A Fiery Baptism Read online

  ‘Holy Moses! I’ve a head like a sieve!’ Karen gasped, comic dismay widening her eyes. ‘I forgot about my celebrity guest. What are we doing in here? One of the models I worked with in Italy simply walked in with him as cool as you please. Rafael Alejandro! Here! In my humble home. Can you believe that?’

  Deception didn’t come naturally to Sarah. ‘Alejandro…the painter?’

  ‘Dear God, is there another one around? He’s only one of the most famous artists alive!’ Karen stressed. ‘Considering that most of them have to drop dead to achieve recognition, we are talking here about fame as in serious fame, fame with a capital F!’

  ‘I believe he’s a remarkably talented artist.’ Even to her own ears, Sarah sounded wooden.

  ‘Believe me, when you look at him his skill with a paintbrush is about the last thing on your mind.’ Karen was dry, annoyed by Sarah’s refusal to be impressed. ‘Newsprint doesn’t do him justice.’

  ‘The gossip columns do.’

  Karen dropped her offended stare and grinned. ‘Sarah, my innocent, when you get an incredibly beautiful man the wild reputation goes with the territory. “Mad, bad and dangerous to know” may not be you but you haven’t seen him yet. The guy is pure fantasy. I swear my hormones went into a feeding frenzy on the doorstep!’

  As Sarah stood up, her conscience twanged. Sarah would be upset when she found that the rare bird had flown in her absence. ‘More you than Gordon?’

  ‘No. I like to appreciate but I’ve no ambition to touch…well, at least not in my sane mind,’ Karen confided with her usual devotion to the absolute truth. ‘I prefer my men less…what do they call it in Spain? Muy hombre? A volatile artistic genius would be much too unpredictable for me.’

  In actuality, Rafael was not unpredictable, Sarah reflected helplessly. He did what he wanted, when he wanted, how he wanted. He had a tongue like a whip and a convoluted, brilliant mind that thought round corners into the dark, secret places other people sensibly left alone.

  ‘Anyway, he’s reputed to be fantastically clever as well,’ Karen rattled on. ‘I’m not running myself down but I’m no Einstein and you just couldn’t be in control with a guy like that. It’s fatuous but people will talk about this party forever simply because he’s here.’ Karen pulled open the door to find Gordon raising a hand to knock on it. Half amused, half irritated, she said, ‘I underestimated you. Have you got a homing device planted on her?’

  Gordon smiled and looked through her simultaneously. Karen flushed and muttered something about food in the oven.

  ‘Sorry, was I ages? We got caught up,’ Sarah said lightly.

  ‘I got taken over,’ Gordon shared wryly. ‘You were right. She’s not at all like you. She’s like a great overgrown schoolgirl.’

  ‘She’s a lovely person and there’s not an ounce of malice in her.’

  Reluctantly he smiled. ‘Can you imagine the havoc she’d wreak if there were? Her brain is two steps behind her conversation.’

  ‘I wonder why she thought you were cute.’

  ‘Cute?’ His nostrils flared fastidiously.

  ‘A compliment you do not deserve.’

  Unexpectedly he laughed, his pugnacious aspect vanishing. ‘I think of fluffy toys as cute but I was out of order. Let’s grab a seat,’ he suggested.

  Gordon being Gordon there was no need to grab or even to search. He guided her between a low table and sofa, stowing her down in one corner. Ten seconds later he reappeared with two drinks he had evidently stashed somewhere near by in readiness. Gordon was always well organised. Meeting the level scrutiny she had been self-consciously evading, Sarah smiled. For once, Karen had made a mistake. Purely platonic friendship was perfectly possible between sensible people.

  Her wandering gaze suddenly jolted to a halt. Shock reverberated through her in sickening waves and her fingers curled into her evening bag like white-knuckled talons, bracing for attack.

  Rafael was lounging on the matching sofa on the other side of the low table. Her throat closed over. Every long lean line of his magnificent body emanated unnatural relaxation. There was a reckless violence in the dark, glittering stare that entrapped hers across the divide. Her ability to breathe was suffocated at source.

  ‘The punch has the kick of a mule,’ Gordon told her warningly.

