She was desperate for a bath but there was only time for a quick shower. Then, donning her one smart outfit, the elegantly cut fine white dress which she had worn for her graduation ceremony, Georgie brushed her rippling mane of curls and dug through her few cosmetics to add some delicate colour to her cheeks and lips. A maid passing through the hall showed her into a formal drawing-room which she found rather oppressive. She was studying a portrait of a forbidding but very handsome man when the door opened behind her.
‘You find your accommodation comfortable?’
She turned, her wide hesitant gaze falling on Rafael and, although she had told herself that she would be perfectly composed, her stomach cramped instantly with nerves. The sight of Rafael in a dinner-jacket, a white shirt accentuating the exotic gold of his skin and the darkness of his eyes, took her back in time and she tensed, tearing her attention from him and sliding down on to the nearest seat. ‘Very,’ she said stiffly.
‘What would you like to drink?’
Georgie tensed even more and she was furious with herself for being so over-sensitive. ‘Any thing,’ she muttered.
Taut as a bowstring, she watched him cross the room to a cabinet and listened to the clink of glass. How did he contrive to make her feel that every sentence he spoke to her was a put-down? A someone’s-walking-over-mygrave sensation seemed to take over more strongly with every minute she remained in his radius. Angrily, she bent her head. She hated him. Naturally it was a severe strain to be forced to accept his hospitality and feel the need to be at least superficially polite.
Indeed, Georgie only had to think of the damage he had done when she had been at a very impressionable age, and her blood boiled. Rafael’s deliberate attempt to reduce her to the level of a promiscuous slut back in her hotel room had simply provided fresh fodder for the bitterness of the past. But it had also brought alive again raw emotions which she had put behind her a long time ago, and she was finding that experience unexpectedly painful.
Right now, she was recalling the staggering response she had given him when he had kissed her, a response she had been too confused even to think about earlier in the day. Now that memory haunted her, shamed her. Four years ago, Rafael had taught her things about herself that, afterwards, she would have given anything to forget. She was a very physical person, or at least she had been with him. In his arms, she had never been in control. She had been entrapped by an uncontrollable passion which made mincemeat of every moral principle Jenny had dinned into her while she was growing up.
Had he so desired, Rafael could have gone to bed with her on the first date and, long after he had gone, Georgie had tortured herself with the fear that that wanton ability to forget everything when he touched her had actually laid the basis of Rafael’s cruel misjudgement of her. Angels and whores… Steve’s reading of Rafael had often returned to haunt her. And she had told herself that if Rafael was that primitive, she had had a very lucky escape indeed.
But what did she tell herself now? How could she have stood there and allowed him to kiss her in that horribly intimate way? She wasn’t a besotted teenager any more. Admittedly, she was still sexually inexperienced, she allowed grudgingly, but then, having been scorched as badly by passion as she had been at nineteen, that was not really surprising. So why hadn’t she objected to being manhandled this morning?
Because you liked it, a dry little voice put in to her flood of inner turmoil. She froze, her pallor suddenly washed by hot colour. Rafael chose that same moment to slot a tall glass between her nerveless fingers.
‘A Tequila Sunrise,’ Rafael drawled softly, ‘I have an excellent memory and I can only hope that you have no ambition to get seriously sloshed tonight.’
Georgie stared at the glass in stricken horror. The offer of a cup of poison could not have made her feel more threatened. One sip of that mixture and she was convinced she would throw up. His brutality absolutely devastated her. That evening, that ghastly final evening four years ago… Her narrow shoulders clenched as though he had laid a whip across them. The lousy sadist, she thought wildly, burning tears of sheer humiliation lashing her lowered eyelids. If there had been a gun within reach, she would have shot him dead without remorse.
‘I see you remember too,’ Rafael murmured smoothly.
Georgie threw her head up, a blaze of raw hostility leaping through her veins. She put that glass to her lips and she drank like a sailor on shore-leave after six months of sobriety. In her rage, she tasted nothing. ‘Thanks,’ she said tautly. ‘I needed that!’
‘Evidently, you did.’ A hard smile curved Rafael’s sensual mouth.
If he fondly imagined she was about to hang her head in shame because one time in her life she had got stupidly drunk, he was wrong!
‘Do you think there would be time before dinner for another one?’ Georgie murmured hopefully, taking up the challenge with a vengeance. If he chose to think that she was a drunk as well as a slut, he was quite free to do so. Anything was better than letting him see that he could still get to her. And displaying a total lack of concern for Rafael’s prehistoric ideal of how a ‘lady’ ought to behave was surely the best way possible to demonstrate her complete indifference to him?
Recalling her own eagerness to please in the past could only make her cringe. All her life she had been extrovert, fiery and opinionated. But Rafael had put a clamp on such emotional excesses, making her feel that to be acceptable she had to tone herself down into a paler version of herself. Afraid that if she couldn’t be what he wanted, she would lose him, Georgie had done a very fair imitation of a doormat until inevitably she had begun to resent his arrogant assumption of supremacy.
Another drink arrived. Georgie swallowed hard in a silence that was beginning to slice along her nerveendings and made herself sip through clenched teeth.
‘I have often wished that I had taken you up on your offer that night,’ Rafael delivered, fixing brilliant golden eyes to her openly transfixed face. ‘But it would have meant breaking every honourable instinct I possessed. I’ve never made love to a woman under the influence of alcohol before, but with you it would have paid dividends. I would have known then that I wasn’t your first
lover—’
‘And I dare say I would have known that I wasn’t yours either!’ Georgie slung back at him in growing outrage. In throwing up her reckless behaviour that night, Rafael demonstrated a savage, unashamed desire to humiliate her.
‘Naturally not… what would you expect?’ Rafael demanded shortly, after a decidedly stunned pause that such an irrelevance as his sexual experience should be mentioned. Dark colour accentuated the fierce angles of his hard cheekbones, his handsome mouth a compressed line.
Georgie tossed back another swig of alcohol, well aware she had disconcerted him. ‘Oops, to think I had one chance in my entire life to be ravished in a Ferrari and I blew it!’ She fluttered her lashes in an attitude of deep regret, beginning to enjoy herself as much as she had thoroughly enjoyed herself in the amateur dramatic society at college. ‘That one perfect spontaneous moment missed… But then, you’re not a spontaneous kind of guy, are you?’
‘Not in a public car park…no,’ Rafael breathed in a driven undertone, with more than a suggestion of gritted white teeth to the reply as he studied her with lancing dark eyes. ‘I find it hard to believe that you can refer to that night so casually.’
Georgie flicked him a glance, adrenalin fairly roaring through her. A determined smile tilted her mobile mouth as she regarded him from below her thick copper lashes. ‘Why not? After all, you weren’t the only one deceived four years ago… I was as well.’