A Touch of Notoriety - By Carole Mortimer Page 0,9

grave with its damning headstone. ‘Do you already have the proof that Elizabeth Lawrence died?’

‘Not yet, no,’ Raphael admitted reluctantly.

‘But you will have?’

His mouth firmed. ‘Possibly.’

Beth stared at him wordlessly for several moments, unable to look away from those piercing blue eyes. ‘You aren’t just coming to England to act as my bodyguard, are you?’ she realised dully.

He gave a slight smile. ‘Did you ever believe that I was?’

Had she? In her heart of hearts, had Beth really thought that Cesar would ever give up trying to prove she was his sister Gabriela? And that he wouldn’t take full advantage of Raphael’s presence in England to continue those investigations.

‘And if you find that proof?’

Raphael shrugged. ‘Then perhaps you will finally be convinced.’

Would she? Was it really possible the original Elizabeth Lawrence had died? And if so, where was she buried?

It had only been a matter of a few days since Grace had put forward the suggestion that Beth might be the Navarros’ missing daughter, and those blood tests had convinced the Navarros, if not Beth, that she was. But they had also been days when she knew Cesar was continuing his own investigations, looking for the truth of how Gabriela could have been taken from Argentina to England twenty-one years ago, and given the identity of Elizabeth Lawrence...

‘There are many of us who, given a choice, would have preferred to have been born into a family which is not their own,’ Raphael drawled as he saw the array of emotions flickering across Beth’s expressive face. Dismay being the last of them.

‘Even you?’

His jaw tightened. ‘We were not talking about me.’

‘Weren’t we?’

‘No,’ Raphael replied with finality. His family, and the reason for the years of estrangement from his father, was not a subject he wished to talk about. The same reason that Raphael preferred to keep his relationships with women to the physical rather than the emotional. A line Beth Blake deliberately stepped over almost every time the two of them were together...

‘And if—if you find there is such a grave, are you going to tell me about it first or just report straight to Cesar?’ She looked at him challengingly.

His mouth thinned. ‘I am employed by Cesar—’

‘Please, Raphael!’ She looked up at him appealingly.

Raphael frowned darkly as he knew he was not as immune to that appeal as he might have wished. ‘Shall we just wait and see what happens?’

‘You sound as if you’re placating a child!’

‘Then perhaps you should stop acting like one.’ Raphael bit out his frustration with this situation. With the fact that he had never regarded Beth as a child.

Oh, she was almost ten years younger than him, and outspoken in a way he had never encountered before—except perhaps from her adopted sister, Grace—but there was no doubting Beth’s womanly curves, or her kissable mouth, or that Raphael’s response to those curves and those sensual lips was purely male!

She gave a pained frown now before turning away. ‘If you wouldn’t mind leaving now, I need to finish packing.’

‘And if I do mind?’

Beth stilled, as she knew, by the closeness of Raphael’s voice, that he was now standing just behind her. So close that she could feel the heat of his body and smell the spicy allure of his cologne, and that pure male smell that was Raphael alone. An insidious and heady combination, along with the predatory power of the man himself, that Beth responded to in spite of herself...

‘Beth?’

She kept her expression deliberately cool as she turned to face him, that coolness wavering slightly as she found that Raphael was standing only inches away from her, those piercing blue eyes still narrowed in his harshly chiselled face as he looked down the length of his nose at her.

Beth’s chin rose determinedly in the face of that implacability.

‘I’ve agreed to go back to England in Cesar’s jet, and to having you accompany me. Isn’t that enough?’

‘For now, perhaps...’

Her eyes flashed darkly. ‘What more do any of you want from me?’

What did Raphael want from this woman?

From Beth Blake, a woman he could not deny that he found physically attractive?

It was all too easy to imagine making love with that woman; kissing those delectable and poutingly stubborn lips, enjoying and pleasuring those lean and silkily slender curves, caressing and tasting the fullness of her breasts, arousing her until she was wet and open to his sinking his shaft between those delicious thighs, slowly and torturously at first, and then faster, pumping into her until they both found