man she had claimed to be leaving him for. A man who had never existed and still didn’t. A man she had totally invented, and she had never met anyone with even half a chance of turning that claim into a reality. How could she have let a new man into her life when she had never fully recovered from the old one?
She’d tried. Since she’d found out just what he really wanted from her and been forced to recognise that her dreams of being loved and cherished to the end of her days were just that—dreams and delusions—she had tried to turn her life around and move on without the happy future with Raul Marcín in it.
But she hadn’t succeeded. The few dates she’d been on had been miserable failures, no man seemed to spark even a flicker of the interest and excitement Raul had been able to create just by existing. So just lately she had determined to concentrate on her career and put all thoughts of a romantic life out of her mind. She would have liked to put all thoughts of Raul out of her head too, but her older brother’s own new-found romance had made that impossible. And now the tragic conclusion of that fledgling love affair had brought Raul himself back into her life. The slashing anguish of that thought made her flinch in pain. Would she ever be able to think of Chris again without this terrible rush of agony, the burn of tears?
‘Well, at least you’re not coming up with some excuse for him.’
Raul had misinterpreted the reason for her silence, thinking it was because of his question about her supposed new partner.
‘There’s no need for an excuse.’ She flung the words at him before she had time to think if they were wise or not.
‘No? If you were mine, I would not leave you to handle all this on your own. I would be at your side, every moment of the day.’
‘But I’m not yours, am I, Raul?’
And she never had been his, not truly his. Not in the way she had most wanted, most longed to be. Of course he had seen her as his. In his mind she had been his woman, his possession, to do with as he pleased. Because no thought of love had ever entered his mind, he had never considered that she might need more than the little he was prepared to offer her.
She couldn’t allow herself to think of how much it would mean to have a man like him, powerful, determined and so capable, by her side in these dark, desperate days. A man who would help her, support her. Whose strength would be used for her good, to ease her path as much as he could. There was no point in even letting herself dream of it. That man would never be Raul and he would never be there for her, her actions two years before had made sure of that. It was even more foolish, even more soul-destroying to allow the thought that perhaps as her husband he might have taken on that supporting role. But he would never have been the husband she had dreamed of having.
And the savage truth was that if she had married him then this weekend’s tragedy would never have happened and she would never have been in this desperate need of support from anyone.
‘And not everyone is a millionaire who can be where he wants to be for as long as he wants to be at the drop of a hat.’ Memory made her voice bitter. ‘Someone who doesn’t have to worry about taking time off work or leaving other commitments …’
The sudden sharp reminder by her conscience of just why Raul was here now, why he had had to drop everything and come to England had her choking off her words and swallowing them down in a rush. She was supposed to have told him the truth about what had happened. That was why she had been waiting for him at the hospital. She had been there to tell him; to make sure that he knew before he found out in any other way. She had to be the one who explained things to him.
But instead she had messed everything up. When she had tried to talk about Chris she had just broken down, gone to pieces, and everything that needed to be said had been left unspoken.
And she could hardly tell him now. Not here, in the darkness of the car, with his chauffeur in the driving seat and the glass panel between him and his passengers in the back partly open so that he would hear every word she said.
‘So he is at work, this new man of yours?’
She couldn’t answer that, not without lying, and so she hedged her bets, sticking instead to a round-about answer that she prayed would satisfy him without actually coming out with the truth.
‘New? It’s been two years.’
‘So long … and yet you wear no ring.’
It was dropped softly, almost lightly into the silence and Alannah was surprised to find that her instinctive response was to clamp her right hand down on top of her left, pushing the ringless finger out of sight. She didn’t know why she reacted in that way, only that some note in Raul’s voice had suddenly made a sensation like the slither of something cold and nasty slide down her spine, so that she shifted uncomfortably in her seat.
‘There’s no need for that.’
Again she dodged round a real answer. There was no need for a ring—but because there was no other man, new or not, in her life.
‘Oh, I see—so was that my mistake?’
‘Mistake?’ Alannah blinked in confusion. Raul Marcín never admitted to mistakes.
‘My approach was too conventional? You should have said that you weren’t interested in marriage.’
‘I wasn’t interested in marriage to you!’
How she wished it was as convincing as she made it sound. The bitter truth was that she had thought that her heart would burst with joy when he had proposed. It had simply never occurred to her innocent, naïve twenty-one-year-old self that this devastating, sexy man could actually want to marry her for any reason other than that he had been as head-over-heels in love with her as she was with him.
It had truly never occurred to her that a sophisticated man of the world like Raul might have other, more pragmatic reasons for wanting to marry her. Reasons for which her innocence, sexually at least, and her family background were much more important than any feelings she might have.
‘It really was just as well we split up when we did,’ she said hastily, as much to distract herself from her own foolish thoughts as to fill the awkward silence that had fallen between them. ‘After all, what is it they say about repenting at leisure?’
‘But that saying is usually preceded by the line “Marry in haste",’ Raul drawled mockingly. ‘We never actually got that far.’
‘And for that we ought to be thankful. If we had got married, it would have been a disaster.’
‘You think so?’ A sceptical note on the question caught on a raw edge on her nerves.
‘Very definitely,’ she stated emphatically. ‘Don’t you agree?’
His sudden silence, his total stillness was unnerving.
Turning to him in confusion, she caught a look she couldn’t begin to interpret in his eyes, flashing on and off, on and off as the streetlights caught them and then moved on.
In spite of herself, her heart gave a sudden rough kick inside her chest, making her blood throb in her veins.
He would only have to move a couple of inches, she told herself hazily. He would only have to turn in his seat, just so, and he would be facing her, his head directly above hers. And
