He disappeared out of view. A door closed, sealing her into silence. Georgie stood there, both hands gripping the rusting bars. She was shaking like a leaf. Well, so much for the influence of the Berganza name! A gush of hot burning tears suddenly stung her eyes. She stumbled down on to the edge of the narrow, creaking bed, with its threadbare blanket covering, and buried her aching head in her hands.
About an hour later an ancient woman clad in black appeared, to thrust a plate through a slot in the bars. Georgie hadn’t eaten since breakfast but her stomach totally rebelled against the threat of food. The chipped cup of black coffee was more welcome. She hadn’t realised how thirsty she was.
After a while she lay down, fighting back the tears. Sooner or later, they would get an interpreter. This whole stupid mess would be cleared up. She did not need Rafael to get her out of trouble. But she was a walking disaster, she decided furiously. Her first solo trip abroad, she had boobed with spectacular effect. Why? She was impulsive, always had been, probably always would be. This was not the first time impetuosity had landed Georgie in trouble… but it was absolutely going to be the last, she swore.
Male voices were talking in Spanish when Georgie wakened. Disorientated, she sat up, hair tumbling in wild disarray round her. The heat was back. The new day pierced a shard of sunlight through the tiny barred window high up the wall. Sleepy violet eyes focused on the two male figures beyond the bars.
One was the policeman, the other was… Her heartbeat went skidding into frantic acceleration. ‘Rafael!’ she gasped, positively sick with relief in that first flaring instant of recognition.
In the act of offering the policeman a cigar, Rafael flicked her a stabbing glance from deep-set dark eyes, treacherous as black ice, and murmured lazily in aside, ‘Pull your skirt down and cover yourself…you look like a whore.’
Without missing a beat in his apparently chummy chat with the policeman, Rafael presented her with his hard-edged golden profile again. Georgie’s mouth had dropped inelegantly wide, a tide of burning colour assailing her fair skin. With clumsy hands she scrabbled rather pointlessly to pull down her denim skirt, already no more than a modest two inches above the knee. She fumbled with the sagging T-shirt, angry violet eyes flashing.
‘Don’t you dare speak to me like that,’ she hissed.
Both male heads spun back.
‘If you don’t shut up, I walk,’ Rafael spelt out, without an ounce of compassion.
Georgie believed him. That was the terrifying truth. Just give him the excuse and he would leave her here to rot—it was etched in the icy impassivity of his slashing gaze, the unhidden distaste twisting his beautifully shaped mouth. He had worn that same look four years ago in London… and then it had almost killed her.
Her throat closed over. Suddenly it hurt to breathe. She fought back the memories and doggedly lifted her chin again, refusing with all the fire of her temperament to be cowed or embarrassed. But Georgie could still wake up in a cold sweat at night just reliving the humiliation of their final meeting. She hated Rafael like poison for the way he had treated her. It was a tribute to the strength of her fondness for his sister that their friendship had survived that devastating experience.
As the two men continued to talk, ignoring her with supreme indifference, Georgie studied Rafael. Against this shabby setting he looked incongruous, exotically alien in a fabulously well-cut grey suit, every fibre of which shrieked expense. The rich fabric draped powerful shoulders, accentuated narrow hips and lithe long legs. Her nails clenched convulsively into the hem of her far from revealing skirt. Maybe he thought she looked like a tart because he was so bitterly prejudiced against her.
His photograph had been splashed all over the cover of Time magazine the previous summer. Berganza, the Bolivian billionaire, enemy of the corrupt, defender of the weak. Berganza, the great philanthropist, directly descended in an unbroken line from a blue-blooded Castilian nobleman, who had arrived in Bolivia in the sixteenth century. The journalist had lovingly dwelt on his long line of illustrious ancestors.
Georgie had been curious enough to devour the photographs first. He was very tall, but he dominated not by size but by the sheer force of his physical presence. A staggeringly handsome male animal, he was possessed of a devastating and undeniable charisma. His magnificent bone-structure would still turn female heads thirty years from now.
She searched his golden features, helplessly marking the stunning symmetry of each, the wide forehead, the thin arrogant nose and the savagely high cheekbones. She wished she could exorcise him the way she had burned that magazine, in a ceremonial outpouring of self-loathing and hatred. Her voluptuous mouth thinned with the stress of her emotions.
A split-second later, it fell wide again as she watched the ‘enemy of the corrupt’ smoothly press a handful of notes extracted from his wallet into the grateful policeman’s hands. He was bribing him. In spite of the fact that Georgie had always refused to believe in the reality of Rafael Rodriguez Berganza, the saint of the LatinAmerican media, she was absolutely shattered by the sight of those notes changing hands.
Her cell door swung open. Rafael stepped in. His nostrils flaring as he cast a fastidious glance round the cell, he swept the blanket off the makeshift bed and draped it round her stiff shoulders. ‘I almost didn’t come,’ he admitted without remorse, his fluid, unbearably sexy accent nipping down her taut spinal cord, increasing her tension.
‘Then I won’t bother saying thanks for springing me,’ Georgie stabbed back, infuriated by the concealing blanket he appeared to find necessary and provoked by the unhappy fact that she had to throw her head back just to see him, her height less than his by more than a foot. But beneath both superficial responses lurked a boiling pool of bitter resentment and remembered pain which she was determined to conceal.
‘Were it not for my sister, I would have left you here,’ Rafael imparted with harsh emphasis. ‘It would have been a character-building experience from which you would have gained immense benefit.’
‘You hateful bastard!’ Georgie finally lost control. Having been subjected to the most frightening experience of her life, his inhuman lack of sympathy was the last straw. ‘I’ve been robbed, assaulted and imprisoned!’
‘And you are very close now to being beaten as well, es verdad? Rafael slotted in, his low-pitched voice cracking like a whiplash. ‘For if I will not tolerate a man offering me such disrespect, how do I tolerate it from a mere woman?’
Hot-cheeked and furious, Georgie literally stalked out of the cell. A mere woman? How could she ever have imagined herself in love with Rafael Rodriguez Berganza? Then, it hadn’t been love, she told herself fiercely. It had been pure, unvarnished lust, masquerading as a bad teenage crush. But at nineteen she had been too mealy-mouthed to admit that reality.
He planted a hand to her narrow back and pushed
her down the corridor, and she was momentarily too shaken by the raw depth of naked rage she had ignited in those dark eyes to object. What the blazes did he have to be so angry about? OK, so it had no doubt been inconvenient for him to come and fish her out of a cell at eight in the morning, but dire straits demanded desperate measures and surely even a self-centred swine like him could acknowledge that?
Outside, the sunlight was blinding, but she was disorientated by the crowd of heaving bodies surrounding the two Range Rovers awaiting them outside. With a slight hiss of irritation, Rafael suddenly planted two hands round her waist, swept her off the ground and thrust her into the passenger seat in the front one. Then he turned back to his ecstatic audience.
All the men had their hats off. Some of the women were crying. Kids were pressing round his knees, clutching at him. And then the crowd parted and the policeman reappeared, with an elderly priest by his side. The priest was grinning all over his face, reaching for Rafael’s hands, clearly calling down blessings on his head.
What it was to be a hero! It made her stomach heave. Georgie looked away, only to stiffen in dismay as she noticed the squirming sack on the driver’s seat. What the blue blazes was in the