One Night in Madrid

Still caught up in her own unhappy thoughts, Alannah had no power to resist as the hand that held her wrist tightened, spinning her round to face Raul.

And she was even closer than she had thought. Facing this way, she was almost up against his chest, her nose level with the top button on his shirt, her eyes looking straight at the smooth, bronzed skin of his throat, seeing the way the muscles tensed and released as he swallowed.

‘Now you will tell me just what all this is about.’

‘All—?’

The words were choked off, the breath snatched from Alannah’s lungs as Raul pushed long brown fingers under her chin and lifted it so that her eyes were now forced to meet the burn of his as they bored down into her.

‘And before you say “All what?” and tell me that there is nothing wrong, then you should know that I will not believe you.’

How had he known so precisely what she had been about to say? Was he a mind-reader now?

‘Why not?’

For a second as his head lowered she thought that he was actually going to touch her, that he might rest his forehead against hers as he had used to do as a gesture of easy affection when they had been together. The thought made her heart clench in panic, her pulse thudding frantically. But he paused just inches away from actual contact and instead clamped his hands over her shoulders, holding her tightly so that she could have no hope of moving away.

‘Because I know you and the way you behave.’

‘You haven’t seen me for two years!’

‘Two years is not so long a time—and with someone like you, I would never forget.’

Never forget … So how did she take that?

If her mind were clearer then she might have been able to interpret just how Raul had actually said the words but her thoughts were still buzzing in despair and confusion and she hadn’t had a chance to grab at the moment before it was gone again and all she was aware of was the burning stare of those deep-set eyes into her face.

And Raul didn’t give her any time to think further.

‘I know that however much you try to hide it you are in pieces inside. You are walking and talking like a robot—but un robot would at least make some sort of sense and you are making none. And these …’

A hard fingertip brushed lightly over the shadows she knew were under her eyes, traced the lines that stress and sorrow had etched on her face.

‘These give too much away. So what is it, Alannah? What has happened to Chris?’

In a series of shocks, it was another she didn’t expect. Her head went back in surprise, eyes opening wide.

‘Chris … You remember my brother’s name?’

‘I remember everything,’ Raul told her in a voice that shivered all the way down her spine, taking another bit more of her hard-won control with it as it went. ‘So now are you going to tell me what has happened? What exactly is wrong with Chris?’

Trapped like a rabbit in the headlights by the burn of those amazing eyes, Alannah felt her grip on what was happening slip and evaporate, leaving her shaking and distraught, a feeling that was worsened by the way that Raul’s hands tightened on her shoulders, hard fingers digging into the soft skin under the black T-shirt.

‘Tell me,’ he said and it was a command, one she knew she disobeyed at her peril. Only the truth would satisfy him and he would know if she told him anything less than that.

‘Chris …’

She hunted for a way to say it—but what way was there other than the hard, cold fact that she had been trying to absorb, to accept, to cope with for the past twenty-four hours?

‘My brother—Chris’s gone … he’s dead.’

And as she said that final, dreadful word the last shattered remnants of her control broke completely and the tears that shock had forced back, leaving her unable to mourn, totally overwhelmed her. With no fight left in her, no strength at all, she gave herself up to the misery and the aching, dragging sobs that could not be held back.

Blinded by the tears, she could feel Raul’s strong arms come round her, gathering her close, holding her tight, and in the blackness and despair of her loss she had no way of knowing if his gesture was the most wonderful, most welcome thing on earth or if it was the worst, the most dangerous thing that could have happened to her.

She only knew that under her tear-soaked cheeks, against the sudden weakness of her body, there was now the strength and support she needed and so she buried her wet face in the fine material of Raul’s jacket and wept her heart out.

CHAPTER TWO

HE SHOULD never have touched her, Raul told himself furiously as he stared out at the lights of the houses flashing past his car as it sped through the darkened streets. He should never, ever have touched her! He should have known just where it would lead.

Maldito sea—what sort of a fool was he? He should have known.

He had let himself believe that two years was a long time. Told himself that in the two dozen months since he had last seen her, since she had walked out of his life without a backward glance, that he had been able to forget her—put her right out of his mind.

Forget her! Hah!

‘What?’

Without realising it, he had let the short snarl of bitter laughter escape from his lips as a real sound and the woman slumped beside him on the back seat of the powerful car stirred briefly from the silence into which she had lapsed after the total outpouring of grief and lifted her head to look at him, her eyes just pools of shadow in a white face.

‘Nada—nothing …’ He waved a hand dismissively and she subsided back into silence, head down, preoccupied by her own thoughts.

