A Stormy Spanish Summer (5 page)

And yet …

And yet beneath her clothes, beneath her top and her plain, practical neutral-coloured bra, her breasts had begun to ache with a sensation that seemed to have spread down from where his hand was covering the pulse in her throat to the tightening peaks of her nipples. Fliss trembled in its grip, shockingly forced to admit to herself that what her body and that ache within it was signalling was
not
angry rejection. Instead a burgeoning female desire was running through her veins like heavy, melting liquid pleasure—a pleasure that lapped at her senses and undermined her self-control, replacing it with a growing sensual longing.

Vidal’s breath grazed her skin, clean and slightly minty. Beneath the newly cleansed scent of his skin her senses picked up something else—something primitive and dangerous to a woman whose own sensuality had broken past the barriers of her self-control. The scent of alluring raw maleness, which called out to that sensuality and somehow had her moving closer to him, her lips parting just a little bit more.

Their gazes clung and fought hotly for supremacy, and then his mouth was on hers. The pressure of those male lips was sending her senses into overdrive, causing a heat explosion of pleasure to melt liquid desire into her lower body.

Fliss tried to fight what she was feeling. She made a helpless sound—she could feel it reverberating in her own throat—a sound of protest, Fliss was sure. Although
her ears translated it more as a shockingly keening moan of need. A need that was instantly increased by the insistent grind of Vidal’s body into her own, and a tightening of his hold on her whilst his tongue took possession of the intimate softness of her mouth, thrusting against her own tongue, taking her to a place of dark velvet sensuality and danger. Her whole body was on fire, pulsing with a reaction to him which seemed to have exploded inside her. Her eyes closed …

Vidal felt the force of his own angry desire surging through him, sweeping aside barriers within himself he had thought impenetrable. The more he tried to regain control, the more savage his reaction became. Anger and out-of-control male desire. Each of them was dangerous enough alone, but incite them both, as this woman he was holding now had done, and the alchemic reaction between them had the power to rip a man’s self-respect to shreds—and with it his belief in himself.

Behind his own closed eyelids Vidal saw her as his body most wanted her: naked, eager to appease the male passion she had induced and unleashed, offering herself. Her white skin would be pearlescent with the dew of her own arousal, the dark pink crests of her breasts flowering into hard nubs of pleasure that sought the caress of his fingertips and his lips.

Outside in the garden below them the gathering dusk activated the system that brought on the garden lighting. Sudden illumination burst into life, causing Vidal to open his eyes and recognise what he was doing.

Cursing himself mentally, he released Fliss abruptly.

The shock of transition from a kiss so intimate that she felt it had seared her senses for ever to the reality of who exactly had been delivering that kiss had Fliss shuddering with self-revulsion. But before she could gather her scattered senses—before she could do anything, before she could tell Vidal what she thought of him—he was speaking to her. As though what he had done had never happened.

‘What I came to tell you is that it will be an early start in the morning, since we have a ten-o’clock appointment with your father’s lawyer. Rosa will send someone up with your breakfast, since my mother isn’t expected back until tomorrow. I also have to tell you that any future attempt by you to … to
persuade
me to satisfy your promiscuously carnal desires will be as doomed to failure as this one.’ His mouth twisted cynically and he gave her a coldly insulting look. ‘Over-used goods have never held any appeal for me.’

Over-used goods.

Trembling with rage at his insult, Fliss lost her head. ‘You were the one who started this, not me. And … and you’re wrong about me. You always have been. What you saw—’

‘What I saw was a sixteen-year-old tramp, lying on her mother’s bed, allowing a young lout to paw her and boast that
he
intended to have her because the rest of his football team already had.’

‘Get out!’ Fliss demanded, her voice rising in anger. ‘Get
out!’

He strode away from her and through the bedroom door.

As soon as she could trust herself to move she half ran and half stumbled to the door, turning the key in the lock, tears of rage and shame spilling from her hot eyes.

