Crime Of Passion Read online

  Crime Of Passion

  Lynne Graham

  "Love has nothing to do with what is between us,"

  Her knuckles showed white as she tightened her grip on her glass. "There is nothing between us."

  "Look at me and tell me that—show me the courage of your conviction," Rafael derided.

  Georgie felt as though she was being torn apart.

  "I said...look at me." Rafael scanned her face with scorchingly angry dark eyes. "Do you think I enjoy wanting you? But this time I will not walk away. Why should I? You owe me—"

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Bolivian policeman growled across the table. 'Es usted inglesal Donde se aloja usted?'

  The small room was unbelievably hot and airless. Georgie shot her interrogator a glittering glance from furious violet eyes and threw back her head, a torrent of tousled multi-coloured curls every shade from gold to copper to Titian red dancing round her pale tri­angular face. 'I do not speak Spanish!' she said for the twentieth time.

  He thumped the table with a clenched fist. 'Como?' he demanded in frustration.

  Her teeth gritted, the naturally sultry line of her mouth flattening. Suddenly something just exploded inside her. 'I've been robbed and I've been attacked and I'm not going to just sit here while you shout at me!' she burst out, her strained voice threatening to crack right down the middle.

  Plunging upright, the man strode over to the door and threw it wide. Georgie gaped in disbelief as her attacker was ushered in. All the fear she had striven to hide behind her defiant front flooded back, images of rape and vi­olence taking over. She flew up out of her chair and stumbled backwards into the comer, one trembling hand attempting to hitch up the torn T-shirt which threatened to expose the bare slope of her breasts.

  Her assailant, a heavily built young man, glowered accusingly and self-righteously across the room at her and burst into vituperative Spanish.

  Georgie blinked bemusedly. Her own blank sense of incomprehension was the most terrifying aspect of all. Why did the creep who had mauled her in his truck behave as though he was the one entitled to make a com­plaint to the police? In fact, the lunatic, apparently ig­norant of the fact that the attempted sexual assault was a crime, had actually dragged her into the tiny, dilapi­dated police station!

  In exaggerated dumb-show, the policeman indicated the bloody tracks of Georgie's nails down one side of the younger man's unshaven face.

  Dear heaven, was a woman not allowed to defend herself when she was assaulted in Bolivia? Without warning, the artificial strength of outrage began to fail Georgie. Her independent spirit quailed and, for the first time in her life, she longed for family back-up.

  But her father and stepmother were enjoying a three-week cruise of the Greek islands in celebration of their twentieth wedding-anniversary and her stepbrother, Steve, was in central Africa reporting on some civil war that had recently blown up. Her family didn't even know where she was. Georgie had impulsively splurged her late grandmother's legacy on her flight to Bolivia. A once in a lifetime holiday, she had promised herself.

  Just thirty-six hours ago she had landed at La Paz, cheerfully anticipating her coming reunion with her friend, Maria Cristina Reveron. How many times had Maria Cristina pleaded with her to come and stay? It had undoubtedly never occurred to her friend, an heiress from the day of her birth, that simple lack of money might lie behind Georgie's well-worn excuses. In the same way, it had not occurred to Georgie that Maria Cristina and her husband, Antonio, might not be in residence when she finally arrived!

  The Reveron villa had been closed up, guarded by a security man with two vicious dogs. He had not had a word of English. Refusing to surrender to panic, Georgie had checked into the cheapest hotel she could find and had decided to do a little exploring on her own while she waited for the Reverons to return to La Paz. Since Maria Cristina was eight months pregnant, Georgie was convinced that her friend could only be away for the weekend at most.

  'A little exploring,' she reflected now, on the edge of hysteria as she studied the two angrily gesticulating men several feet away. Panic was threatening her. She was more than out of her depth, she was drowning. Intel­ligence told her that it was time to play the one card she had refused to play when she found the Reveron villa inconveniently and dismayingly empty of welcoming hosts. The wild card, the one move that she had never dreamt she would ever be forced to make.

  She could have phoned Rafael to ask him where his sister was.. .but her every skin-cell had cringed from the idea of contacting him, asking him for his as­sistance. Stupid pride, she saw now, hardly the be­haviour of a responsible adult. Four years was a long time. So he had dumped her. So he had hurt and mis­judged her. So he had humiliated her. Well, join the real world, Georgie, she taunted herself, with the thickness of tears convulsing her throat, you are not the only woman ever to suffer that way!

