Rafael's Love-Child

‘I call him Tonio.’

‘That suits him.’ She bent forward, smiling into the child’s wide eyes, the red-gold curtain of her hair falling round her oval face, forming a shield from Rafael’s watchful gaze. ‘He’s yours?’

His wordless murmur went unheeded as her thoughts leapt on to the next logical connection.

‘I didn’t know you were married.’

‘I’m not.’ His unexpected response brought her head round in a rush, brown eyes widening in shock. ‘Never have been, even though I came close to it once.’

‘Then Tonio. He’s a—a—love-child?’

Her heart was doing crazy things inside her chest: beating way too fast and twisting, practically turning somersaults, so that she was unable to breathe. Not married didn’t mean not committed, and after all what greater commitment was there between two people than the fact that they had a child together?

‘A love-child?’ Rafael’s beautifully shaped mouth twisted cynically on the word. ‘There are those who would call him something far less complimentary.’

‘But if you and his mother are together…’

‘No!’ It came forcefully, almost violently, and those brilliant golden eyes blazed with fierce rejection of her statement. ‘Tonio’s mother and I are not, as you so tactfully put it, “together”.’

Serena’s heart, which had started to slow down, to return to its natural rhythm, lurched painfully at the sudden change in his tone.

Somehow, without quite knowing how, she had overstepped whatever careful lines he drew around his personal life. The man she had grown accustomed to over the past few days had vanished and the person she had privately nicknamed the Spanish Inquisitor, the man who had so upset and frightened her at their first meeting, was back.

‘I—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.’

Thoroughly unnerved, she snatched her hand away from the baby’s grasp, suddenly afraid to show her response to the child.

‘I never…’

But she got no further. Furious at having his new-found toy so abruptly snatched from him, Tonio murmured a faint protest which then developed into a full-blooded howl, his little face screwing into a furious grimace, his cheeks flushed bright red.

‘Oh, sweetheart, I’m sorry!’ Serena’s remorse was immediate, her fear of Tonio’s father forgotten as she moved hastily to comfort the little boy.

Rafael was there before her, scooping the child out of his carrycot and gathering him close.

‘Hush, mi corazón, hush,’ he soothed huskily. ‘All is well; you’re safe.’

Serena’s heart tightened again, her nerves tying themselves into hard, painful knots at the sight of the baby held so firmly against the strength and width of the hard wall of the man’s chest. His small, vulnerable form seemed so much tinier, so delicate when contrasted with the arms that enclosed him, the long-fingered hand that curved lovingly around the delicate skull, supporting the tiny head.

Immediately all the loneliness and apprehension that had gripped her just before Rafael’s arrival flooded back with a vengeance.

This was why, in spite of her initial fear of him, she had been so glad to see Rafael when he had appeared in her room on the second day after she had regained consciousness. No one else was likely to visit. There was no one she could turn to who could help her obtain the small necessities that would make her stay in hospital that bit more comfortable.

And Rafael hadn’t needed to be asked. In fact he had arrived that first day with flowers, fruit, and a bag containing a selection of toiletries, all of the most luxurious brands, more expensive than anything she had ever been able to provide for herself. He had even thought to bring a couple of new nightdresses, guessing at her size with an accuracy that had frankly astonished and unnerved her. It spoke of an intimate knowledge of the female body that she found she didn’t want to enquire into too closely.

‘Keep them!’ he had declared dismissively when she had protested at his generosity. ‘They’re only trifles—I can easily afford them.’

But just that morning she had learned that the nightdresses and toiletries were only part of it, that his generosity went much further than she had ever imagined. And that was something she could not let go unchallenged.

‘Is it true that you have been paying all my bills?’

Rafael’s proud head came up sharply, black brows drawing together over the tawny eyes that were suddenly wary, as if he had something he very definitely wanted to conceal.

‘Who told you that?’ he demanded in a voice that promised retribution on the person responsible just as soon as he found out.

‘Oh, come on, Mr Cordoba!’ Serena protested. ‘I may have had an accident—a knock on the head—but I’ve not completely lost my mind!’