  Half of it went down Sarah’s convulsed throat in one go. Rafael had switched his attention back to the sinuous redhead curled under his arm. Cerise-painted fingertips were idly tracing the taut inner seam of the faded denim encasing one long, muscular thigh. Those caressing fingers exercised a sick fascination over Sarah. She could not take her eyes off them.

  Gordon was talking to her and she couldn’t hear him. In desperation she turned towards him, only to be nailed again by Rafael’s steel-bright stare. Unforgivably he had been watching her watching him. She felt like an animal caught cruelly in the jaws of a trap with the hunter standing over her, making no attempt to administer a clean kill. She had the terrifying sensation that Rafael was seeing her naked and defenceless. Her muscles were so clenched that she physically hurt. For a crazed moment she was so wildly out of control that she almost ran for cover again.

  Karen’s voice exploded in her ear. ‘Why aren’t you circulating?’

  Karen wasn’t real. Gordon wasn’t real. The only reality was Rafael, even when Karen was blocking her view. He had not needed to speak to brutally intimate his savage contempt for her as a woman. He only had to sit there letting that tramp practically make love to him in public! She read the message like the banner he intended it to be and she felt ill, cornered.

  ‘Por dios, this world is truly a small place.’ Sarah’s head jerked up, a row of spectral toothmarks biting into her jangled nerves, her pallor pronounced.

  Rafael had moved. He stood over her now, casting a long dark shadow before he crouched down in front of her with a natural athlete’s grace. So close, so unexpected was it that it took every atom of will-power she possessed not to rear back. Somewhere Karen was loudly proclaiming an introduction.

  ‘Sarah and I know each other.’ He said it to her, nobody else, his tiger’s eyes a golden threat on her white immobility.

  ‘You know each other?’ Karen positively squealed, hanging over the back of the sofa. ‘Where from?’

  A smile slashed Rafael’s expressive mouth. A long brown forefinger skated over Sarah’s fiercely clenched hands, a mountain cat taking a first playful swipe at a trapped prey, frozen with fear. ‘Where from?’ he prompted silky soft. ‘Am I so easily, so quickly forgotten?’

  Only desperation came to her rescue. ‘Paris, wasn’t it?’ she managed tautly.

  ‘When I was still starving in my garret, although not alone,’ he mocked, velvety smooth, smiling again as her trembling fingers snaked jerkily back out of reach. ‘I believe I was part of the Francophile experience.’ Slowly he sprang upright again, still ignoring Gordon. ‘Es verdad?’

  ‘Boy, have you got some explaining to do!’ Karen snapped painfully close to her eardrum as he walked away. ‘Give me an inch, Gordon, there’s a love. This is girl-talk, utterly beneath your notice. Sarah, you couldn’t possibly have forgotten him!’

  ‘To think that I once believed that the Spanish were a uniquely courteous race,’ Gordon drawled. ‘Shall we sample supper?’

  Karen cut in on him, ‘Sarah, tell me—’

  ‘You don’t need a public address system, do you?’ Gordon detached Sarah’s numbed arm from Karen’s over-enthusiastic grip. They were a hair’s breadth from fighting over her, Sarah realised on the brink of hysteria. Rafael’s behaviour had shocked her into dumb stupidity. She couldn’t have made small talk to save her life.

  ‘Paris,’ said Karen and suddenly she burst out laughing. ‘Of course! He was one of Margo’s and you never did tell tales.’

  Karen had herded them both into the dining-room. She was chatting nineteen to the dozen now, glad to have solved the mystery so easily. ‘We all thought it was a scream when Sarah’s parents let her go and stay in Paris with Margo. Easter in Upper Sixth, wasn’t it?’

  Gordon passed out plates. ‘Margo?’ he prompted obediently.

  Sarah parted bone-dry lips. ‘Margo Carruthers. Her father had an engineering business in Paris.’

  ‘Sarah used to sleep in French class,’ Karen took up impatiently. ‘And her parents put French on a level with flower arranging and good carriage.’

  ‘I went to Paris to improve my French.’ Sarah had to fight to keep her voice level on the unnecessary explanation.

  Karen was giggling like a drain.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t see the joke,’ Gordon imparted.

  Karen gave him a ‘you-wouldn’t’ look. ‘Margo was sex mad. Anything in trousers,’ she emphasised. ‘But she acted like a little novice nun round parents. You must know what the Southcotts are like. If they’d had a clue what Margo’s favourite pursuit was, they’d never have let Sarah within a mile of her exclusive company!’

