Her lovely face tight and pale, her anguished eyes screened, she said hoarsely, ‘You found out the truth about Sam that night I was with you but you didn’t tell me—’
‘How could I tell you? At that stage, I believed your father didn’t know he’d been raising another man’s son,’ Rafaello countered in blunt exasperation. ‘However, Archie disabused me of that idea the minute Sam went up to bed that ev
ening. He said that, although he might’ve been willing to tell Sam the truth, he couldn’t do it because he didn’t want you to know that your mother had had an affair!’
‘You still should have told me,’ Glory retorted stubbornly.
‘It wasn’t my secret. To be honest, I didn’t think your father would ever tell Sam, so it would have been wrong for me to interfere,’ Rafaello stated with immovable conviction. ‘But while we were in Greece Archie decided that if my father could tell me that Sam was my brother then Sam had the right to the same information.’
‘But I was still left out of it, even by my own family,’ Glory said bitterly, struggling to hide her hurt.
‘It’s not exactly the kind of news people want to break on the phone.’
‘And it’s certainly not the sort of news you were likely to share when you were using Sam and those theft charges to make me agree to become your mistress!’ Glory flung back in fierce condemnation.
Rafaello threw back his arrogant dark head and stood his ground in silence.
‘Even knowing that there was no way on earth you would have let those charges stand against your own half-brother, you went ahead and dragged me into bed!’ Glory continued in a rising crescendo. ‘How low can a guy sink?’
‘If he wants a woman as much as I wanted you…probably even lower,’ Rafaello conceded with disconcerting frankness, brilliant dark eyes bleak, hard jawline clenched. ‘I am not proud of what I did, cara.’
‘That didn’t stop you, though, did it?’
Pale beneath his bronzed skin, lean, powerful face taut, Rafaello surveyed her steadily. ‘I got pretty much what I asked for. You walked out on me again—’
‘You were about to dump me—’
‘No, I wasn’t,’ Rafaello stated.
‘Why are you lying about it?’ Glory shot at him shrilly. ‘You think my being pregnant means you can’t be honest any more?’
‘No…’ Rafaello responded. ‘I think your being pregnant means that I’m not going to fight with you. It can’t be good for the baby.’
Off-balanced by what struck her as a shockingly smooth and devious sidestepping of the major issues she was striving to confront him with, Glory experienced such a surge of unfettered rage that she felt light-headed. ‘Just you leave my baby out of it—’
‘It’s my baby too—’
Her teeth gritted on that unarguable point. ‘You used me in Corfu—’
His expressive jawline took on a more aggressive slant, his dark eyes suddenly flaring gold. ‘Don’t you dare try to tell me that you didn’t want me. Don’t you dare.’
‘Is that how you excused yourself?’ Glory was impervious to that warning intonation and accelerating tension in the air.
‘You were the one who needed the excuse. I won’t let our parents’ mistakes tear us apart—’
‘How did I need an excuse?’ The atmosphere was humming, setting up a chain reaction in Glory’s own trembling length.
Rafaello strolled closer, all dominant male, all confident threat. ‘An excuse to enjoy the passion,’ he drawled soft and low and insolent as all get-out. ‘I gave you that excuse, that outlet, that freedom. As long as you could blame me for forcing you into that arrangement, you didn’t have to feel guilty. You were no unwilling mistress!’
Outmatched by that demanding reminder of her own weakness, Glory turned scarlet, unable to think of anything to hurl back which would not be an outright lie. Infuriated and embarrassed, she tried to brush past him but Rafaello caught her to him. Trapping her struggling slim body into the unyielding strength of his hard, muscular frame, he crushed her mouth beneath his with passionate force. Sensual shock lanced through Glory in a debilitating wave. In the midst of her raging turmoil she felt her own desperate hunger for that physical connection pulling at her with talon claws, but she fought it.
‘Don’t do this to us,’ Rafaello lifted his dark head to demand in ragged appeal. ‘Don’t make me so mad that I’ll say things that will hurt you, bella mia.’
Encountering the blaze of those smouldering golden eyes, reacting to that disconcerting note of masculine urgency, Glory was mesmerised into stillness. It was as if he pressed a magic button and the rage went out of her. She quivered, shifting inexorably into closer contact. The magnetic attraction of that lean, powerful physique of his against her own softer feminine curves was immense. She was madly aware of the hard contours of bone and sinew beneath the formal business suit, and the thrusting promise of his undeniable arousal. Between one breath and the next she was lost to temptation, all resistance beaten down by the answering ache of her breasts and the moist heat stirring between her thighs.
‘Rafaello…’ she muttered in desperation, fighting to call a halt to her own susceptibility.
Rafaello dealt her a scorching smile and hoisted her up into his arms without another word. He carried her out of the lounge. You can’t do this, you mustn’t do this, cried her conscience on a frantic note. But she ignored that inner voice, pushed her face into a wide, solid shoulder, letting her nostrils flare on the familiar scent of him, feeling every skin-cell she possessed switching onto a higher frequency in response. He laid her down on a bed in an unfamiliar room and plucked off her shoes. Straightening with easy grace, he removed his jacket and tossed it aside.