I
T WAS
too late to try and hold back the memories now. They were there with her in every raw and cruel detail.

Fliss sank down into one of the chairs, her head in her hands.

She had been shocked and hurt when Vidal had told her that he’d intercepted her letter to her father. Such a cruel action from someone she had put on a pedestal had hurt very badly, coming on top of Vidal’s existing coldness towards her. Rejection by her father and his family—something she had always tried to pretend didn’t matter—had suddenly become very real and very painful. She had seen the warmth with which Vidal treated her mother, and that had made her own sense of rejection worse. He wasn’t after being cold to them both—just to her.

When her mother had told her that Vidal was taking her out to dinner as a thank-you for his stay, Fliss had asked if she might have some schoolfriends round to celebrate the ending of the school year and their exams. Her mother had agreed—on the strict understanding that she was only to invite half a dozen of her classmates. This
had seemed fair to Fliss and so she had been horrified when their get-together was interrupted by the arrival of what had seemed like dozens of teenagers—many of whom already the worse for drink.

She had tried to persuade them to leave, but her efforts had been met by jeers and even more rowdy behaviour. One of the boys—Rory—had been the ringleader of a wild crowd from her school. A swaggering bully of a boy who’d played in the school football team. He had gone upstairs with the girl who had arrived with him—a stranger to Fliss—and she had followed them, horrified when they went into her mother’s bedroom.

In the row that had followed the girl had left, and Rory, furious with Fliss, who had been ‘spoiling his fun’, had grabbed her and pulled her down onto the bed. His actions had turned Fliss’s anger to fear. She had tried to pull free and fight him off, but he had laughed at her, pouring cider over her from the bottle he had brought up with him and then pushing her back against the bed.

That was when the door had opened and she had seen her mother and Vidal standing there. At first she had been relieved—but then she had seen the look on Vidal’s face. So had Rory, because that had been when he had made that crude and completely untrue comment about the rest of the football team, followed by an equally untrue statement.

‘She loves it. She can’t get enough of it. Ask any of the lads. They all know how well she’s up for it. A proper little nympho, she is.’

Fliss could still remember the feeling of shocked disbelief icing through her, making it impossible for her
to speak or move; to defend herself or refute his boast. Instead she had simply lain there, numbed with horror, whilst Vidal had pulled Rory from the bed and marched him downstairs.

Her mother’s shocked, ‘Oh, Fliss …’ had been ringing in her ears as she’d followed.

Later, of course, she had explained what had happened to her mother, and thankfully her mother had believed her, but by that time Vidal had been on his way back to Spain, and the pain she had felt on seeing the contempt and loathing in his eyes as he’d looked at her had turned her crush on him into revulsion and anger.

She had never gone back to school. She and the three girls who had become her closest friends had gone instead to a sixth-form college, thanks to the excellence of their exam results, and Fliss had made a private vow to herself that she would make her mother proud of her. She would never, ever allow another man to look at her as Vidal had done. She had never discussed with anyone just what his misjudgement of her that evening had done to her. It was her private shame. And now Vidal had resurrected that shame.

Downstairs in the library, with its high ceiling and Biblical frescoes, Vidal stood motionless and white-lipped, staring unseeingly into space, oblivious to the grandeur of his surroundings. The bookshelves were laden with leather-covered books, their titles painted on the spines in gold, and the scent of leather and paper pervaded the room.

Vidal knew himself to be a man of strong principle,
with deep passions and convictions about his ancestry and his duty to it, and to the people who depended on him. Never before had the strength of those passions boiled over into the fury that Felicity had aroused in him. Never before had he come so close to having his self-control consumed in such intense fires.

If he hadn’t been stopped when those lights had come on.

He would have stopped anyway, he assured himself. But a critical inner voice demanded silkily,
Would you?
Or would he have continued to be consumed by his own out-of-control emotions until he had had Felicity spread naked on the bed beneath him, as he sought to satisfy the hunger within him he had thought extinguished?