  ‘Teenagers are very vulnerable,’ Gordon said coolly.

  ‘You can’t know the Southcotts very well. When there was a flu outbreak at school, they kept Sarah home for a whole six weeks!’ Karen sent Sarah’s shuttered face a guilty glance. ‘Sorry, forgot you were there. Where are you in this conversation, anyway?’

  Karen’s sister came up and whispered something. ‘No!’ Karen exclaimed in angry vexation. ‘Excuse me. Someone’s been in my dark-room.’

  ‘I hope we can assume that the interrogation is over,’ Gordon said grimly. ‘Alejandro had one hell of a nerve forcing himself on you like that. But then what can you expect from a gypsy?’

  An extraordinary urge to slap the complacent superiority from Gordon’s well-bred features assailed Sarah. Karen’s assumption that Rafael had been one of Margo’s men had filled her with embittered humour. Even her closest friend couldn’t imagine any more intimate connection between them. Only the devil’s idea of a black joke could have matched two such radically different personalities. And why had she had to go to hell and back to discover what was so obvious to everyone else? The North Pole and the equator did not meet.

  Gordon hailed a familiar face with relief. Another dinner-jacket and bow-tie. A man with a thin blonde on his arm shook her hand, spoke, and she must have spoken back. The dialogue roamed from government cuts to the Booker Prize on to Wall Street. Gordon was in his element. They worked their passage slowly back to the lounge, a comfortable part of a foursome, but shock was still curdling Sarah’s stomach. Nervous tension always made her feel sick.

  Rafael was leaning back against the wall. He didn’t have a restful bone in his superbly built body. He was never still even when he was working. Oh, God…oh… In despair, she struggled to suppress the memories chipping away at what little remained of her poise. As people pushed past, propelling her uncomfortably closer to Rafael, Gordon draped an unexpected arm round her narrow shoulders. Rafael’s lady friend was tugging at his sleeve, her other hand resting on his chest. Sarah was reminded of a red setter bouncing up and down with a lead in its mouth, begging for a walk. Repulsion slithered through her. Some cruel fate had decided to punish her tonight.

  ‘I think it’s time we went home.’ It was Gordon’s clipped drawl.

  ‘Yes, it’s getting late.’ She had no idea what time it was, how long it might have been since she had finally contrived to wrench her magnetised attention from Rafael.

  Gordon steered her out to the hall with surprising speed. ‘I’ll collect your coat.’

  A chill was spreading along her veins. She would phone Karen tomorrow. In all likelihood, Karen would not even recall that she had left without speaking to her. Before she could take refuge in that hope, Karen emerged from the lounge and hurried over to her.

  ‘Will someone please tell me what was going on in there?’ she hissed.

  ‘Sorry, I don’t…’

  ‘Gordon and Rafael Alejandro. For a minute I thought there might be a punch-up but Gordon predictably opted for the diplomatic retreat. Talk about instant antipathy and not a word exchanged!’ Karen giggled. ‘You don’t mean to say you didn’t notice all that silent flexing of male egos? You’re blind, Sarah.’

  Gordon appeared in the midst of these unwelcome confidences. Smoothly cutting in on Karen, he mentioned an early morning meeting with just the right touch of polished regret.

  ‘Phone me when you get home,’ Karen mouthed, unimpressed.

  There was silence in the lift. Her high heels clicked noisily over the pavement. Gordon unlocked the passenger door of his Porsche. Her hands were trembling. She clasped them together on her lap. When a taxi cut in front of them, Gordon cursed, which was most unlike him.

  ‘It was you in Paris with Alejandro,’ he murmured flatly, abruptly.

  Sarah shut her eyes. ‘Yes.’

  Silence stretched but mentally she imagined that she heard the crash as she fell off her ladylike pedestal.

  ‘Just yes?’ Gordon queried, crunching the gears at the traffic lights. He was revealing a flip side character unfamiliar to her. ‘It’s none of my business, but he upset you.’

  She straightened out her coiled fingers, rearranging her hands with the care of a small child mindful of adult appraisal. ‘I’m not very good with surprise encounters. I didn’t expect to ever see him again.’