‘I thought we agreed on Rafael,’ he inserted coolly, in an obvious attempt to distract her from her line of questioning.

‘We agreed on nothing! You instructed me to use your name, told me not to worry my pretty little head about anything…’

And, weak and vulnerable, she had done just that. She had accepted his presence in the hospital because the medical staff did, hadn’t persisted with the questions that had been so subtly but effectively blocked because with her head still aching and her thoughts still whirling in confusion it was easier not to. She had simply assumed that Rafael Cordoba had some part in the time she couldn’t remember, the moments just before or just after the accident, and so hadn’t pressed the matter.

But not now. Now she couldn’t believe that she had been so foolish, so blindly, stupidly naïve. Now she wanted some answers.

‘And it wasn’t just a bang on the head,’ Rafael continued imperturbably, moving to lay the baby back in his carrycot. ‘You were very much out of it there for a while, and you were lucky to get away with only the injuries you had.’

‘You don’t have to tell me that!’ Serena retorted swiftly.

She still felt cold inside just to recall the moment when, helped by a nurse, she had first managed to struggle out of her hospital regulation gown and into one of the new, pretty cotton ones Rafael had provided for her. She had been shocked and horrified to see the bruising that covered so much of her body, the scratches and cuts that marred the whiteness of her skin.

And that bruising had been on her face as well, when she had finally nerved herself to look in a mirror. Patched and ugly, in shades that blended from dark purple to a nasty, fading yellow, it had mottled her forehead and all down the right side of her cheek. It was the darkest, most obviously damaged area, just above her eye, that had made her shudder to think just how lightly she had escaped and what might have happened.

‘But I’m feeling better now, and I’m able to think straight again. For a start, I’m in a private ward. And I’d have to be all sorts of a fool to think that the food I’m getting, the nursing care, the comfort that’s been provided is the same as I’d be getting if I had just been taken in as ordinary Serena Martin, brought in unconscious off the street, with no one to help her. So I asked a few questions…’

That didn’t please him at all. It was stamped all over his autocratic face, etched into every arrogant line of bone and muscle. And the way his sensual mouth tightened, obviously clamping down on some angry response, dried her throat uncomfortably so that she had to force herself to continue.

‘I was told that I was receiving private medical care, and that you were footing the bill. Is this true?’

For the space of several taut and uncomfortable seconds, it looked as if he wasn’t going to answer her. But then a disdainfully curt nod of his dark head admitted the truth.

‘But why? Why should you, a complete stranger, do all this for me? That is, if you are the stranger you said you were.’

‘And why the devil would I lie to you?’

Scorn blazed in his eyes, searing over her skin until she felt as if it had scoured off a much-needed protective layer. Instinctively she folded her arms around herself, suddenly feeling over-exposed.

Temporarily she had managed to blot out the fact that she was actually in a bedroom, however institutionalised, in her nightclothes, while this darkly devastating man was fully dressed beside her. But that look had ripped away the shield she had built around her.

‘I—I don’t know. I can’t even begin to imagine. You say I’d never met you before, and yet you do so much for me.’

‘I told you I could afford it.’

‘I know what you told me!’

Serena flung out her arms in a wild gesture of rejection of his response, heedless of the way it made the slightly too large neckline of her nightdress gape, revealing the rich curves of her breasts.

‘It’s what you’re not saying that’s bothering me! I don’t need to know that you’re some wildly rich international banker or that the cost of my stay here is just chickenfeed to someone with your millions. I want to know exactly why you’re involved in all this—and don’t you dare say, All what?’ she flung at him as he drew breath sharply, prior, she was sure, to doing just that.

In his turn, Rafael lifted his own hands in a gesture that surprised her by its apparent mood of concession. But the wry twist to his mouth, the distinct glint in his eyes, spoke of something else entirely.

‘You are obviously feeling much better,’ he murmured dryly. ‘But the doctor believes…’

‘Yes, I know that the doctor believes it’s better to wait. That she wants me to remember on my own. But I’m not remembering, and it’s doing my head in… It’s making me feel worse, even more confused,’ she amended hastily as he frowned his confusion, even his near-perfect grasp of English incapable of following the slang phrase. ‘I feel like I’m going out of my mind. I’m frightened—’

Her voice broke unevenly on the last word, hot tears burning in her eyes, making them glisten brilliantly as she struggled to blink them back.