Vidal closed his eyes and then opened them again. He had thought he’d put the past behind him, but Felicity had brought it back to life with a vengeance.

He needed this to be over. He needed to walk away from the past and draw a line under it. He needed to be rid of it—and for that to happen he needed to be rid of Felicity herself.

Vidal’s mouth compressed. As soon as they had seen Felipe’s lawyer, and arrangements had been made for Vidal to buy from Felicity the house her father had left her, he would remove her from his life—permanently.

Upstairs in the bathroom adjoining her bedroom, the door safely locked, Fliss stood motionless and dry-eyed beneath the beating lash of the powerful shower. She was beyond tears, beyond anger—except for the anger that burned inside her against herself—beyond anything
other than the knowledge that she could stand beneath the fiercely drumming water for the rest of her life—but no amount of water would ever wash away the stain she herself had stamped—dyed—into her pride via what she had done when she had responded to Vidal’s contemptuous kiss.

Stepping out of the shower, she reached for a towel. Perhaps she should not have come here, after all. But that was what Vidal had wanted, wasn’t it? The letter he had sent as her father’s executor, advising her of the fact that her father had left her his house, had said that there was no need. No need as far as
he
was concerned, but every need for her, Fliss reminded herself as she towelled her hair dry. Her body was concealed from her own gaze by the thick soft towel she had wrapped around herself, which covered her from her breasts down to her feet. She had no wish to look upon the flesh that had betrayed her. Or was she the one who had betrayed it? Had she had more experience, more lovers, the lifestyle and the men Vidal had accused her of giving herself to—if she had not deliberately refused to allow her sexuality and her sensuality to know the pleasures they were made for—she would surely have been better equipped to deal with what was happening to her now.

She couldn’t possibly
really
have wanted Vidal. That was impossible.

Her heart started to beat jerkily, so that she had to put her hand over it in an attempt to calm it.

It
was
impossible, wasn’t it? A woman would have to be bereft of all pride and self-protection to allow herself to feel any kind of desire for a man who had treated
her as Vidal had. It was the past that was doing this to her—trapping her, refusing to let her move forward. The past and the unhealed wounds Vidal had inflicted on her there …

It was the sound of her bedroom door rattling that brought Fliss out of the uneasy sleep she had eventually fallen into, after what had felt like hours of lying awake with her body tense and her mind a whirlwind of angry, passionate thoughts. At first the image conjured up inside her head was one of Vidal, his long fingers curled round the door handle. Immediately a surge of sensation burned through her body, igniting an unfamiliar and unwanted sensual ache that shocked her into reality—and shame.

The darkness of the night, with its sensually tempting whispers and torments, was over. It was morning now. Light and sunshine flooded into the room through the windows over which she had forgotten to close the curtains the previous night.

The faint knocking she could still hear on the door was far too hesitant to come from a man like Vidal.

Calling out that she would unlock the door, Fliss got out of bed, glad that she had done so when she discovered a small, nervous-looking young maid standing outside the door and pushing a trolley containing Fliss’s breakfast.

Thanking her, Fliss quickly checked her watch. It was gone eight o’clock already, and her appointment with her late father’s lawyer was at ten. She had no idea where the offices were, or how long it would take to get there.
She’d have preferred to go there alone, but of course with Vidal named as her late father’s executor that was impossible.

With the maid gone, Fliss gulped down a few swallows of the deliciously fragrant coffee she had poured for her, and snatched small bites from one of the fresh warm rolls which she had broken open and spread with sharp orange conserve. Her mother had told her about this special orange conserve, beloved of the family, which was made with the oranges from their own groves. Just tasting it reminded her of her mother, and that in turn helped to calm her and steady her resolve.

