here and you don’t care what the world thinks of you or the choices you make! But I... I don’t belong here, so just try and imagine what it’ll feel like if I ever walk into a room to be confronted by some woman you’re bedding behind my back!’
‘You have quite the imagination...’
‘Have I? You might not intend on flaunting anything but are you going to tell me that that world you occupy isn’t a really small one?’
‘It’s small,’ Rafael admitted in a roughened undertone. His grasp on her arm had slackened but he had also closed the tiny distance between them so that she could feel the heat radiating from his body.
‘Women can be vicious,’ Sofia muttered, looking down and thinking of the nasty digs that had plagued her teenage years and the bitchiness of jealous girls who had always guarded their stupid boyfriends against what they’d seen as a possible threat. As if she’d ever been interested in any of them. But still she knew what it felt like to be attacked through no fault of her own.
She shuddered at the thought of having to deal with some woman Rafael might be seeing.
‘Are you speaking from experience?’ he murmured, dropping his hand to his side and stepping back as he stared down at her with his head tilted to one side.
‘The fairer sex can be anything but gentle when it comes to certain things.’ Sofia tilted her head at a challenging angle and folded her arms. Her whole body was still tingling. She felt as though she’d been touched, intimately touched, even though all he’d done was circle her arm with his fingers.
‘Especially given the way you look,’ he said, eyes roving over her flushed face. ‘I get it, cara.’
Thick silence greeted this observation. It stretched and stretched, sending her thoughts into a giddy tailspin, making her mouth dry. It was an effort not to close her eyes and reach up...just a little...enough to brush her lips against his mouth.
Her nipples, pushing against the cotton bra, felt scratchy and over-sensitive and between her legs...felt hot and damp.
Their eyes locked. His breathing was thick and fast, giving her signals she didn’t trust and didn’t want to understand. He took a step towards her, jaw clenched, his body rigid with tension.
Then, just like that, he seemed to gather himself, shutting down an atmosphere that had flared up between them like a sudden, fierce conflagration.
‘Right now...’ His voice was jerky and he raked his fingers through his hair, looking briefly away but then directing his back to her flushed face. ‘We both have enough on our plate without imagining a situation that might or might not happen.’
He walked towards the window, stared out with his back to her and then threw over his shoulder, ‘Now that you’ve seen where you’ll be living, I think we can head back to London. The house should have been ready for you to move in immediately, and I would have returned to London, but there’s been a mix-up with the housekeeper who needs to come in tomorrow to spruce the place up. It would be useful for you to spend the day tomorrow buying whatever clothes you think you might need, anyway. I’ll also make sure you have a car at your disposal. You name the make and the model. When it comes to what happens...outside this marriage...that is a bridge to be crossed in due course, so let’s stick to the present. Meet the parents—or should I say parent—wedding vows exchanged, and once that’s done I get going on sorting out the problem with Freddy. That’s enough to be going on with, wouldn’t you agree?’
WHERE THE HELL was she?
Rafael looked at his watch again. So far, she was half an hour late and counting, and he was beginning to think that he should have taken control of this final big step. Should have insisted that he bring her here to the Register Office himself. At the very least, get his driver to collect her from the house in the country where she had been spending the past week, bar that one day when she had shopped in London at his suggestion.
But then what was the chance that she would have allowed herself to be chivvied into doing what he wanted?
Rafael grimaced, mentally acknowledging that when he had set off on his mission to make her acquaintance the last thing he’d expected was to discover someone with a will as stubborn as his own.
She had turned down all offers from him to get someone—his PA or one of his other, trusted employees—to show her around London.
‘I learned how to be independent a long time ago,’ she had said flatly. ‘I can manage just fine on my own.’
She had openly scoffed at his concerns that she might find herself in an unsafe situation because she had no idea where the no-go areas were.
Her one worry—and he knew this from the shadow that flitted across her face when he mentioned it—was meeting her father, but she had been spared that because David had not been able to see her after all. A series of gruelling tests had left him depressed and, once again, hospital-bound. He had been discharged the day before but he was still in a wheelchair.
Rafael glanced down at his godfather, patiently waiting for his daughter to appear bounding up the steps of the impressive Town Hall.
David Dunmore looked his age. He was no longer the sharp-eyed, rotund father figure of old. He had lost a substantial amount of weight, something Rafael was noticing for the first time, and his face was weary and drawn. He looked fragile. For a man who had once been so vital, so energised, so big, this fragility was a sucker punch to the gut.
Rafael cursed softly under his breath because the last thing his godfather needed was for Sofia to decide that she couldn’t go through with the deal after all.
And how did he know that that wasn’t exactly what had happened?
She already had a huge amount of cash in her bank account. Nothing like the amount she could expect to land eventually, but enough to hightail it back to Argentina and set up camp to a very high standard indeed.
He had trusted her to sign on the dotted line and follow through, because his gut instinct told him that she was trustworthy, but there was always a first when it came to gut instincts going wrong.
On the verge of whipping out his mobile phone and calling her, a hurrying figure caught the corner of his eye and he half-turned in its direction.
And there she was.
The breath left him in a rush, as if he’d been punched in the gut.
In the warmth of a mild-mannered spring day, with crowds scurrying all around, she was a vision of such unparalleled beauty that he was forcibly and unpleasantly reminded of just how tempting a creature she was. From the first time he’d laid eyes on her his libido had started misbehaving, and it was misbehaving now, even though he had already told himself that the best course of action was the very one he had taken: to keep things purely on a business level, thereby avoiding unnecessary complications. He’d stated his case and made sure that she was on the same page...
But, hell...when a woman looked the way she did...
She had forgone white or cream, or any variation thereof, and was wearing a figure-hugging lilac dress that somehow managed to be extremely proper and outrageously sexy at the same time.
He had only seen her informally dressed and she hid her assets well.
Not so now. Her generous breasts made a mockery of the high, prissy neckline, just as her shapely legs made a mockery of the knee length cut of the dress. The single string of pearls around her neck sent his mind screaming off in all sorts of inappropriate directions.
He wondered what they would look like against her naked, latte-coloured body.
Her long, streaming hair was neatly tied back and his fingers itched to unravel it from its restraints.
Irritated