A Stormy Spanish Summer (4 page)

Shaking herself free of her painful thoughts, she looked at her small case. Her mother had told her about the traditional way of life of this aristocratic, autocratic Spanish family that Vidal now headed. Vidal had said that his mother had insisted she stay here. Did that mean she could expect to be formally received by her? Perhaps over dinner? She hadn’t brought any formal clothes with her—just a few changes of underwear, a pair of tailored shorts, some fresh tops, and one very simple slip of a dress: a handful of non-crushable matt black jersey that she had fallen in love with on a trip to London.

She was just about to lift the dress from her case and shake it out when the door opened and Rosa came in,
carrying a tray containing a glass of wine and a serving of tapas.

After thanking her, Fliss asked, ‘What time is dinner served?’

‘There will be no dinner. Vidal does not wish it. He is too busy,’ Rosa answered haughtily in Spanish. ‘A meal will be brought for you if you wish.’

Fliss could feel her face beginning to burn. Rosa’s rudeness was unforgivable—but no doubt she was taking her cue from Vidal.

‘I have no more wish to eat with Vidal than he does with me,’ she told Rosa spiritedly. ‘But since Vidal told me specifically that it was his mother’s wish that I stay here, instead of in the hotel I had booked, I assumed I would be expected to have dinner with
her.’

‘The Duchess is not here,’ Rosa informed her curtly, putting down the tray and turning grim-lipped to the door. She had disappeared through it before Fliss could ask her any more questions.

Vidal had lied to her about his mother’s presence here in the house and about her wish to see her. Why? Why would he want to have her here beneath his own roof?

Just for a moment she wished she was back at home—and more than that she wished that her mother was still alive. Filled with the sadness of her emotions, Fliss sat down on the edge of the bed.

Her mother had given her the best childhood ever. A wonderfully generous bequest of an elderly relative Fliss herself had never even known had enabled her mother to buy them a lovely home in a quiet country village—large enough for Fliss’s grandparents to move in with
them—as well as providing an income which had meant her mother had been able to be at home with her. Her mother had talked openly to her about her father, referring to him with love in her voice and her eyes, and no resentment or bitterness. She had only clammed up when Fliss had begged her to bring her to Spain so that she could see the country for herself. She had refused to criticise Vidal when Fliss, with a seven-year-old’s sharpness of mind, had worked out that
he
must have been the one to betray her parents.

‘You mustn’t blame Vidal, darling,’ her mother had told her gently. ‘It truly wasn’t his fault. He was only a little boy—the same age as you are now. He was not to know what would happen.’

Her gentle, loving mother—always so ready to understand and forgive those who hurt her.

Initially Felicity—named for ‘happiness’, according to her mother—had accepted this defence of Vidal. But then he had come to visit them, and after initially behaving towards her with kindness he had started to treat her with disdain, putting as much distance between them as he could, and making it plain that he disliked her. How her vulnerable teenage heart had ached over that unkindness.

From the minute she had first seen him, stepping out of the expensive car he had driven from London to their house, Fliss had been smitten, developing a huge crush on him. She could vividly remember the day she had inadvertently walked into the bathroom when he had been shaving. Her besotted gaze had been glued to his naked torso. Of course that kind of intimacy had
sent her febrile teenage longings surging out of control. Theirs had normally been a mostly female household, so the sight of any bare male chest would have had her studying it in secret curiosity, but when that bare chest belonged to Vidal …

She had felt almost sick with excitement and longing when she had finally managed to step back out of the bathroom, her imagination working overtime and conjuring up various scenarios in which she had not merely looked at it but even more breathtakingly excitingly been held close to it. It was all very well to mock her sixteen-year-old naivety now, but wasn’t it the truth that she was still every bit as personally unfamiliar with the actual reality of sexual intimacy, bare skin to bare skin, now as she had been then?