Half an hour later she was showered and dressed in a clean tee shirt and her plain dark ‘city’ skirt, her hair brushed back off her face and confined in a clip in a way that unwittingly revealed the delicacy of her features and the slender length of her neck. Fliss automatically touched the small heart-shaped gold locket that hung from her neck on its narrow gold chain. It had been a gift from her father to her mother. Her mother had worn it always, and now Fliss wore it in her memory.

A swift curl of mascara and a slick of lipstick and she was ready. And just in time, she reflected as she heard another knock on her bedroom door—a rather more confident one this time. When she opened the bedroom door it was to find Rosa standing outside, her expression as wary and disapproving as it had been the previous evening.

‘You are to go down to the library. I will show you the way,’ she announced in Spanish, her button-shiny, sharp dark eyes assessing Fliss in a way that made Fliss
feel her appearance had been found wanting when compared with the elegance no doubt adopted by the kind of women a man like Vidal preferred. Soignée, sophisticated, designer-clad women with that air of cool hauteur and reserve her mother had told her that highborn Spanish women wore like the all-covering muslin robes once worn by the Moors who had preceded them.

So what? She was here to speak with her father’s lawyers, not to dress to impress a man who filled her with dislike and contempt, Fliss reminded herself.

No sound other than that made by their feet on the stairs broke the heavy silence of the house’s dark interior as Rosa escorted her down to the library, opening the door for her and telling her briskly that she was to wait inside for Vidal.

Normally Fliss would have been unable to resist looking at the titles of the books filling the double-height shelves that ran round the whole room, but for some reason she felt too on edge to do anything other than wish that the coming meeting was safely over.

Safely
over? Why should she feel unsafe and on edge? She already knew the contents of her father’s will so far as they concerned her. He had left Fliss the house he himself had inherited from Vidal’s grandmother, on the ducal estate in the Lecrin Valley, along with a small sum of money, whilst the agricultural land that surrounded it had been returned to the main estate.

Was she wrong to feel that there was a message for her in this bequest? Was it just her own longing that made her hope it was the loving touch of a father filled with regret for a relationship never allowed to exist? Was
it foolish of her to yearn somehow to find something of what might have been? Some shadowy ghost of regret to warm her heart, waiting for her in the home her father had left her?

Fliss knew that if Vidal were to guess what she was thinking he would destroy her fragile hopes and leave her with nothing to soften the rejection of her childhood years. Which was why he must not know why she had come here, instead of staying in England as he instructed her to do. In the house where her father had lived she might finally find something to ease the pain she had grown up with. After all, her father must have intended
something
by leaving her his home. An act like that was in its own way an act of love, and she longed so much to have that love.

Not that she couldn’t help wishing the house was somewhere other than so close to Vidal’s family
castillo.

As grand as this townhouse was, Fliss knew from her mother that it couldn’t compare with the magnificence of the ducal
castillo,
in the idyllically beautiful Lecrin Valley to the south of Granada.

Set on the south-westerly slopes of the Sierra Nevada, and running down to the coast with its sub-tropical climate, the valley had been much loved by the Moors, who had spoken of the area as the Valley of Happiness. Her mother’s voice had been soft with emotion when she had told Fliss that in spring the air was filled with the scent of the blossom from the orchards that surrounded the castle.

Olives, almonds, cherries, and wine from the vines
that covered many acres of its land were produced in abundance by the ducal estate, and the house owned by her father was, Fliss knew, called House of Almond Blossom because it was set amongst an orchard of those trees.

Was Vidal trying to undermine her in having her brought to this so openly male-orientated room and then left here alone, virtually imprisoned in its austere and unwelcoming maleness? she questioned, her thoughts returning to the present. Why couldn’t Rosa have simply called her down when Vidal himself was ready to leave for the lawyer’s office? Why had she been made to wait here, in this room that spoke so forcefully of male power and male arrogance?

As though her hostile thoughts had somehow conjured him up, the door swung open and Vidal stepped into the room—just as she was in angry, agitated mid-pace, her eyes flashing telltale signs of what she was feeling as she looked towards him.