What was he doing here with her? How had he managed to end up escorting her home like this when he already knew that he had made one of the biggest mistakes of his life in taking her in his arms in the first place? His fingers still stung from where he had touched her skin, the scent of her hair, her body was still in his nostrils in a way that reminded him painfully of the long, burning nights of sexual frustration that he had endured in the weeks after she had left him. Nights that had driven him to seek the company of another woman, any woman, only to find that being with anyone else made the feeling worse, piling dissatisfaction on dissatisfaction until he had felt he would go up in flames because of it.

It was the last thing he should be feeling right now. The last thing he even wanted to think about and yet one touch had put him right back there in the thrall of it. One touch, one moment with her in his arms and it was as if she had never been away.

But what the hell else could he have done? When she had gone to pieces in front of him like that—practically thrown herself into his arms—only a brute would have turned away from her.

Especially when he knew only too damn well just what she was going through, the rawness of grief, the sense of total disbelief that prevented any sort of acceptance.

Lorena.

The beloved name slashed into his thoughts like a stab of pain, making him close his lids sharply against the burn at the backs of his eyes. The thought of the moment that he had had to identify his sister’s body, lying cold and still, was a memory that he knew he would never be able to erase.

And with that moment etched so brutally on his mind, and knowing that Alannah was going through something of the same thing, how could he have turned away?

‘Thank you for taking me home.’

Having emerged from her withdrawn silence at last, Alannah seemed determined to make herself continue the conversation. Raul could hear the effort she was making to speak in the stiffness of her words, the flat, monotone delivery.

‘It’s very kind of you.’

Another brusque gesture waved away her words.

‘No es nada,’ he returned, finding it impossible to pitch his voice at anything other than a growl, and he watched her pull her jacket tighter round herself as if she was cold.

‘I could have caught the bus.’

Now it was her voice that had a distinct chill to it. Every last trace of the woman who had wept in his arms had vanished and in her place was a cool, collected and totally distant female. He could practically feel the ice forming in the car as she spoke. Probably, like him, she was now deeply regretting that she had ever given in to the weak impulse to cry on his shoulder. He need be under no delusion that it meant anything. She had been on the edge of breaking down from the moment he had walked into the room, and he had been the only person there. He had no doubt that if there had been anyone else she could possibly have chosen then she would. ‘In this weather?’

This time his gesture indicated the driving rain that was lashing against the car windows, the swish of the hard-working wipers and the splash of tyres through puddles almost drowning his words.

‘You would have been drenched before you even made it to the bus stop. Besides, Carlos was waiting to drive me into town anyway and, as we found, we have to go past your flat to reach my hotel.’

And he was not at all prepared to leave her alone on a night like this and in the state she was in. She might have stopped crying, those appallingly harsh, wrenching sobs subsiding slowly into a ragged, gasping near-silence, but her slim body had still been shaking in his arms, her eyes swimming with tears.

‘I’ve done it before.’

‘I’m sure you have but with my car available there was no need for you to do it tonight.’

He wondered what she would have done if he had told her that he knew exactly what she was feeling. That he was going through the same hateful experience himself and because of that he’d known he couldn’t let her face even the short journey alone.

When a sudden vicious memory of just why he was using her company to keep the darkness from his own thoughts, why he needed her presence to fill the emptiness he was feeling forced itself past the temporary barrier he had tried to erect in his mind, he shook his head roughly, needing to drive away the desperately unwanted images.

‘I could have managed!’

Alannah’s tone told him that she had seen the abrupt movement and misinterpreted the reason for it.

‘I’m not always a wreck like this! I can usually cope—it’s just that tonight things—got on top of me.’

‘Believe me, I understand. But was there no one else who could have been there with you? Your mother perhaps?’

‘My mother is in a far worse state than I am.’

Her voice was low and she was staring out of the window, assuming an intense interest in the passing cars as she spoke.

‘It goes against everything in nature for a mother to hear of the death of her child and she has barely recovered from losing my father. She’s in pieces—can’t sleep … won’t eat.’

She shook her head, her mouth twisting, fighting, he knew, against more tears.

‘The only way she can cope is with the help of the sedatives the doctor prescribed. At least they knocked her out tonight. But she can’t manage anything practical. Everything that has to be done is up to me.’

There was a terrible, raw edge on that last sentence, one Raul recognised only too well. The memory of how she had looked in that hospital room, so lost and alone, with no one there to help her, no support, no company, sent a wave of cold anger running through him.

