A Stormy Spanish Summer (11 page)

‘I
SHALL
leave you here to complete your examination of the house. My meeting with the water engineer should not take too long. As soon as it’s finished I shall come back for you, and then we can return to Granada.’

Fliss nodded her head. Her throat felt too raw with pent-up emotion as she stood with Vidal in the hallway to her father’s house. She had barely slept, and disturbingly her body, as though totally divorced from the reality of the situation between them, had reacted to his proximity in the car this morning as though they were real lovers, aching to be close to him. Several times she had felt herself being drawn to move nearer to him, her senses craving the intimacy of just being close.

Was it always like this after having sex? Was there always this need for continued closeness? This desire to touch and be touched? To be held and to know that that other person shared your thoughts and feelings? Somehow Fliss did not think so—which meant.

‘This morning I couldn’t find my mother’s locket.’ She rushed into speech in an attempt to block from her thoughts memories of their intimacy, but simply referring to the initial cause of it was enough to have her
whole body burning—and not just burning but aching as well.

‘I have it. The catch is faulty. I shall get it repaired for you in Granada.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Before I leave you, there’s something I must say.’

Fliss had never seen Vidal look more grimly stern, never heard his voice contain such harshness—not even on that dreadful evening when he had looked down at her with such cruel contempt as she lay trapped in Rory’s hold.

Automatically she tensed, as though waiting for a blow to fall, so Vidal’s next words came as an unexpected shock.

‘I owe you an apology—and an explanation. I realise that there are no words that can undo what has been done. No amount of explanation or acknowledgement of blame on my part can give you back the years you have lost when you should have been free to … to enjoy your womanhood. All I can do is hope that whatever satisfaction you took from last night is sufficient to free you from the pain I inflicted on you in the past.’

Although Fliss had flinched over that word
satisfaction,
not really sure if he was trying to subtly taunt her by referring to the sexual delight he had given her, she managed not to betray herself in any other way.

‘The accusation I made against you that evening was born of my … my pride and not your behaviour. You had looked at me with an innocent desire and …’

‘And because of that you thought I was promiscuous?’ Fliss finished for him. Her face was burning over
his reference to her ‘innocent desire’, but much as she wanted to refute it she knew that she couldn’t. That was definitely not a subject she wanted him to dwell on, so she told him fiercely, ‘There’s no need for you to say any more. I know what motivated you, Vidal. You disliked and disapproved of me even before you met me.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Yes, it is. You wanted to stop me from writing to my father, remember?’

‘That was—’

‘That was how you felt about me. I wasn’t good enough to write to my father—just as my mother hadn’t been good enough to marry him. Well, at least my father had second thoughts about our relationship, even if
you
still wish it didn’t exist.’

For her sake maybe it was better to allow her to believe what she was saying, Vidal decided. It could not undo the harm that had been done, of course. Nothing could do that. But he could not and would not burden her with his love—a love she did not want. She desired him, though. Perhaps he was late in recognising that loving her meant putting her happiness first, but now that he
had
recognised that it would be shameful and wrong of him to use her first taste of adult desire as a means of trying to persuade her that she could grow to love him. He couldn’t do that. Not even if it meant watching whilst she walked away from him.

The empty house, as though its silence had been disturbed by her arrival, had ultimately settled and sighed around her in the way old houses do, reminding her of the similar sighs and creaks she had experienced from
her old family home when she had walked round it one last time before saying her final goodbye to it. Fliss had thought of her mother and her father as she’d walked from room to room, her sadness for them and for all that they had never had filling her emotions and her thoughts. Two gentle people who had simply not been strong enough to fight against those who had not wanted them to be together.

But she was the living proof that their love had once existed, she reminded herself as she stood in the doorway of the house’s master bedroom. Not her father’s bedroom. According to Vidal, her father had preferred to sleep in a smaller room, almost cell-like in its simplicity, further down the corridor. A room that in its starkness told her nothing about the man responsible for her existence.

Now, with her exploration of the house complete, she had nothing to do other than wait for Vidal to return. Nothing to do, that was, other than try not to think about the intimacy they had shared. As a sixteen-year-old she had spent many private hours in fevered imaginings of Vidal making love to her. Now that he had. Now that he had she wanted him to do it again—and again. She wanted the pleasure he had given her to be hers exclusively, wanted Vidal himself to be hers exclusively.

