The Thorn in His Side (6 page)

‘This is ridiculous!’ His tone irritable, he unfolded his long lean length from his seat and strode purposefully towards the door, pausing to offer a curt word of apology to the man who was seated at the other side of the big desk.

Rafael had no problem with Gretchen scheduling her therapy session during office hours, but he had a big problem with the woman she had arranged to stand in for the couple of hours she was away from her desk.

Last week her useless substitute had not relayed an important message, this week she was taking part in what sounded like some sort of catfight!

‘No problem,’ Max Croft said with an easy-going shrug. ‘Someone doesn’t sound very happy,’ he added half to himself as Rafael, his chiselled features set in a dark scowl, wrenched the door open.

The female voices got louder and the older man felt a passing flicker of sympathy for the unknown person or persons responsible for putting the scowl on Rafael
Alejandro’s face. There was a very good reason why people avoided inviting the Spaniard’s displeasure.

Rafael had earned his reputation—possibly exaggerated, but Max, a prudent man, was not about to put it to the test—as a person who did not suffer fools gladly and who suffered people who crossed him not at all.

His wealth and power made him a man that people automatically wanted to please, but Max suspected that even without the wealth he was a man that people would have trodden lightly around. The fact that nobody actually knew how he had amassed his great wealth, though there were many theories, only added to the mystique that had developed around the man.

There was dynamic and then there was, he mused, Rafael Alejandro, who was to his mind more a force of nature!

About to walk into the room adjoining, Rafael paused, head tilted a little to one side as he identified one of the angry voices. The exquisite little face that matched the husky voice flashed into his head, and the resulting blast of neat testosterone that flooded into his bloodstream made his mind grow blank.

It took him a couple of seconds to regain control of his mental faculties. Abandoning the effort to effect similar control over his body—Rafael recognised a lost cause when he felt one—he began sifting possible explanations for this unexpected visit as he turned back to the other man.

‘Max, would you mind if we finished off the details next week? Something has come up.’

‘No problem,’ Max replied, curious but careful not to show it.

As the other man got to his feet Rafael walked away
from the doorway and crossed the room, where he opened the fire door.

‘I’ll be in touch,’ he promised.

Impressively the other man walked past him acting as if he got asked to leave via the fire exit every day of the week.

Rafael closed the door and nodded his approval. In his experience more important than knowing when to ask a question was knowing when
not
to ask a question.

The question, Rafael asked himself as he stood a silent observer to the events unfolding in his outer office, was why?

Why was Libby Marchant here?

He did not have the faintest idea but he now knew why he paid Gretchen her outrageously high salary—she earned it and then some. On her watch this farcical scene would never have occurred.

Unobserved he watched Gretchen’s pink-cheeked and harassed stand-in angle a look of narrow-eyed dislike at the young woman sitting on the floor in the middle of the room.

‘I am sorry, Ms Marchant, that you have had a wasted journey, but as I have already explained—’

‘I don’t need your apology or your explanations.’

‘What do you need?’

At the sound of his voice both women spun around to face him.

Rafael scanned the face turned up to him, eyes a deep cobalt blue that blazed back at him, no tears, just ferocious contempt and anger reflected in the sparkling surface as she blinked once, then blinked again.

He saw recognition then shock register in her eyes a
split second before her lips parted to release a fractured gasp of horror.

The soft sound drew his gaze to that lovely lush softness of her mouth. He felt his body harden in helpless response to the images floating through his mind. Images that portrayed those lips moving across his skin, over his body.

‘You …?’ Fighting her way through what felt like layers of fuzzy cotton wool in her brain, Libby shook her head to clear the fog. ‘I don’t understand …’

She would, and when she did he imagined there would be some interesting and possibly noisy fireworks. Rafael resigned himself to the inevitability of it.

‘What
do
you need,
querida?’
he repeated his question.

She didn’t answer and he found himself thinking of what he needed.

He needed a lot.

He needed everything.

He stood for a moment, literally frozen to the spot by a tide of primal lust that washed over him, lust so primitive and potent that for the space of several heartbeats it wiped everything else from his head.

