A Touch of Notoriety(38)

Beth grimaced. ‘I don’t like to think of her—to imagine Elizabeth, being left here all alone, year after year—’

‘Beth—’

‘It’s all right, Raphael.’ She turned to give him a strained smile. ‘You don’t need to worry, I’m not going to break down in floods of tears. I haven’t returned your silk handkerchief from last time yet!’

Raphael had no idea how to go about dealing with this calm and coolly collected—this unreachable—Beth. ‘I have plenty of other handkerchiefs,’ he assured her gruffly.

She gave a firm shake of her head. ‘I’m not going to cry.’

‘Then perhaps you should.’

‘Why?’ Her eyes flashed up at him darkly and her hands were clenched at her sides. ‘Don’t feel sorry for me, Raphael. I didn’t even know the real Elizabeth Lawrence.’

‘You are upset.’

‘Of course I’m upset!’ Beth confirmed fiercely. ‘Wouldn’t you be upset, if you had just visited your own graveside?’

Raphael drew in a hissing breath at the stark reality of that statement; Beth had, effectively, just done exactly that. The fact that she was dealing with this situation as calmly as she was, with a dignity far beyond her years, only increased his admiration for her; a dangerous admiration, considering his completely physical response to this particular woman.

‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘We should go, Beth.’ He reached out to clasp her arm, with the intention of escorting her from the churchyard.

She flinched away from his touch. ‘But I’m not Beth any more, am I? I’m Gabriela.’

Raphael looked down at her searchingly as his hand dropped slowly back to his side, noting the flush that had now entered her cheeks, and the unnatural brightness to those beautiful dark eyes. ‘I am sure that the Navarros will continue to call you Beth, if that is what you prefer.’

‘I would prefer that none of this nightmare had ever happened,’ she dismissed tautly. ‘But that obviously isn’t going to happen. And what would be the point of asking them to call me Beth, when she no longer exists?’

‘Of course you exist—’

‘No-I-don’t.’

He flinched at the fierce evenness of her tone. ‘You—’

‘Time to go, Raphael.’ She turned away abruptly, not waiting to see if he accompanied her as she walked swiftly through the graveyard to where they had left the car parked by the side of the road.

Raphael followed her slowly, for once in his life unsure as to what to do or say next...

* * *

The effort to hold back the tears burned the back of Beth’s throat as she sat in the car beside Raphael while he drove them away from the village of Stopley—away from Elizabeth Lawrence’s tiny grave.

She so wanted—needed—to cry. Wanted to scream and shout, too, as she shed those tears of pain and loss. The pain and loss she felt for the death of Elizabeth Lawrence, that two-year-old baby back there in the graveyard, as well as her own.

And if she felt this way after seeing Elizabeth Lawrence’s grave, how much more deeply Esther and Carlos Navarro must have suffered after the disappearance of their own beloved daughter, never knowing what had become of her, or whether she was alive or dead. An uncertainty that had finally driven the couple into living apart, Esther returning to her native America, while Carlos remained in Argentina, when they could no longer even look at each other without thinking of the baby daughter they had lost.

As for Cesar...Beth knew from Grace that he had lived all of his adult life with the guilt of his baby sister’s disappearance hovering like a dark shadow over his heart. Gabriela had been taken from her pushchair in the park during the few minutes she had been left unattended while their nanny helped him untangle his kite from some bushes.

The biggest tragedy of all perhaps was that while Beth could sympathise with all of the Navarros’ pain, she couldn’t just step back in Gabriela’s designer shoes and become the daughter they had lost. Any more than she could just turn on a switch and feel an outpouring of familial love for all of them. She might be Gabriela Navarro—she had no choice now but to accept that was who she really was—but she wasn’t and doubted she ever could be the Gabriela Navarro her ‘family’ so longed for, and wanted her to be...

Maybe, with time, she might come to care for them all—although the arrogant Cesar was going to be something of a challenge!—but she very much doubted it was ever going to be enough, that she was ever going to become Gabriela enough to satisfy the hunger for the daughter, the sister, the Navarro family had suffered under for the past twenty-one years.