  Approaching the table, where a notepad and pen lay, Georgie drew in a deep sustaining breath. But suppose they had never heard of Rafael? Suppose he wasn't the big wheel her friend had always led her to believe? And, even if both those fears proved unfounded, just how likely was it that Rafael Cristobal Rodriguez Berganza would flex a single aristocratic finger to come to her aid?

  With an unsteady hand, Georgie carefully block-printed Rafael Rodriguez Berganza across the pad and then pressed it across the table. It hurt to do it—oh, yes, it hurt to write that name.

  A furrow appeared between the policeman's brows. With an air of questioning confusion, he looked up and across at her. He repeated the name out loud with more than a touch of reverence. 'No entiendo,' he said, frowning his lack of understanding.

  'Friend! Good friend!' Georgie tapped the pad with feverish desperation and then crossed her arms defens­ively over her breasts. 'Very good friend,' she lied, forcing a bright and hopefully confident smile, while inside herself she curled up and died with mortification.

  The policeman looked frankly incredulous, and then he vented a slightly nervous laugh. He pointed to her and then he tapped his own head and shook it. He cut right across the language barrier. You're nuts, the gesture said.

  'I am telling the truth!' Georgie protested frantically. 'I've known Rafael for years. Rafael and I... we're like this!' She clutched her hands together, striving to look sincere and meaningful.

  The policeman flushed and studied his shoes, as though she had embarrassed him. Then, abruptly, as the youthful truck-driver exploded back into speech again, the policeman thrust him unceremoniously out of the room and slammed the door on him.

  'I want you to telephone Rafael!' Feeling idiotic, but now convinced that she was actually getting somewhere, Georgie mimicked dialling a number and lifting a phone while he watched her.

  With a sigh, the policeman moved forward. He clamped a hand round her narrow wrist, prodded her out into the corridor and from there at speed down into the dirty barred cell at the foot. He had turned the key and pocketed it before Georgie even knew what was happening to her.

  'Let me out of here!' she shrieked incredulously.

  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 Latin-American 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, bis 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 bunding, 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 sack? She shrank up against the door.

  Frozen into stillness, Georgie watched the sack wobble and shiver. There was something alive in it, unless she was very much mistaken... With an ear-splitting shriek of alarm, Georgie catapulted herself head-first out of the car. She came down on the hard dusty ground with enough force to knock the breath from her lungs.

  'Not happy unless you're the centre of male attention, are you?' Rafael breathed unpleasantly, bending over her as she scrambled up on to her knees. Two of his security men had climbed out of the vehicle behind to see what was happening.

  Red as a beetroot but outraged, Georgie gasped, "There's a snake in that sack!'

  'So?' Rafael e
nquired drily. 'It's a local delicacy.'

  He dumped her back in the seat she had left in such haste, the blanket firmly wrapped round her quivering limbs. Perspiring with fright, impervious to the amusement surrounding her, Georgie watched the policeman smilingly tie the sack more securely shut and deposit it back in the car.

  'Please take it away, Rafael,' she mumbled sickly, leaning out of the window. 'PleaseV

  A lean brown hand reached for the offending article and removed it, putting it in the back seat.

  "Thank you,' she whispered as he swung into the driver's seat. A stray shaft of sunlight gleamed over the blue-black luxuriance of bis silky hair. Like a reformed kleptomaniac in an untended store of goodies, Georgie clasped her hands, removed her eyes from temptation and hated herself. Why did memory have to be so physical"? She shifted on the seat, bitterly ashamed that she could still remember just how silky his hair felt.

  'So tell me, how—in your view—did you land yourself in a cell less than twenty-four hours after your arrival in my country?' he invited curtly, making it clear that whatever was on his mind, it was certainly not on a similar plane to hers.

  'Yesterday, I decided to go and see the Zongo Valley

  ice-caves '

  'Dressed as you are now?' Rafael cut in incredulously. 'In a mini skirt and high heels?'

  'I ' A mini skirt? He regarded a glimpse of her knees as provocative?

  "The climb to the caves takes almost two hours even for an experienced hill-walker!'

  Georgie's teeth clenched. 'Look, I simply saw this poster in the hotel. I didn't know you had to be an athlete to get up there!' 'When did reality dawn?'

  'When I got out of the taxi and saw a trio of brawny, booted, bearded types swarming up the hill,' she ad­mitted in a frozen voice, empty of amusement. 'So I thought I'd walk back and see the lake instead, and I turned back to tell the taxi-driver that I wouldn't be long and he'd gone.. .with my handbag!' 'Jorge suspected something of that nature.' 'Who is Jorge?'

  "The village policeman,' Rafael said drily. 'My bag was stolen. The driver just took off with it on the back seat!'