Clawing his way slowly above the shimmering primal blur dancing across his vision, he raked a not quite steady hand through his dark hair, struggling to rationalise the primitive strength of his reaction to this woman’s beauty.

Life was not going to return to normal until he did something about this situation, he decided, thinking along the lines of a short-term, passionate affair. Of course the Marchant connection complicated the situation, but the problem was not insuperable.

While the thoughts were running through his head,
somewhere in the periphery of his vision Rafael was conscious of the stand-in, whose name at that moment totally eluded him—hard to think names when you were thinking of being inside the warm heat of a woman’s body—stepping out from behind her desk to join him.

She remained utterly oblivious to the fact that her presence was surplus to requirements—he might actually give Gretchen a raise—as she directed an accusing glare towards Libby Marchant.

‘This person—’ she stabbed an accusing finger at Libby ‘—I asked her to leave, I said—’

‘You said he was not in the building.’ Feeling as if she were living a nightmare, Libby turned her attention from the woman back to the man standing there. She shook her head.

‘Are you here to see Rafael Alejandro too?’ Unlikely but not impossible and definitely preferable to the other explanation—the one she couldn’t even bring herself to acknowledge.

The slight negative shake of his dark head drew a sharp little gasp from her throat.

‘I came here to see Rafael Alejandro. Are
you
Rafael Alejandro?’

He tipped his dark head in acknowledgement. ‘I am.’

Libby’s hand went to her mouth as she closed her eyes, remembering the moments the previous night when she had sat in the hospital watching the people she loved most in the world unhappy and in pain, able to do nothing but fetch coffee from the vending machine that nobody drank, then fetch some more when it got cold.

Escaping for a short time into her own private fantasy world had not seemed so terrible, and if thinking about
a man’s face, allowing the memory of his lips, his taste, the hard virile strength of his body to fill her mind and block out the nightmare for a short time meant she was able to stay strong for her family and offer the support they needed it, had seemed defensible.

Defensible …!

A violent wave of shame and revulsion washed over her. The man she had fantasised about was the reason they were there; he was the reason why Meg and Ed’s tiny baby was in an incubator unable to breathe without the aid of machines.

She opened her eyes and admitted to herself, This man, that face—and hated herself.

She hated him.

Rafael watched the expressions flicker across her face before finally settling into contemptuous fury.

‘You knew who I was yesterday?’ Of course he did. Libby swallowed the bubble of hysteria lodged in her aching throat. ‘You are a despicable man!’

He angled a sardonic brow. ‘A little harsh.’

‘A little harsh?’ she echoed. ‘You ruined my father.’

A spasm of irritation tugged at the corners of his mouth. ‘I did not ruin your father. Your father—’ He broke off, shaking his head. ‘It is not relevant—that was business.’

‘Business?’
she said, looking at him incredulously. ‘It feels pretty personal to me!’

The stand-in turned to Rafael, her expression apologetic. ‘I asked her to leave and she became abusive.’

Libby’s brows rose in indignation. ‘If you think that was abuse you’ve led a very sheltered life!’

‘I’ve called Security, sir. I told her and she just sat down. I think she’s a bit …’ a wary eye on Libby, the
woman tapped her head significantly ‘ … not quite right.’

Rafael’s eyes did not leave Libby’s face as he rapped back flatly, ‘Then uncall them.’

The woman’s mouth fell open. ‘But …’

Rafael looked her way and arched a brow. The woman blenched and starting nodding. but Rafael was already walking across to where Libby was still sitting.

‘The sit-in is quite unnecessary,’ he said, stretching out a hand towards her.

Libby looked at his hand, gave a contemptuous snort and got to her feet unaided.

Hands on her hips, she tilted her head back to direct a challenging stare at his face. The silence stretched as her eyes were drawn to the strips stretched neatly across the wound on his head; the white plaster stood out against his olive-toned skin.

‘Yes, it is painful if that makes you feel better.’

‘It does,’ she admitted, thinking, You do not know the meaning of pain.