What had she done to herself? Fliss wondered bitterly. In proving to Vidal that he had misjudged her she had simply exchanged one emotional burden for another. Now she had no anger with which to conceal her real feelings for Vidal. Her
real
feelings? Could one fall in love for life at sixteen? Could one really know that the
possession of one’s first lover, was the only possession one would ever want? Her heart and her senses gave her their answer immediately and forcefully. She loved Vidal, and her anger against him for misjudging her was entangled with her pain because he did not love her back.

She loved Vidal.

From the window of the master bedroom she could see a car coming down the rutted driveway and heading for the house. Vidal’s car. He had come to collect her, as he had told her he would, and soon they would be on their way back to Granada. Soon she would be on her way back to London and her own life there. A life without Vidal. Could she bear that? She would have to.

Fliss reached the hallway just as Vidal opened the front door. His, ‘Have you seen everything you wanted to see?’ elicited a nod of her head.

She didn’t trust herself to actually speak to him—not right now, with her heart aching for him and for his love.

Later that day, driving away from the
castillo
and the estate, Fliss knew that from now on whenever she smelled the scent of citrus fruit she would think of the Lecrin Valley, of the touch of Vidal’s hands on her skin, the passion of his kiss on her mouth, and the possession of her body by his. Bittersweet pleasure, indeed.

T
HE
Granada townhouse contained an air of impatient bustle—due, Fliss knew, to the fact that its lord and master was about to fly to Chile for a business meeting with his business partner there later in the week.

‘It’s foolish, I know, but I can’t help feeling a little anxious whenever I know that Vidal is about to fly to South America. It always reminds me of the death of his father, and makes me worry for Vidal’s safety—although I can never say that to Vidal himself, of course. He would think me overprotective,’ the Duchess confided to Fliss as they had their morning coffee together out on the courtyard terrace, two days after Fliss’s return from the
castillo.
‘You will be returning to England soon, I expect,’ she added, ‘but you must keep in touch with us, Fliss. You are part of the family, after all.’

Part of the family? Vidal certainly didn’t want her to be part of the family.

As though her thoughts had somehow conjured him up, Vidal himself walked out of the house and came over to join them, bending swiftly to kiss his mother’s cheek and smile at her. His look for Fliss was notably cold and dismissive.

‘I’ve arranged for you to see Señor Gonzales tomorrow morning, so that the paperwork with regard to the sale of your father’s house to me can be set in motion,’ he told her.

‘I’m not going to sell it.’

The words were out of their own volition, spoken as though Fliss had no control over them, shocking her as much as they obviously infuriated Vidal. Until that moment it had never occurred to Fliss to even
think
of keeping her father’s house, but now that she had told Vidal that she wasn’t going to sell it, defying what she knew were his expectations, she suddenly realised how right it felt that she should keep it.

Almost as though they had physically reached out and touched her, she felt as though somehow she could sense her parents’ approval and delight. They
wanted
her to keep the house. She felt that more surely than she had ever felt anything before in the whole of her life. In a rush of aching emotion Fliss knew that no matter how much Vidal tried to bend her to his will and make her sell the house to him she wouldn’t—because quite simply she couldn’t.

‘The dower house is part of the ducal estate,’ Vidal told her grimly. ‘When it was given to Felipe—’

‘When my father left it to me,’ Fliss interrupted him, ‘he did it because he wanted me to have it. If he had wanted it returned to the estate then that’s what he would have done. It’s mine, and I intend to keep it.’

‘To spite me?’ Vidal suggested coldly.

‘No,’ Fliss denied. ‘I intend to keep the house for
myself … for … for my children. So that they at least can know something of their Spanish ancestry.’

What children? An inner voice mocked her. The only children she wanted were Vidal’s children—children she would never be allowed to have. But her words seemed to have been enough to infuriate Vidal further. Fliss could see that.

His eyes burned molten gold with anger as he challenged her, ‘And these children—you will bring them here to Spain, will you? With the man who has given them to you?’

‘Yes!’ Fliss told him, refusing to be intimidated. ‘Why shouldn’t I? My father left the house to me because he wanted me to have something of him to cherish. Of course I will want to share that with my own children.’ Overwhelmed by what she was feeling, she accused him emotionally, ‘You might have been able to stop me making contact with my father, but you couldn’t prevent him from leaving his house to me—although no doubt you tried.’

Fliss couldn’t say any more. She simply couldn’t trust herself to speak. Shaking her head, she got up from the table and almost ran into the house in her desperation to escape from Vidal’s presence before she broke down completely.

