‘And …’ Raul prompted icily when she hesitated.
‘And I—we—we’d like to bury them together. We’d like you to give us permission to bury Chris and Lorena in the same grave so that they—they could be …’
Together.
The word sounded inside her head but she totally lacked the strength to say it. She couldn’t have managed another word if her life depended on it. And in the silence that followed she felt as if a window must have blown open in the force of the wind outside, letting in the cold and the wet so that she shivered in the sudden chill of the air as if the temperature had actually dropped to zero around her.
‘You want me to forgive your brother …’
Raul’s tone was so calm, so unemotional that Alannah blinked in confusion to hear it. Was it possible—was he actually going to be reasonable about this? She could read nothing in his shuttered face, his hooded eyes hiding every last trace of what he was feeling from her.
‘And you want me to leave my sister here … and you think that coming on to me is the way to soften me up to give you what you want?’
‘Coming on?’Alannah gasped in shocked disbelief. ‘But I didn’t—I wasn’t! How could you think that?’
The sound of a loud buzzing noise intruded into her stunned protest, making her start in shock and stare round dazedly, looking for the source of the sound.
Raul, however, reacted immediately, pulling one hand free and snatching his mobile phone from his jacket pocket. Sitting on one arm of the settee, he thumbed it on and spoke sharply into it.
‘Sí? Carlos …’
Carlos. Of course.
Alannah tensed sharply as she realised just who was at the other end of the phone. A swift glance at the clock on the wall confirmed her suspicions. The thirty minutes Raul had stipulated were up—just—and almost exactly to the second his driver had arrived to collect him as he had been instructed.
So would Raul leave now, as he had originally planned? Her heart lurched sickeningly at the thought, the tension in her body growing worse. Did she want him to go or to stay? She had no way she could answer that, even to herself.
‘Momento …’ Raul said into the phone, then, still holding it to his ear, he glanced across into Alannah’s outraged face. For a moment he simply watched her consideringly, eyes narrowed in cold assessment, and with a curt, sharp nod of dark satisfaction he turned his attention back to the phone.
‘Yes,’ he said sharply, using English deliberately, she was sure, so that she had no option but to understand what he was saying. ‘Yes, I’m done here—more than ready to leave. I’ll be down in a minute.’
He was going. He was leaving, and nothing was going to stop him; his tone, his expression, the cold gleam in his eyes made that only too plain. He was leaving and. That was as far as she got. She didn’t have time even to finish the thought before Raul snapped off his phone and, still with his eyes fixed on her face, dropped it back in the direction of his jacket pocket. Then slowly, silently, holding her wide-eyed gaze with his own, he stood up and smoothed down his trousers, brushed a speck of something—a purely imaginary speck of something, Alannah was sure—from the front of his jacket.
‘My chauffeur is waiting,’ he said and Alannah actually gasped out loud because it was as if the ice in his voice had been physically real, hitting her brutally in the face as he spoke. ‘And it’s more than time I left.’
‘But …’ Alannah tried, knowing she couldn’t let him go without an answer, though in her heart she knew what it was going to be, something that was confirmed by the look that flashed from those dark golden eyes.
‘The answer is no, Miss Redfern …’
She recoiled sharply, flinching away from the stiff formality of his use of her name.
‘There is no way that I will leave my sister here to be buried alongside the man who killed her.’
‘But he didn’t …’ Alannah tried again but Raul ignored her interjection, talking over it as if it had never happened.
‘My family and yours should never have had any contact—we should have stayed at the opposite ends of the earth.’
‘Why? Because my ordinary family just aren’t good enough to mix with the likes of the high and mighty Marquez Marcín dynasty?’
Alannah no longer cared what she was saying or how she sounded. She only wanted to lash out, hurt him as she was hurting. Make him bleed as she felt that she was bleeding to death inside. She no longer knew or cared if it was for herself or her brother—or for poor little Lorena that her heart was breaking. Only that she had to scream out the agony or break down completely.
‘Well, let me tell you that I wish to God we’d never met. That it was the worst thing that ever happened to me—the worst day of my life—when you walked into it.’
If she thought that by lashing out she’d get through to him, make him react, then she was bitterly disappointed. Where she’d expected anger there was simply coldness, where she would have thought there would be emotion there was a frozen stillness, a terrible quiet in which he looked down his long, straight nose at her, his mouth twisting in vicious contempt.
‘Then the feeling is entirely mutual,’ he tossed at her. ‘I can assure you that I feel exactly the same. I wish to hell that I had never met you—never set eyes on you …’
‘Never …’
Twice Alannah tried to add to the single word. But both times she opened her mouth and had to close it again hastily because nothing came out. Raul just watched her, hands clenched into fists and pressed tight against his narrow hips.
‘Wished you’d never met me,’ she finally got out. ‘Then why would you have wanted to marry me?’
Oh, why couldn’t she stop? Why did she have to keep stabbing at him, pushing him to come back at her with something even worse?
Which of course he did.
‘You know why. I needed an heir.’
Well, she’d always known that. She’d just never expected him to come right out and say it so bluntly.
She’d hesitated a moment too long and those sharp golden eyes had caught the faint flicker of unease in her face, the way she had recoiled from his words.
‘Oh, come on, Alannah,’ he mocked cruelly. ‘You surely didn’t think I was going to say that I loved you? You can’t have wanted that?’
This time she had no trouble finding the words, or the strength of voice to throw them at him.
‘You’re damn right I wouldn’t! I wouldn’t have wanted any such thing from you—it would disgust me—repel me—and besides, I doubt very much that you know what love is. It’s certainly not a feeling that you’ve ever experienced for any woman, even one you once asked to marry you.’
‘I’d have to agree with you there.’ Raul drew himself up and inclined his head in a cold, controlled acknowledgement of her accusation. ‘Love is a very unreliable foundation on which to base one’s choice of bride.’
‘No, you put more emphasis on the fact that no other man has ever slept with her than any such untrustworthy feelings.’
‘Well, that didn’t last long, did it?’ Raul mocked. ‘As soon as I asked to marry you, you realised that you weren’t made for monogamy and set out to make up for what you’d been missing.’
‘But the one thing I didn’t miss was you!’
With her head defiantly high in the air, she stalked past him and out into the tiny hallway, flinging open the door with a wild gesture that had it banging into the opposite wall.
‘And