Pain was what she had seen in the eyes of her brother as he kept vigil by his baby daughter’s cot. ‘Do you know where I have just come from?’

‘Why don’t you tell me, as you are clearly aching to do so?’

‘The hospital’ At least that wiped the smug smirk off his face. ‘Because of you my sister-in-law went into premature labour. If anything happens to her or her baby it will be down to you! And if it does,’ she promised, eyeing him with contempt, ‘I will make you wish you had never been born.’

Rafael took on board the information but did not react to the threat; instead he studied her.

Yesterday’s mud-stained fashionable outfit was gone,
replaced by a pair of jeans that clung to the slim curves of her thighs. It was topped by a cashmere sweater a shade paler than her incredible eyes.

With no make-up, she looked as though she had just stepped straight from a shower with her still damp wildly curling hair hanging loose around her clean-scrubbed pale face.

She looked so young he suddenly felt old and jaded by comparison.

She also looked dead on her feet and perilously close to collapse. Not happy to identify the emotion that tightened his chest as concern, he barked, ‘What in the name of God were your family doing letting you come here in this state?’

This pretence of concern enraged her further. ‘My family … my family are devastated. My father is a broken man. Imagine how he feels right now!’

Rafael tried and failed. He had never had family support to fall back on, just his own wits. How would it feel to be part of a family that was ready to do battle on his behalf?

His glance drifted over her angry face.

Or at least one member was.

Rafael didn’t have a clue, but he suspected that there would be many who, broke or not, would envy Philip Marchant.

He did not include himself in this number.

‘Did you know he only had a heart attack last year? Did you know he had a
triple
bypass?’ she demanded, her voice quavering at the memory of walking into his study and finding her dad lying on the floor clutching his chest.

She would never forget the sheer terror and utter helplessness she had felt as she’d held his cold, clammy hand
and waited for the ambulance to arrive. The minutes had felt like hours. She still relived them regularly in her nightmares.

‘No, I did not know.’

Her blue eyes darkened with distaste as they came to rest on his face. ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference, would it?’ she charged contemptuously. ‘You don’t give a damn who you hurt.’ The exhaustion that was creeping over her slurred her words as she yelled, ‘My brother is still at the hospital.’

‘Is the baby very premature?’

‘I’m not going to discuss my family with you!’ she raged.

‘I thought that was what you were doing,’ he observed before turning to the hovering stand-in who was eating up every word. ‘When Gretchen gets back tell her to cancel my appointments for this afternoon.’

‘Come.’ He slung an impatient look Libby’s way. ‘You need to sit down.’ He gestured towards his office door.

She shook her head mulishly. ‘I was sitting down. You made me get up.’

‘Let me rephrase that—you can walk under your own steam or I will carry you.’

She looked at him in horror. ‘You wouldn’t dare.’

‘Wrong reply,’ he said, casually swinging her into his arms.

She responded with kicks interspersed with squeals of outrage.

‘You remind me of a piglet I used to know,’ he said, placing her back on her feet in the middle of his office. ‘I’d say take a seat but I’m afraid that might trigger another act of civil disobedience. You know, you really
should have called the press if you wanted to exploit the situation to the full.’

Libby stood there breathing hard. ‘How dare you manhandle me? And how do you know I haven’t called the press?’ she challenged.

‘Have you?’

‘I called the local news station,’ she lied inventively as she made a great show of consulting her watch. ‘I’d say they should be arriving just about—now.’ She lifted her head and smiled. ‘They’ll love seeing a crying woman ejected by your bully boys.’

‘Never play poker—you’d lose.’ Rafael scanned the face turned up to him; the eyes, a deep cobalt blue, that blazed back at him were dry.

‘You’re not crying,’ he pointed out mildly.

‘I will be,’ she promised grimly, and then, just in case he didn’t believe her, she produced her party trick. Allowing her eyes to fill with tears, she blinked to allow one to escape the shimmering depths before wiping it away with the back of her hand and angling a challenging stare up at the tall man who had casually brought ruin to her family.