Only when she had reached the safety and privacy of her bedroom did she let her feelings get the better of her.

And then her bedroom door opened, and she froze with disbelief as Vidal strode in.

This time he hadn’t bothered knocking. This time
he’d simply flung the door open and marched in, slamming the door behind him.

He was angry—furiously, savagely, passionately angry. Fliss could see it and something within her leapt to match those feelings—a wild, tempestuous intensity of emotion that had her facing him defiantly.

‘I don’t know what you want, Vidal—’

He didn’t let her get any further. ‘Don’t you? Then let me show you.’

He had closed the distance between them before she knew it, reaching for her, with a man’s passion, a man’s need, she recognised dizzily.

‘This
is what I want, Felicity, and you want it too. So don’t even bother trying to pretend that you don’t. I felt it, saw it,
tasted
it in you, and it’s still there now. Didn’t it ever occur to you that in giving yourself to me you might have unleashed something that neither of us can control? Something for which we will both have to pay a price? No, of course it didn’t. Just as it obviously never occurred to you that a man who is aroused to possessive jealousy at the sight of the sixteen-year-old girl he wants but has denied himself, out of the moral belief that she is too young, might just leap to the wrong judgement when he finds her in bed with someone else.’

What was he doing? He shouldn’t be in here, saying things like this. He should be keeping as much distance between Felicity and himself as he could. It had been those words she had thrown at him about wanting to keep her father’s house for her children that had done it—the anguish of the thought of her with another man’s child, conceiving that child, bearing it, loving it
as she loved the man who had given it to her, had been more than he could bear. The voice within him that was urging him to stop, to leave now whilst he still could, was being drowned out by the pain of his longing for her.

‘I wasn’t in bed with Rory,’ was the only protest Fliss could manage to make, and even that was a whispered flurry of words whilst her mind, her body, her senses grappled with exactly what Vidal had just said to her.

Vidal wanted her, desired her? Had been jealous at the thought of her with someone else?

‘I promised myself I wouldn’t do this,’ Vidal was saying angrily. ‘I told myself that it demeans me as a man to use the sexual desire we feel for one another for such a purpose. But you leave me with no other choice.’

‘I leave you with no other choice?’

She wasn’t going to let herself think about what he had just said—about them sharing a sexual desire for one another—and she certainly wasn’t going to think about the effervescent surge of joyous delight his words had given her. Instead she would focus on the practical and the logical, on the sheer arrogance of his belief that he could walk in here and expect. What exactly
did
he expect?

Her body had started to overheat, and her thoughts were spinning out of control, wild, sensual, erotic and very dangerous thoughts that wanted to send her into his arms, into his possession.

‘Not when you throw in my face your plans for the future. A future that includes taking a lover who will
give you his children. He may give you that, but first I shall give you
this,
and you will give me the passion you promised all those years ago. Don’t bother trying to deny it. You have already shown that you want me.’

‘Any woman worth her salt can fake an org … sexual pleasure,’ Fliss corrected herself frantically.

‘Anyone male or female can say the words and act out a fiction of sexual delight, but the human body does not lie. And your body wanted me. It welcomed me, it ached and yearned for me, and when the moment came it showed me that I had given it pleasure. As I shall do again now. And you will not stop me, because you will not wish to stop me, even though you might try to tell yourself that you do.’

Fliss made a small mewling sound in her throat, but it was too late to protest more strongly because Vidal was kissing her, fiercely and passionately, and she was kissing him back with equal hunger and need.

Vidal’s hand cupped her breast, his fingers finding her already erect nipple.

This was the last thing she had expected—and yet the first thing she had wanted. She couldn’t deny it. She still tried to, though, but the words didn’t come. Her body, her senses, her emotions were already saying yes.

Vidal acknowledged how hard he had tried to fight the need for her that was sweeping over him right now, and how completely he had failed. He hadn’t planned for this to happen. In fact he had done everything he could to avoid it happening. But right now he was no more able to control his need for her than she was able to conceal her response to him.

Pointless. Pointless to fight, pointless to flee, and even more pointless to allow herself to love him—and that was exactly what she was doing, Fliss recognised, as Vidal looked deep into her eyes and then kissed her slowly and lingeringly. The sensation of his mouth moving on hers with such deliberate and controlled sensuality was stealing her resistance from her. All she wanted to do was respond to him, give to him, be held and touched and possessed by him. The force of that need made her whole body tremble in his arms like a reed in the wind, needing his support to protect her from her own vulnerability.