‘So where the hell was he?’

That brought her head up, shadowed eyes meeting his sharply.

‘Where was—who?’

‘The man in your life …’

The man she had left him for.

‘Your lover—your boyfriend—whatever you call him.’ ‘Oh …’

Realisation dawned slowly on Alannah’s numbed brain. He was talking about the 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 with her face turned up towards him as it was, then he would just have to lower that proud dark head in order to crush her lips in the kiss he so obviously wanted to take from her. The kiss that the gleam in his eyes, the softening of the beautiful, hard mouth promised.

And the kiss she so wanted from him.

The realisation was like a blow landing on her ribcage, making her catch her breath in shock and confusion.

She wanted Raul to kiss her. Wanted it so much that it was like a scream in her head. But a scream of need that warred in the same instant with an equally desperate scream of denial and warning. This didn’t make any sort of sense. It was not only stupid, but it was also dangerous as hell. She should be running miles away from Raul, as far and as fast as she could. Not sitting here, imagining, waiting—yearning …

‘Raul …’ she said, trying desperately to make it sound like a warning, as offputting as possible. But she had so little control over her tongue that instead it came out on a sensual husk, enticing and provocative when she was trying for exactly the opposite.

‘Alannah …’ Raul murmured and his tone echoed hers almost exactly, the gravelly purr seeming to coil around her head like perfumed smoke until she felt as if her senses were swimming from just breathing in. And what breath she managed seemed to catch in her throat so that her lips parted on a small, faintly gasping sigh as she fought for control.

Those gleaming eyes were fixed on her and she saw the faint twitch of his mouth into a tiny smile before he sobered again. Staring intently at her partly open mouth. And she could only watch, frozen as his dark head tilted slightly to one side, lowered …

And stopped dead as the car drew in to the side of the road and pulled up, coming to a smooth halt right outside the main door to the building where her flat was. A comment from the driver—something on the lines of ‘We’re here’ in Spanish, Alannah presumed—broke into the taut, heated silence that gripped the two of them as the engine slowed, stilled.

And still Raul didn’t move. Still he kept his hooded gaze fixed on her lips, so fiercely intent that she could almost feel its burn along the delicate skin of her mouth, drying them, drying her throat until the sensation became totally unbearable and she had to slick her tongue over her lips to ease the parched discomfort there.

And almost groaned aloud—but whether in relief or disappointment she was unable to say—when she saw how the tiny, brief movement shattered the mesmeric mood. Raul’s head came up again, his eyes clashed with hers just for a moment, then glanced away again, looking out into the rain-swept street.

‘My stop, I think,’ Alannah managed, her voice coming and going on the words like a badly tuned radio. ‘This is where I get out.’

If she expected any response, she didn’t get one. Instead Raul leaned across her and pushed open the door, letting in a waft of cold, wet air as he did so, then sat back, obviously expecting her to take herself off, out of the car, and as speedily as possible if his closed, withdrawn expression was anything to go by.

‘Thank you for the lift.’

‘You’re welcome.’ He made it sound the exact opposite.

The abrupt change from fiercely intent sensuality to cold distance was so disconcerting that Alannah actually felt herself shaking, unable to quite get a grip on herself. She had been so sure … and yet now his mood was so totally different that she was forced to wonder if she had been imagining things, deluding herself completely.

She couldn’t get out fast enough, pushing awkwardly and inelegantly out of the car. It was only as she set foot on the pavement, buffeted uncomfortably by the force of the wind and the rain, her short jacket no protection against the inclement weather, that she suddenly remembered in a devastating rush just why she had met up with Raul at all. Why she had been at the hospital in the first place.

She had been there to tell him everything—the whole truth about the terrible accident that had claimed Chris’s life—and she hadn’t even begun to say anything. She had let the time in the car slide away from her, caught in her memories of the past, in anything and everything other than what she should have been thinking of.

What she should have told him.

What she still had to tell him.

She couldn’t let someone else break the truth to him; couldn’t let him find out in any other way. There was only one person who could tell him everything that had happened—and it was her duty to make sure he got the right story. It was the last thing she could do for her brother—the only way to preserve Chris’s memory.

But there was no way she could turn round now and tell him. What was she to do? Get back in the car and say—‘Hang on, I’ve got something to tell you’? Or say it baldly and bluntly standing here like this, leaning in at the door, where the driver and possibly anyone passing by might also be able to hear.

She couldn’t do that to him. Not even to Señor Heartless Raul Marcín. In these circumstances she owed him a bit more than that.