‘Right now you seem like the only person I know in the entire world, but I don’t really know you! I don’t know a thing about you except the way you seem to have moved in here, taking over…’

‘Maldito sea! I felt responsible.’

It was the last thing she had expected and it stopped her dead, her eyes wide and stunned, her soft mouth actually falling open a little in shock.

‘You? Responsible? But how?’

The look he turned on her made her stomach quail nauseously. Suddenly she wished she’d never opened her big mouth.

‘It was my car.’

‘Your…’

Through the tumult of emotion inside her head she couldn’t begin to interpret the inflexion he put on the words, the feeling behind them. But she couldn’t stop herself from reacting purely instinctively, recoiling back against the pillow, all colour leaching from her face, one hand coming up to cover her trembling mouth.

‘You—you were driving?’

‘Dios, no! I wasn’t even in England at the time, but my—’ He caught himself up sharply, seeming to hunt for the right words. ‘It was my car that was involved in the accident.’

‘Your car…’ Slowly Serena lowered her protective hand, sitting back up a little, but her face was still clouded with confusion. ‘Was I driving?’

‘No. You were a passenger.’ It was curt to the point of rudeness, obviously deeply reluctant.

‘Then what…? How…?’

‘Miss Martin…’ Rafael used cold formality to freeze her out, stop her questioning in its tracks. ‘May I remind you that I have been instructed not to give you the full facts about your accident? Doctor’s orders, I believe you say.’

But now she was really worried. Being left to remember in her own time was one thing. This dreadful feeling that something was being kept from her because it would be too upsetting to know it quite another.

‘But why? Did something awful happen? Who was the driver? Where is he—she—now?’

‘Miss Martin—Serena…’

‘Rafael!’ It was wrenched from her, her state of mind too disturbed to notice the way she had used his Christian name as she lurched forward, half out of the bed, to grab hold of his hand and clutch at it hard. ‘Please!’

For the space of perhaps two dozen long drawn-out, heart-thudding seconds he hesitated, obviously thinking hard. With his hooded eyes looking down into her own darkly shadowed ones, she saw him come to a decision, change his mind, rethink and change it again.

‘Please!’ she repeated, knowing intuitively that he had decided against her. ‘I need to know.’

His sigh was a blend of exasperation and unwilling resignation.

‘Serena—’ he said at last. ‘The driver…he did not survive the crash.’

‘Oh, no!’

It was the worst she had imagined. The only thing that really explained his reluctance to speak. No, perhaps the worst thing was the way she was feeling—or rather not feeling. She couldn’t even remember who had been driving the car, so she didn’t know what she should be feeling.

‘Who was he? Did I know him?’

But Rafael’s face had closed up, heavy lids and long, luxuriant lashes hiding his eyes and his thoughts from her.

‘That is for you to say.’

‘Oh, that’s not fair!’

But, ‘doctor’s orders’ he had said, and he meant to abide by those orders, no matter what it did to her.

‘I must have done, mustn’t I? I mean—I was there with him—in the car. I wouldn’t have got into a car with a stranger.’

She looked into his face, seeking a response that would help her, but finding only that stony-faced, blanked-off expression that made her think fearfully of the unseeing, frozen faces of the statues of Ancient Greece, carved from cold, unyielding marble.

‘I wouldn’t!’ For some reason she felt the need to repeat it, to emphasise the importance of what she had said. ‘I’m not that sort of a girl.’

He didn’t say a word, but some change in his face, a movement of his head, an expression in those burning eyes, a momentary lift of one black brow that he couldn’t quite control, seemed to question the truth of her assertion.

‘You don’t believe me?’

Angry now, she could no longer stay still. Swinging her legs out of bed, she got to her feet, snatching up the calf-length robe that matched her nightdress and pulling it on, belting it firmly around her slim waist with a rough, jerky movement that betrayed her inner feelings.