  ‘You were still at school! What kind of a…?’ His voice broke off harshly.

  Sooner or later, Gordon and Karen would both add two and two and make four. She had fallen in love when she was eighteen. Love had sent her off the rails. Love had plunged her into a kind of compulsive insanity that had left her at the mercy of emotions she could neither understand nor control.

  For the first time in her life, someone had had more power over her than her parents. The Southcotts had been faced with someone as strong-willed, as ruthlessly manipulative and possessive as they were themselves. Battle had commenced with a vengeance. Stranded in the middle of the war zone, already sinking beneath the pressures of a relationship in which she was hopelessly out of her depth, Sarah had slowly been torn in two.

  Rafael was the estranged and unrepentantly unfaithful husband who had had the unmitigated gall to refuse her a divorce. The high-powered lawyer her father had hired had tried repeatedly to break the deadlock. He had failed. Had Sarah been prepared to prove Rafael’s adultery, she would not have required his consent to a divorce. But Sarah had not been prepared to grasp that stinging nettle. Indeed she had shrunk from the threat of the publicity that would have accompanied a contested case. And three months from now the five-year time limit would be up. Technical freedom would be hers once more.

  And what difference would it make to her? Sarah had stopped feeling married in the white-walled prison of a luxurious private clinic while she had waited…and she waited for a man who never arrived. What did it do to a woman when she offered understanding, if not forgiveness, and even understanding was rejected? Why had she even bothered to write to him? Time and time again she had asked herself that question. In her darkest hour she had offered an olive branch…in her own parlance, she had crawled. Her husband had committed adultery. And she had crawled. For nothing. That was what was still burned into her soul. She had put her pride on the line for nothing.

  It was a blessing that nobody knew his identity. Her parents had gone to great lengths right from the beginning to bury all the evidence. When she had failed to return from Paris, they had told the school that she was ill and when time wore on that she was convalescing abroad. Rafael’s starburst ascent from impoverishment to success beyond anyone’s wildest dreams was a savage irony. ‘An offence against good taste,’ her mother had called it.

  She rested her aching head back while Gordon drove her home to her small Kensington flat. ‘I wish you’d talk to me,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  At the door of her flat, he caught her wrist between his fingers. Suddenly he was kissing her, the pressure of his mouth warm and practised on hers. She endured the embrace passively. Unmoving, unresponsive. To respond you had to feel something. Sarah felt nothing beyond an awkward sense of embarrassment.

  Gordon drew back, a faint flush on his cheekbones. ‘I don’t win any prizes for timing, do I?’ But he smiled down at her, restored to his normally even temper. ‘I’ll call you.’

  Karen had once told her that no man ever believed his interest might be unwelcome to a woman. And Gordon was a very confident man, calmly proving the concept. At the start of the evening the mere idea of Gordon kissing her would have been enough to alarm Sarah, but Rafael had already sent her crashing through the shock barrier.

  ‘I’ll be very busy this week,’ she replied.

  His mouth quirked but he said nothing, standing there until she was safely indoors. Dropping her coat on the hall chair, she kicked off her shoes and walked into the lounge.

  Her babysitter was already bundling up her books. ‘You’re early. I didn’t expect you for ages yet.’

  ‘I was tired.’ Sarah dug into her purse and paid the teenager, who lived just across the corridor. ‘Any problems?’

  ‘Oh, no!’ Angela grinned, digging the notes deep into the pocket of her skin-tight jeans. ‘I let them watch the late film with me,’ she then conceded carelessly. ‘I’ll let myself out.’

  Sarah wandered over to the sideboard and withdrew the bottle of brandy which she kept for her father’s occasional consumption. She was pouring a measure into a crystal glass when she thought she heard Angela speaking to someone. With a frown she lifted her head just as the front door rocked on the teenager’s noisy slam, making her wince.

  Angela was trustworthy and sensible but she had a soft-hearted tendency to give way to Gilly and Ben’s pleas to get back out of bed. Give the twins an inch and they took a mile. Tomorrow they would be overtired and cross. Tomorrow…her hand shook and she curved an arm over her stomach. Damn him, damn him…damn him.

  ‘Dios mio.’ It was a purred intervention in the quiet. ‘I should think you would need to drain the bottle to sleep tonight.’

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