Vidal moved back and pulled off his shirt, then cupped her face and kissed the side of her neck, sending hot shivers of pleasure running over her skin so that her control ran from her like sand taken by a ceaseless and unstoppable tide.

‘Touch me,’ he whispered against her ear, and that rough, broken note of urgency suggested that his whole desire was for her touch and he was on the point of breaking his self-control. Surely more a figment of her own imagination than true reality? But Vidal was lifting her hand and placing it against the warm flesh of his chest, holding it there as he implored her, ‘Touch me, Fliss, as I’ve wanted you to touch me from the moment I saw you.’

Unable to stop herself, Fliss obeyed his whispered command. Wasn’t this, after all, what she had ached and longed for herself? Now, as she stroked and explored her way over Vidal’s torso, she could feel the surge of the blood beneath his skin rising up to meet the trembling
excitement of her fingertips—just as she could feel the movement of his muscles as she grew bolder and explored further and lower, to the flat plane where his flesh disappeared beneath the edge of his chinos.

‘Yes.’
The heated urgency of the demand Vidal smothered against the rise of her breast came just when her hand reached the barrier of his trousers, and could only mean one thing. But still Fliss hesitated. To have come this far was dangerous. To go any further would be fatal, taking her to a state of being and emotion that once inhabited she knew she would never want to leave.

‘So you still want to torment me, do you?’ Vidal accused her. ‘Then maybe I should do a little tormenting of my own.’

Before she could stop him he had swung her up into his arms and was carrying her into his own bedroom, minimalist and masculine in design and decor, even if the large bed on which he was placing her seemed to Fliss to be the most sensually dangerous place she had ever known. Or was that because Vidal was now undressing her and himself, between kisses she was sure were designed to arouse her to the point where she ached for him so much that she was willing to do anything to have the pleasure he was giving her? Each kiss, each touch was taking her deeper and deeper into a place of such intense need that nothing else existed, and her now naked body was trembling with the force of her longing.

‘See how much you want me?’ Vidal asked her.

Fliss couldn’t deny it. She did want him. She wanted him, needed him, longed for him, loved him.

Her body shuddered in mute confirmation of that admission.

Vidal leaned forward and stroked her body from her hip to her breast with a fiercely demanding caress that ended with him bending his head to take her nipple between his lips, drawing the need up through her body until it was trembling and pulsing in response to him. His free hand was cupping her other breast, his knee urging her legs apart.

The desire that ripped into her was a volcano of molten heat. The satisfaction of feeling his naked erect flesh against her own sex, initially so pleasurable, quickly became another form of exquisite torture as she ached for even more intimacy, grinding her lower body against him whilst Vidal in turn lifted her against himself, opening her legs to wrap them around his body and hold him closer.

Fliss craved the sensation of him within her, the movement of his flesh inside and against her own. Just the thought of it made need surge through her in unbearable longing, but Vidal was pushing her away, removing himself from her, leaving her. Was this what he had meant about tormenting her?

Yearningly Fliss reached to him, but he shook his head.

‘Not yet,’ he told her softly. ‘I want to touch all of you, to taste all of you, to know all of you first.’

He was stringing kisses along the back of her knee and then the inside of her leg, whilst his fingers stroked apart the willing swollen heat of the lips covering her sex. The pulse already beating there increased in intensity,
driving her towards the goal her body now craved. The caress of Vidal’s touch against the intimate wetness of her sex was both a pleasure and an incitement to want more, to want
him.
Fliss knew it as she curled her fingers round his wrist in a mute plea for what she really wanted.

Vidal denied her, bending his head and dipping his tongue into the moist arousal of her sex, lightly caressing the very heart of it, and then less lightly, whilst Fliss clung to what was left of her reason until she could cling to it no more, and then her cries for him to complete the pleasure he was giving her with the stroke of his flesh within her rose and fell against the fevered backdrop of their unsteady breathing and the inward clamour of their frantic heartbeats.

‘Now!
Now,’
Fliss begged Vidal, all control and restraint lost as she was sucked into the maelstrom of desire Vidal had aroused within her. Her senses, already stimulated and aroused, absorbed the reality of his maleness as he stopped, poised over her, wantonly glorying in awareness of his need, of his erection taut and hard.