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 enquired 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. ‘Please!’
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 his 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!’
‘It may have been an oversight on his part. Had you asked him to wait?’
Georgie stiffened. ‘Well, I thought he understood’
‘Do you know the registration of the taxi?’ Rafael surveyed her with an offensive lack of expectation.
Angrily she shook her head.
‘Your bag may yet reappear,’ Rafael asserted. ‘If your bag is not handed in, then you may say that it has been stolen, not before. You were stupendously careless!’
‘Lecture over yet?’ she demanded shortly.
‘When you found yourself stranded, what did you do?’
‘By the time I realised he wasn’t coming back, the place was deserted, so I started walking and then I…’ She hesitated. ‘Then I hitched a lift. You wouldn’t believe how pleasant and unthreatening the driver was when I got into his truck—’
‘I believe you. I should imagine he came to a wheel-screeching halt,’ Rafael murmured with withering sarcasm. ‘Then what?’
Georgie lifted her chin. ‘He offered me money and while I was pushing it away he lunged at me. I thought I was going to be raped!’
‘I understand you kneed him in the groin and drew blood. One may assume you are reasonably capable of self-defence. He thought you were a prostitute’
‘A what?’ she exploded.
‘Why do you think he offered you money? Female tourists do not travel alone in Bolivia, nor do they hitch alone.’ Grim dark eyes flicked a glance at her outraged face before returning to the road.
‘Have you any idea how scared I was when he drove off and wouldn’t let me out of his truck?’
‘He was determined to report you for what he saw as an attempt to rip him off. But he was happy to drop the charge once he realised that his neighbours would laugh heartily at him for being attacked by a woman half his size!’
Georgie was enraged by his attitude. The message was: you asked for it.
‘You had a very narrow escape. He might have beaten you up to avenge the slur upon his manhood. This country has been dominated by the cult of machismo for four centuries,’ Rafael drawled in a murderously polite tone. ‘It will take more than a handful of tourists to change that but, happily, the great majority of travellers are infinitely more careful of their own safety than you have been.’
‘So I asked for what I got… in your view!’ she flared.
‘An attempted kiss, a hand on your knee—he swore that was all. He said you went crazy and I believe him. It’ll be weeks before he can show his face without his neighbours sniggering.’ Rafael actually sounded sym-
pathetic towards the truck-driver.
Silence stretched endlessly. He made no attempt to break it. The four-wheel-drive lurched and bounced over the appalling road surface with the vehicle behind following at a discreet distance. Briefly, Rafael stopped the car and sprang out. Incredulously she watched him open the sack to release the snake. Wow, environmentally friendly man, and sensitive enough not to offend the villagers by refusing the unwanted gift. It crossed her mind bitterly that the snake was getting more attention than she was.
Then, that was hardly a surprise. Four years ago, Rafael had made it brutally clear that she failed his standards in every way possible. Her morals, her behaviour—her sexually provocative behaviour, she recalled angrily—had all been comprehensively shredded by that cruel, whiplash tongue. But what still hurt the most, she was honest enough to admit, was that she hadn’t had the wit to take it on the chin and walk away with dignity. Like a fool, she had attempted to prove her innocence.
‘He’s from a different world,’ her stepbrother Steve had derided once. ‘And he belongs to a culture you don’t even begin to understand. Don’t be fooled by the fact that he speaks English as well as we do. Rafael’s a very traditional Latin-American male and the women in his life fall into two categories. Angels and whores.