LITMIR.BIZ

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need to be comfortable for this?’

      That note of suspicion had deepened, darkened, intensifying all her fears just to hear it.

      ‘It would be more—more civilised. Look, just give me a minute to get a drink, a glass of water—you might not want one but I do. And then I’ll—then we can talk.’

      For an uncomfortable second she thought he was going to refuse. The cynical, sceptical glance he turned on her face made her stomach muscles tighten in apprehension. But then, just when she thought he wouldn’t, he inclined his dark head in agreement.

      ‘OK,’ he said as he turned and walked back into the living room. ‘I will wait—but only a minute. I am not a patient man and I want to know just what the hell is going on.’

      Left behind, Alannah snatched up a glass and shoved it under the tap, splashing cold water into it until it spilled over, flooding down the sides and over her fingers. Wrenching off the tap with one hand, she lifted the drink to her mouth and took several long, thirsty gulps of the cool liquid then lifted it to her forehead, rolling the wet glass above her eyebrows in an effort to calm herself down, ease the tension that was already tight as a steel band around her skull.

      She had to get a grip on herself. She had to go in there and talk to him as calmly as possible—tell him everything that had happened and then.

      She winced inside as she anticipated Raul’s probable reaction, the dark thunderstorm that would probably break right over her head as soon as she finished speaking. But it had to be done—and soon too. Thirty minutes, he had said, and they had already used up more than half of those. If she didn’t hurry then Carlos would turn up again and she would be unable to say what she had to say in front of him.

      Putting the glass down on the worktop, she drew a deep breath and squared her shoulders.

      She was going to do this —now.

      She was barely inside the other room when the sight that met her eyes drove all the breath from her body in a shocked rush. Raul was waiting for her, but it wasn’t just the sight of him standing there, big and dark and disturbingly formidable, feet planted firmly on the woven rug before the gas fire, that shook her world. It was the picture frame he held in his hand, head bent, hooded eyes intent on the image in the photograph it held.

      And the look on his face twisted her heart in her chest. She knew that look and she knew exactly what it meant. But the real problem was that she knew that what she was about to say could only make things so much worse.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      THE photograph WAS the first thing that Raul had seen when he walked back into the room. Because with Alannah’s instruction in his head that he should sit down he’d been heading for one of the armchairs grouped around the small gas fire, and he was facing that way for the first time, towards the wall and the small round table that stood against it. The table was crammed with photographs, all in frames of different shapes and sizes, some wood, some polished silver, some old, like the picture of her grandmother he recognised from when he had known her before, and some obviously very recent.

      It was one of these that had caught his attention.

      And what he saw had the power to make him feel as if a brutal knife had just slashed open his heart, letting out all the pain and the loss he had been fighting to hold back ever since he had been dragged away from a business meeting by the worst phone call he had ever received in his life.

      ‘Lorena … Lori …’

      The name escaped his lips on a whisper, the pain even of speaking it searing into his soul. His eyes blurred so badly that for a moment he thought—hoped—that he had been wrong and the subject of the photograph was not who he thought it was. But blinking hard as he snatched it up did nothing to help that feeling. In fact it only made it so much worse as it cleared his vision and made it agonisingly plain that he had not been wrong.

      Lori’s beautiful, delighted face smiled up at him from behind the glass. Her grin was wide, her brown eyes sparkled, her dark hair was tossed by some unseen breeze. She looked totally happy, totally wonderful.

      Totally alive.

      His hands clenched tight on the picture frame, so tight that he almost felt that the light pine wood would shatter under the pressure of his fingers.

      This was wrong—so wrong. Lori was so young. Too young. She was too young—had been too young. With a terrible lurch of his heart he adjusted the tense of his thoughts as he had had to do so many times in the past twenty-four hours. As he would have to do for the rest of his life—at least until he got used to it.

      And he didn’t want to get used to it. Never!

      How could his little sister—his precious, beautiful baby sister, the sister who had been put so carefully into his arms when she was less than a day old and had moved straight into his heart in an instant—be dead while he was still alive? It went against all the laws of nature that he had already had ten years more of life than she would ever know. That at twenty-one her life was already over—finished.

      It didn’t bear thinking about. He couldn’t think about it … His numbed, bruised and battered brain just couldn’t take it in.

      The photograph was almost invisible behind the burning haze in his eyes. He wanted to lift a hand to brush at them fiercely but somehow his grip wouldn’t loosen on the photograph he held. He couldn’t let go …

      ‘Raul …’

      The voice was low, feminine, gentle … as gentle as the soft fingers that touched his hand, very lightly, very carefully.

      ‘Raul …’

      It was an effort to drag his eyes away from the photograph and they wouldn’t quite focus when he did. So Alannah’s face was still a blur, her expression indistinct when he turned to her.

      ‘What are you doing with a picture of Lori? Why is there a photograph of my sister in your flat?’

      ‘Lori gave it to me.’

      Alannah’s voice seemed uneven and strangely fuzzy. Or perhaps that was because he was having difficulty concentrating as well as seeing clearly.

      ‘She sent it to me on my birthday.’

      Of course. His sister had adored Alannah and she had been overjoyed at the prospect of having her as a sister-in-law. She had been devastated when he had had to tell her that they weren’t going to be married after all. In fact telling Lori had been one of the hardest things he had had to do. He had never forgiven Alannah for destroying his sister’s dreams along with his own when she had walked out on them.

      ‘You were still in touch with her?’ ‘Yes.’

      There was something wrong with her answer, an edge on the words that he didn’t understand, and right now his thinking wasn’t clear enough to be able to work out anything like that. He just knew that the way she spoke grated on him, made his skin feel raw as well as his heart.

      ‘Do you know why she was in England? Did she come to see you?’

      ‘Yes.’

      There it was again, that ragged, uneven note that twisted something deep inside.

      ‘Raul—’ she began but suddenly the dreadful thought that she might not know the full truth pushed him to cut across her words.

      ‘Did you know—Lori—did you know that she …?’

      As he drew breath, drew strength to say the hateful word died—Lori died—Alannah moved with sudden urgency.

      ‘Oh, don’t! Don’t!’

      Those soft fingers touched his face, covered his mouth to stop, to hold back the dreadful truth. And she was very, very close, the scent of her body surrounding him, the warmth of her skin against his.

      ‘You don’t have to,’

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