Clumsily Fliss turned round, as though in flight from her own knowledge of herself. But the fact was that there was nowhere to run to from the reality of her virgin state. No matter how many defensive barricades she had built around herself, no matter how strong an aura of adult womanly confidence she had taught herself to manifest, and no matter how closely she guarded the secret of her past-its-sell-by-date virginity, she could not escape from the truth.

What was the matter with her? she challenged herself. She had lived with being sexually inactive for years. It had been her own decision to make and to keep. It was just one of those things. The pace of modern life, the need to establish her career, had somehow prevented her from meeting a man she wanted enough to let go of the past.

It would be pure self-indulgence for her to start feeling sorry for herself. By many people’s standards Fliss knew that her childhood had been a privileged one. She still considered herself to be privileged now—and not just because she had had such a wonderful mother.

With her grandparents and her mother dead, the big house had seemed so empty—and yet at the same time filled with painful memories. At the height of the property market, before it crashed, Fliss had been approached by a builder who had offered her an unexpectedly large sum of money for the house and its land. After trying to work out what her mother would have wanted her to do she had gone ahead and sold the house to him, and bought herself the flat in the converted Georgian townhouse. Her work in the Tourism Department of the very pretty market town in which she lived kept her busy, and she had plenty of friends—although many of her schoolfriends were now pairing off and making ‘nesting’ plans, and her three closest friends from school and university, whilst single like her, now lived and worked overseas.

A brief rap on her bedroom door had her getting up off the bed and tensing as she waited for the door to open and Rosa to appear—no doubt radiating further disapproval.

However, it wasn’t Rosa who stepped or rather strode into the room, but Vidal himself. He had changed from his business suit into a more casual shirt and a pair of chinos, and had also had a shower, to judge from the still-damp appearance of his slicked-back hair. Her heart turned over inside her chest cavity in slow painful
motion, her breath seizing in her lungs. Her awareness of the intimacy of him being in her bedroom brought back too many memories of the past for her to feel comfortable even before the door had closed and locked.

Once before Vidal had come into her bedroom.

No!
She would not allow herself to be dragged into the dark agony of that dreadful place where those memories were stored. It was the present she needed to focus on—not the past. It was she who must challenge and criticise Vidal—not the other way around.

Summoning her strength, she demanded, ‘Why did you tell me that your mother would be here when that was a lie?’

The sudden surge of blood creeping up along his jaw betrayed his real reaction to her challenge, even if he was trying to deny it by giving her a coolly dismissive look.

‘My mother has been called away to visit a friend who is unwell. I was not aware of her absence myself until Rosa informed me of it.’

‘Rosa had to tell you where your mother is? How typical of the kind of man you are that you need a servant to tell you the whereabouts of your own mother.’

The hot, angry red blood surged over the sharp thrust of his jawline like an unstoppable tide.

‘For your information, Rosa is
not
a servant. And as for my relationship with my mother—that is not a subject I intend to discuss with you.’

‘No, I’m sure you don’t,’ Fliss answered him grimly. ‘After all, it is in no small part because of you that I never got to have a relationship with my
father.
You
were the one who intercepted my private letter to him. And you were the one who came all the way to England to bully my mother into pleading with me not to try to contact him again.’

‘Your mother believed it would not have been in your best interests for you to continue to write to Felipe.’

‘Oh, so it was for
my
sake that you stopped me communicating with him, was it?’ Fliss’s voice was icy with sarcasm as the memory of all the anguish and humiliation Vidal had caused flooded past her defences. He was cruel and arrogant. Willing to destroy others without compunction so that he could have his own way. ‘You had no right to stop me knowing my father, or denying me the right to at least see if he could love me. But then we know that love for another person isn’t a concept someone like you understands, is it, Vidal?’

She could feel the aching burn of her emotions in the hot tears that threatened to flood her eyes. Tears! She would never—
must
never—ever cry in front of this man. She must never show him any weakness.
Never.

‘What could you possibly know about loving someone—about loving
anyone?’
Fliss hurled accusations at him in furious self-defence. She’d say and do anything to stop him guessing at the pain within her that his words had touched. ‘You don’t know what love is!’

