Crime Of Passion. Lynne Graham

she wondered briefly, but she was in such turmoil that the oddity of the comment as quickly left her mind again.

      She was enraged by the awareness that Rafael had not expected her to refuse that sordid proposition. Rafael had actually expected her to spread herself willingly on the bed. Her narrow shoulders rigid, she turned back to him. ‘Just forget where I live’

      ‘I try to.’ Rafael dealt her a chilling look of derision, his nostrils flaring. ‘But why else did you come to Bolivia? You knew we would meet again…and that was what you wanted, es verdad?’

      Georgie was stunned by his arrogance. ‘Like hell it was! I want nothing to do with you… absolutely nothing!’

      ‘Prove it,’ he taunted, reaching out without warning to drag her up against him with an easy strength that shook her.

      ‘Get your hands off me!’ she gasped.

      But his mouth crashed down on hers, hard, hungry, hot, forcing her lips apart. And, for Georgie, the world rocked right off its axis, dredging a shocked whimper of sound from deep in her throat. Every physical sense she possessed was violently jolted. His tongue expertly probed the sensitive interior of her mouth, blatantly imitating an infinitely more intimate penetration, and her bones turned to water and she quivered and moaned, electrified by the fierce excitement he awakened. He crushed her slender length to him with bruising hands and she gasped, her thighs trembling, an unbearable ache stirring low in her stomach.

      Rafael lifted his dark head slowly. ‘Do I take you on that bed or do I take you to the airport?’ he prompted silkily, blatant masculine satisfaction in the narrowed gaze scanning her rapt face. ‘The choice is yours.’

      CHAPTER TWO

      ‘THE airport?’ Georgie repeated blankly, endeavouring to return to rational thought and finding it unbelievably difficult.

      ‘For your flight home,’ Rafael extended, with a slashing and sardonic smile.

      ‘But I’m not going home.’ Georgie broke slowly from the loosened circle of his arms, still reeling from the effects of his lovemaking and trying very hard not to show just how shattered she was by the response he had dredged from her. She was in shock. ‘I’m going to stay with Maria Christina.’

      ‘My sister is in California.’

      ‘California?’ Georgie parroted after a shattered pause. Incredulously she stared at him. ‘What are you talking about?’

      ‘Antonio’s mother lives there and Maria Cristina and Rosa are very close,’ Rafael explained smoothly. ‘My sister is expecting her first child and, since her own mother is dead, it is natural that she should want Rosa’s support at such a time.’

      Georgie was in a daze. ‘But I received a letter from her less than two weeks ago, inviting me over here. She hoped I’d still be here when she had her baby!’

      ‘She only decided to go to San Francisco last week. She couldn’t have been expecting you to come.’ Rafael exhibited a magnificent disregard for her natural distress.

      ‘It was a last-minute decision and I got cancellation tickets,’ Georgie conceded tautly. ‘I tried to phone her the night before the flight but she wasn’t in—’

      ‘But you came all the same,’ Rafael drawled with an ironic lack of surprise.

      ‘I wanted to surprise her!’ Georgie slung back. ‘Why didn’t you tell me immediately? Obviously you knew I was here to stay with your sister—’

      ‘I had hoped you were not that foolish. I told you to stay away from Maria Cristina four years ago,’ he reminded her with grim emphasis. ‘It is a most unsuitable friendship and I made my feelings clear then ’

      ‘Stuff your bloody feelings!’ Georgie gasped, suddenly swinging away from him, her voice embarrassingly choked. ‘My friendship with Maria Cristina is none of your business.’

      Her bruised eyes were filled with tears. So this was what it felt like to be at the end of her tether. She had really been looking forward to staying with her friend. This disappointment was the last straw. She also knew that, as a recently graduated student teacher, who had yet to find employment, it would be many years before she could hope to repeat such an expensive trip.

      It was unlikely that Maria Cristina would come to London under her own steam. Rafael’s sister was very much a home-bird, who had only tolerated her English boarding-school education because it had been her late mother’s wish and who had freely admitted that she hadn’t the faintest desire to ever leave Bolivia again once her education was completed. Her marriage to a doctor, no more fond of travelling than she was, had set the seal on that insularity.

      ‘Anything which threatens my family is my business.’

      ‘Threatens?’ Georgie queried jerkily, fighting for composure. ‘And how do I threaten your family?’

      ‘I will not allow you to hurt my sister, and the day that she realises what kind of a woman you really are, she will be hurt.’

      ‘God forgive you.., I would never hurt Maria Cristina!’ Georgie gasped painfully, swinging back to him in a rage. ‘She’d be a whole lot more hurt if she knew that the brother she idolises is a slimy toe-rag!’

      ‘What did you call me?’ Dark eyes had turned incandescent gold, his savagely handsome features freezing into sudden incredulous stillness.

      Georgie vented a shaky little laugh. All that bowing and scraping people did in his vicinity did not accustom him to derision. But she knew that she would never forget the depths to which he had sunk in his desire to humiliate her today. ‘If think you heard me, and let me assure you that your seduction routine leaves a lot to be desired!’ she spelt out, hot with anger and bitterness.

      ‘Seduction was quite unnecessary,’ Rafael asserted softly, his beautifully shaped mouth twisting with blatant contempt. ‘If I’d kept quiet, I’d be inside you now, and the only sounds in this room would be your moans of pleasure. You’d share a bed with any man who attracted you! I don’t pride myself on the idea that there is anything exclusive about your response to me.’

      Georgie was trembling violently. Every scrap of colour had drained from her features, leaving her white as snow. Her hand flew up of its own volition but steel-hard fingers snapped round her wrist in mid-air.

      ‘Don’t you dare,’ Rafael grated down at her in a snarling undertone.

      And the violence in the atmosphere was explosive, catching her breath in her dry throat. Raw aggression had flared in his smouldering gaze and instinctively she backed away, massaging her bruised wrist as he freed her, her heartbeat thumping so loudly in her ears that she felt faint and sick, but still she wanted to kill him, still she wanted to punish him for saying those filthy things to her.

      ‘I’m not like that,’ she murmured tightly, turning away, despising the little shake that had somehow crept into her voice, betraying her distress. ‘And even if I was, it would be a cold day in hell before I let you touch me.’

      There was so much more she wanted to say but she didn’t trust herself. Once before, she had attempted to reason with Rafael in her own defence. He hadn’t listened. He had shot her every plea down in flames, immovably convinced that she had betrayed him in another man’s bed. Afterwards she had felt even more soiled and humiliated by his derision. She would never put herself in that position again.

      The silence went on forever, reverberating around her in soundless waves.

      ‘Are you able to settle your bill here?’

      Four centuries of ice in that chilling enquiry—well, what did she care? Numbly she shook her head.

      ‘I’ll take care of it.’

      For five minutes, she simply stayed there in the empty room, struggling harder than she had ever had to struggle for control. When she had managed it, she walked down to Reception and found him just