This was better. At least her slender height gave her the ability to look him in the eyes, even if he was still some five or so inches above her five-feet-nine.

‘How dare you? You have no right to sit in judgement on me when you don’t even know me—if that is the truth.’

‘I had never set eyes on you in my life until the first day I came to this hospital and saw you lying unconscious in that bed.’

‘Then—then you can’t tell me what I was doing at the time of the accident or just before it and why.’

Her delicate toes curling on the soft carpet, Serena shifted uncomfortably from one foot to another. She didn’t want to think of Rafael standing beside her bed, looking down at her unconscious form from that imperious height. Just the thought of those cold eagle’s eyes watching everything about her, judging, assessing, when she was utterly defenceless, unaware even of his presence, made her blood chill in her veins.

‘You can’t know anything about me—who I am or what I am—so you’ll have to take my word for it that I’m just not that kind of woman.’

‘You may believe that you were not that sort of woman—’

He bit off the sentence swiftly, but not quite quickly enough. Serena pounced on that revealing change of tense.

‘Were not?’ she repeated shakily. ‘Were? What does that mean? What do you know that you aren’t telling me?’

But he wouldn’t meet her eyes. Instead he turned to where little Tonio still lay, sleeping peacefully.

‘I have to leave,’ he said, not even attempting to hide the fact that he was deliberately ignoring her anxious questions. ‘Tonio will need feeding…’

‘No! You can’t do this to me! I won’t let you!’

The sidelong glance he turned in her direction was one of supreme indifference. I can do exactly as I wish, it declared, as clearly as if he had spoken. And you can do nothing to stop me.

Oh, couldn’t she?

Just as Rafael looped the handles of the carrycot over one strong hand she slipped past him, heading for the doorway and positioning herself just in front of it.

‘I mean it!’ she declared, praying that her vehemence hid every sign of the uncertainty that nagged at her.

‘Serena…’ Her name was threaded through with a note of ominous warning, one she knew she would be wise to heed, but she couldn’t bring herself to give up the fight so easily.

‘No. I won’t let you go until you tell me. It’s my life, I have a right to know!’

No, defiance was the wrong approach. It was only hardening his resolve. She could see that in the set of his jaw, the cold light in his eyes, the way they had narrowed, dangerously assessing. Hastily she rethought her plan of campaign.

‘Rafael, please… ‘ she cajoled, carefully adjusting her tone, making it soft and pleading, totally unlike the challenge of moments before.

‘Serena, don’t do this… ‘

Are you sure you know what you’re doing? a small, nervous voice questioned at the back of her mind. Are you sure that you really want to know?

‘No!’

Stubbornly she pushed the weak thoughts away, refusing to let them take root. If she gave in to Rafael now, if she let him go without answering her, then she would have lost her chance for ever. If he defeated her once, he would always be able to do so again.

‘Please—you don’t know what it’s been like! I’ve lain awake at nights trying and trying to remember, but it’s all just a blank—a big, gaping black hole where that day should be. Can you imagine how that feels—how frightening it is?’

‘Madre de Dios!’

Rafael dropped the handles of the carrycot and raked both hands through the shining luxuriance of his black hair in a gesture so expressive of burning exasperation that Serena couldn’t hold back a smile at the knowledge that she was getting through to him at last.

‘You will regret this.’

It was a flat statement of fact, not a threat, and that was what firmed her resolve, making her even more set on continuing.

‘I’ll regret it even more if I don’t find out what you’re talking about. This is my past—my life! How can I ever hope to move on, go forward, if I don’t know what’s behind me?’

Rafael’s only answer was another outburst of explosive Spanish, but at the end of it he flung up his hands in a gesture of defeat.

‘All right, you asked for it! And perhaps it is best that you know the truth. That date you gave… ‘

‘It wasn’t right? I was unconscious longer than I believed?’

‘On the contrary. In all but one detail the date was perfectly correct. The right day, the right month…’

‘But…’ She had to force the word out in a hoarse, tight-throated croak, because it was obvious that there had to be a ‘but’.

‘But it was a year early.’

‘Early? I don’t understand.’

