung from where he had touched her skin, the scent of her hair, her body was still in his nostrils in a way that reminded him painfully of the long, burning nights of sexual frustration that he had endured in the weeks after she had left him. Nights that had driven him to seek the company of another woman, any woman, only to find that being with anyone else made the feeling worse, piling dissatisfaction on dissatisfaction until he had felt he would go up in flames because of it.
It was the last thing he should be feeling right now. The last thing he even wanted to think about and yet one touch had put him right back there in the thrall of it. One touch, one moment with her in his arms and it was as if she had never been away.
But what the hell else could he have done? When she had gone to pieces in front of him like that—practically thrown herself into his arms—only a brute would have turned away from her.
Especially when he knew only too damn well just what she was going through, the rawness of grief, the sense of total disbelief that prevented any sort of acceptance.
Lorena.
The beloved name slashed into his thoughts like a stab of pain, making him close his lids sharply against the burn at the backs of his eyes. The thought of the moment that he had had to identify his sister’s body, lying cold and still, was a memory that he knew he would never be able to erase.
And with that moment etched so brutally on his mind, and knowing that Alannah was going through something of the same thing, how could he have turned away?
‘Thank you for taking me home.’
Having emerged from her withdrawn silence at last, Alannah seemed determined to make herself continue the conversation. Raul could hear the effort she was making to speak in the stiffness of her words, the flat, monotone delivery.
‘It’s very kind of you.’
Another brusque gesture waved away her words.
‘No es nada,’ he returned, finding it impossible to pitch his voice at anything other than a growl, and he watched her pull her jacket tighter round herself as if she was cold.
‘I could have caught the bus.’
Now it was her voice that had a distinct chill to it. Every last trace of the woman who had wept in his arms had vanished and in her place was a cool, collected and totally distant female. He could practically feel the ice forming in the car as she spoke. Probably, like him, she was now deeply regretting that she had ever given in to the weak impulse to cry on his shoulder. He need be under no delusion that it meant anything. She had been on the edge of breaking down from the moment he had walked into the room, and he had been the only person there. He had no doubt that if there had been anyone else she could possibly have chosen then she would. ‘In this weather?’
This time his gesture indicated the driving rain that was lashing against the car windows, the swish of the hard-working wipers and the splash of tyres through puddles almost drowning his words.
‘You would have been drenched before you even made it to the bus stop. Besides, Carlos was waiting to drive me into town anyway and, as we found, we have to go past your flat to reach my hotel.’
And he was not at all prepared to leave her alone on a night like this and in the state she was in. She might have stopped crying, those appallingly harsh, wrenching sobs subsiding slowly into a ragged, gasping near-silence, but her slim body had still been shaking in his arms, her eyes swimming with tears.
‘I’ve done it before.’
‘I’m sure you have but with my car available there was no need for you to do it tonight.’
He wondered what she would have done if he had told her that he knew exactly what she was feeling. That he was going through the same hateful experience himself and because of that he’d known he couldn’t let her face even the short journey alone.
When a sudden vicious memory of just why he was using her company to keep the darkness from his own thoughts, why he needed her presence to fill the emptiness he was feeling forced itself past the temporary barrier he had tried to erect in his mind, he shook his head roughly, needing to drive away the desperately unwanted images.
‘I could have managed!’
Alannah’s tone told him that she had seen the abrupt movement and misinterpreted the reason for it.
‘I’m not always a wreck like this! I can usually cope—it’s just that tonight things—got on top of me.’
‘Believe me, I understand. But was there no one else who could have been there with you? Your mother perhaps?’
‘My mother is in a far worse state than I am.’
Her voice was low and she was staring out of the window, assuming an intense interest in the passing cars as she spoke.
‘It goes against everything in nature for a mother to hear of the death of her child and she has barely recovered from losing my father. She’s in pieces—can’t sleep … won’t eat.’
She shook her head, her mouth twisting, fighting, he knew, against more tears.
‘The only way she can cope is with the help of the sedatives the doctor prescribed. At least they knocked her out tonight. But she can’t manage anything practical. Everything that has to be done is up to me.’
There was a terrible, raw edge on that last sentence, one Raul recognised only too well. The memory of how she had looked in that hospital room, so lost and alone, with no one there to help her, no support, no company, sent a wave of cold anger running through him.
‘So where the hell was he?’
That brought her head up, shadowed eyes meeting his sharply.
‘Where was—who?’
‘The man in your life …’
The man she had left him for.
‘Your lover—your boyfriend—whatever you call him.’ ‘Oh …’