She had no idea what she was really saying as the wild words tumbled from her lips. All she knew was that they sprang from an unending well of pain deep inside her.

‘And you
do?
You who—’ Furiously angry himself,
Vidal closed the distance between them, shaking his head in disgust as he stopped speaking.

But Fliss knew perfectly what he had been about to say, and the accusation he had been about to fling at her.

Now panic as well as pain had her well and truly in its grip

‘Don’t touch me,’ she ordered, stepping back from him, her voice shaking with dread.

‘You can stop the play-acting, Felicity.’ Immediately Vidal’s anger was replaced by a look of contempt. ‘And we both know that it
is
play-acting, before you attempt to deny it and perjure yourself even further.’

Her panic levels were going through the roof, sky-high and out of control, defeating her as she struggled to bring some rationality to her reactions and her emotions.

The memories had come dangerously close, muddying the waters of what was present and what was past. Her heart was jumping around inside her ribcage and she was sixteen years old again, floundering helplessly at the confusion of feelings that were forbidden and frightening.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she lashed out wildly, ‘but you’re wrong. I don’t want you. I never wanted you.’

‘Want me?’

The silence in the room was like the still centre at the eye of a storm. It was like knowing with all her senses that the danger was there and soon it would crash down
on her and consume her. And there was nowhere she could run to escape it.

‘Want me? Like this, you mean?’ Vidal said softly.

‘This’ was being ruthlessly dragged into his arms and then being pinioned against him, trapped between him and the wall behind her, as he bound her to his body so intimately that she felt as though she could feel the bones and the hard male muscles that lay beneath the sleek flesh that padded them. Unlike her own, his heartbeat was steady—steady and determined. The heartbeat of a victor who had successfully captured his prey.

Was this how that long-ago Moorish princess had felt held in the vice-like grip of her captor?

Fliss’s own heartbeat raced, her pulse flickering in a wild primeval dance that took away her ability to think or even feel rationally. Had she, that long-ago young woman, also felt the same searing, soaring, confusing of fear and triumph? Fear for her independence—fear of the wild clamouring that was beating through her. And had she felt triumph because she had been able to drive the man holding her beyond his own self-control? Because she had broken something in him? Even though the price of that victory would be him exerting his power over her in retaliation?

A mêlée of thoughts and feelings rioted inside her, turning her into a version of herself she barely recognised.

He shouldn’t be doing this, Vidal knew, but somehow he couldn’t stop himself. A thousand nights and more of dragging himself from forbidden dreams in which he held her like this overwhelmed his self-control. She
wasn’t sixteen any more; she wasn’t forbidden by his own moral code—even if his pride burned and recoiled at the thought of still desiring her.

The girl with the wide-eyed gaze, filled with all the heady innocence of a sixteen-year-old in the grip of her first sexual desire for a man, had never existed anywhere other than in his imagination. All the nights he had lain sleepless and tormented the bed
she
had been lying in had been far from chaste.

As he bent his head towards hers he could feel the thud of her heartbeat and the soft warmth of her breasts pressed against his chest—those breasts from which he had ached so badly to peel the tee shirt covering them so that he could reveal their perfection to his gaze and touch, so that he could pluck on the tormenting thrust of her nipples with his fingertips, so that he could draw them into his mouth and caress them until her body arched with longing for his possession.

No!
He must not do this.

Vidal made to release her, but Fliss shuddered violently against him, the small sound she made deep in her throat drowning out his denial.

Vidal was looking into her eyes, forcing her to look back at him. Close up, his eyes weren’t one solid colour but several shades mingling together into topaz-gold. The unblinking intensity of his gaze was dizzying her, just as the heavy thud of his heart beating was commanding her own heart to match its rhythm.

In another heartbeat he would kiss her, and she would feel the cold, unforgiving dominance of those sharply cut lips. Her own parted—on a protest against what he
was doing, not a sign of her docile acceptance of it, and certainly not in eager anticipation of it.