‘The date you gave to the doctor was the right day, right month last year. And you are not twenty-three, but twenty-four. The accident, the injury to your head, left you with partial amnesia. It’s not just the last few days that you can’t remember. You’ve lost a year of your life.’

CHAPTER THREE

YOU’VE lost a year of your life. A year of your life. A year.

The words Rafael had flung at her formed a tormenting, thudding refrain inside her skull whenever she wasn’t thinking about anything else.

And she had too much time to think. Nothing held her attention; nothing distracted her from the appalling fact that she could not manage to come to terms with.

In the daytime she could try to read, or watch television, but inevitably she had found it was impossible to concentrate. She would find that she had been staring blankly at the screen or a page on which not a single word had registered, and all the time those impossible, incredible words had swung round and round in her mind, beating at her brain with a bruising sense of horror. But the nights, in the silence and the darkness, were much, much worse.

You’ve lost a year of your life.

How was it possible? How could this have happened? More importantly, why had it happened? How could she simply forget about a year that she had lived? How could something wipe out twelve months, three hundred and sixty-five days of her existence, destroying it and leaving not a trace of anything behind?

‘No!’

She cried the word aloud in an attempt to drive away the demons of fear and panic that seemed to prowl around her, hidden in the shadows, tormenting her.

She wouldn’t give in to this, she vowed. Wouldn’t go down under the waves of horror that threatened to engulf her. She would fight them with everything at her disposal. Her past couldn’t stay buried for ever. Her memories would have to emerge some day, and she would do everything she could to make sure that day came just as soon as possible.

Not that she had much to go on. Her few belongings were no help. The clothes she had been wearing at the time of the accident had been ruined, but she was assured that they had been strictly anonymous, inexpensive chainstore items, with no distinguishing marks on them at all, ditto her shoes. And the small, battered brown leather handbag that had been picked up at the crash scene held only a purse containing just a few pounds in cash, a comb, a packet of tissues and a key. That was all.

‘If only there’d been a diary, or something with an address on it!’ Serena had wailed when Dr Greene had assured her that nothing had been taken or hidden from her.

‘It’s been left exactly as it was handed to us, I’m afraid. The police have investigated that address in Yorkshire that you gave us, but it turned out to be a dead end.’

‘No help at all?’

The doctor shook her dark head, grey eyes sympathetic.

‘I’m sorry, no. It was just one bedsit out of a dozen or so in an old house that’s usually rented out to students. Apparently when you lived there everyone who shared the house with you was in their final year. They’ve all moved on, far and wide, and very few of them even bothered to leave forwarding addresses.’

‘And Leanne?’

Leanne was someone she’d remembered. A friend from her student days. Her best friend.

‘I went to university late, because my mother was so ill,’ she’d told the doctor, sadness clouding her eyes at the memory. ‘She had ovarian cancer and I postponed my starting date because I wanted to stay at home and nurse her. So I was twenty-two when I started my course. It seemed that everyone else was so much younger than me, and I didn’t really make any friends until I moved into Alban Road. That was where I met Leanne.’

‘You said she’d emigrated to Australia?’

‘That’s right. She was engaged to an Australian doctor and she was going to live with him after the wedding.’

Serena had been invited to the wedding, she knew that much. And she was sure she would have gone. There was no way she would have missed her friend’s big day. But, try as she might, she couldn’t recall anything about it. It seemed that the start of Leanne’s marriage marked the end of the lifetime she could remember.

‘But Australia’s a huge place when you’ve no idea where to start looking. Worse than the proverbial needle in a haystack. I would have had her address somewhere; I know I would! But I’ve no idea where it is now.’

That address must be wherever she had lived in the year since she had left Yorkshire. Because she had learned that much at least. Something had happened to her; something so important or traumatic that she had thrown up her university course and…

And what? Lying awake in the darkness, Serena thumped her pillow in a rage of impotent frustration. The answer to that question was lost, along with her memory.

‘So what do I do now?’

Because she had to do something. The injuries she’d received in the crash were well on their way to mending, the cuts all but healed, even the worst of the bruises fading away completely. Physically, there was nothing to keep her in the hospital any longer.