Free Rafferty's Wife by Kay Hooper Page A

left in the confusion of her thoughts, she simply turned everything off.

    By the following morning, Rafferty had realized that more than apologies were needed. Sarah had avoided him, and when they were more or less forced to be together—dinner, for instance—she had been utterly silent. And she wasn’t giving him the silent treatment, he realized. She simply wasn’t
there
.
    And when, some hours later, he had left the deck to go to their cabin, Sarah had been in bed and asleep, so far over on her side of the bed she was in danger of falling off.
    He hadn’t awakened to find her in his arms this time.
    Rafferty himself was silent during breakfast, aware that Harry looked at them both anxiously while he served another of his truly excellent meals. But the cabin boy said nothing.
    Sarah went up on deck after the meal, and Rafferty followed. He almost forgot the stone wall between them as he watched her discard her caftan for the astonishingly brief bikini she wore underneath and lie down on a paddedlounge. It was a good five minutes—during which he drank in the sight of her curved body—before he reminded himself that Sarah was slipping rapidly beyond his reach.
    “We have to talk.” He sat down on a matching lounge, forcing his mind away from vivid mental images.
    She looked at him, her pale green eyes as enigmatic as seawater, her face immobile. “Do we?”
    Rafferty was silent for a moment, not weighing what he was about to say but questioning the timing of it. Not that it mattered; he had no choice. “I read something once—couldn’t tell you where, but I believe Virgil wrote it—about falling in love. He remembered the sensation vividly, remembered being swept away by the madness of it. Madness. There’s nothing rational about love, Sarah. Nothing predictable. There’s just a madness, filled with hopes and fears, literally impossible to control.”
    Sarah frowned a little. “Just because I look like his Sara doesn’t mean Sereno—”
    Softly, Rafferty said, “I wasn’t talking about him.”
    For the first time since she had retreated into herself, Sarah began to feel again. “We don’t know each other,” she said in a curiously suspended voice.
    “Do you think that matters? Do you think it matters that this is the wrong time and place, and Lord knows the wrong circumstances for anything as fragile and unpredictable as love?”
    “I don’t—”
    “Sarah, what I’m trying to tell you is that it doesn’t help me to
know
you’d never sleep with Sereno to get that information. It doesn’t help to
know
he’d be the last man in the world you could feel an attraction for. It’s because love isn’t logical or rational that I said what I did yesterday,” he finished simply, “because I love you, and I was scared.”
    She chewed on her lower lip unconsciously, staring at him. And feeling again was painful because the ascent from despair and anger to a giddy, half-frightened happiness was just as abrupt and unsettling as it had been the otherway around. And somewhere in that earlier journey, some of the old Sarah had come creeping back in, cautious and wary.
    “Rafferty, in a few days, we’re both going to be playing parts. A couple on the verge of ending a brief marriage. And I have to try and fascinate a man who’ll likely make my skin crawl. You have to meet with an undercover agent and get that information from him.” She swallowed hard, wondering what he was thinking behind the glow of his tawny eyes. “In spite of what happened in Trinidad, we can’t let our personal feelings control us in this. We can’t afford the luxury.”
    He smiled suddenly. “What am I seeing now? A fusing of two Sarahs? Enough of the new to contemplate vamping an island dictator, and enough of the old to warn me off?”
    She managed a faint smile of her own. “That’s stating it too simply and you know it.”
    “Maybe. But it’s essentially the truth. And it won’t work, Sarah.”
    “It has to.”
    He