A Stormy Spanish Summer (7 page)

Shaking, Fliss adjusted her clothing, the pink stain colouring her face and her chest not just caused by her embarrassment. Her nipples ached painfully—not only the one Vidal had been caressing but the other one as well. Even something as simple and as necessary as breathing was bringing an uncomfortable awareness of their heightened sensitivity. Her sex itself felt hot and swollen, pressing against the barrier of her briefs, its dampness shamefully evident to her. She couldn’t understand what had happened to her—how she could have gone from bitter anger to intense desire in the space
of a handful of seconds just because Vidal had touched her. How
could
she feel like this?

Fliss focused on Vidal’s disappearing back as he returned to the house. She wasn’t going to allow herself to trail in his wake, following him like an adoring puppy, like the girl she had been at sixteen. And besides, the reality was that she didn’t feel up to facing anyone else at the moment. Right now she preferred the privacy of the rose-covered arbour and its wrought-iron bench, where she could sit down and recover her composure.

It was a good ten minutes before she felt able to start walking back to the house. Ten minutes was surely long enough to ensure that Vidal was nowhere in sight, even if it hadn’t been long enough for her heart to entirely resume its regular heartbeat. She was beginning to feel very afraid that that was never going to happen, and that she would be cursed for ever to bear the scars of the pain he had caused her.

Engrossed in her own thoughts, Fliss had all but forgotten Vidal’s mother until she reached the patio area and saw that the Duchess was still seated there. It was too late for her to retreat. The Duchess had seen her and was smiling at her, and besides …

Taking a deep breath, Fliss bravely stepped up to her, apologising with genuine remorse. ‘I’m sorry if my comments upset or offended you. That wasn’t my intention.’

An elegant long-fingered hand—a feminine version of her son’s, surely?—clasped Fliss’s arm gently.

‘I suspect that I am the one who owes you an apology, Felicity. My son tends to be rather more protective of
me than is always necessary. It comes in part because of the man he is, and from being head of such a traditional family, but also I think it comes because he was thrust into the role of head of the family at too young an age.’ A shadow of remembered sadness touched her expression as she explained, ‘My husband died when Vidal was seven.’

Fliss caught her breath in shock, unable to stop herself from creating inside her head an image of a seven-year-old boy learning that he had lost his father. Sympathy for Vidal? She must not weaken herself by going down
that
route!

‘Then when Vidal was sixteen his grandmother died—which meant that he had to take on the responsibilities of his inheritance.’ She paused to say quietly, ‘I’m sorry. I’m boring you, I expect.’

Fliss shook her head. She might be trying to tell herself that she wasn’t interested in hearing Vidal’s loving mother’s stories of her son’s youth, but the truth was that in reality a part of her wanted her to beg the Duchess to tell her more. It was disturbingly easy for her to picture Vidal at sixteen—tall, dark-haired, still a boy, but already showing the physical signs of the man he would become.

A small charge of sensation touched her skin; Vidal’s touch, like Vidal’s mouth against her flesh, had burned away barriers she had thought set in concrete—values and judgements.

Somehow she managed to drag her attention back to Vidal’s mother, who was still speaking, telling her
gently, ‘Vidal was very attached to your mother, you know. He thought a great deal of her.’

Fliss managed to nod her head, although she couldn’t trust herself to say anything.

Her mother hadn’t really talked much about Vidal’s mother—other than to say that she hadn’t been Vidal’s grandmother’s first choice of a bride for her son, and that it was the Duchess who had insisted on Vidal having a more rounded and diverse upbringing than his paternal grandmother had wanted.

Unwittingly confirming what Fliss’s mother had told her, the Duchess continued, ‘My mother-in-law did not approve one little bit when I persuaded my late husband to hire a young woman to help Vidal improve his English. She thought it very unsuitable, and would have preferred a male tutor, but I felt that my little boy already had enough male influence over his life.’

Such a fond and loving warmth infused the Duchess’s face that Fliss knew she was mentally picturing the child that Vidal had been. Fliss could picture that child too. Her mother had taken a good many photographs whilst she had been in Spain, and Fliss had grown up knowing who the dark-haired boy featured in some of them was. She had one of them with her now, in her handbag, taken at the Alhambra. It showed her mother and her father with a much younger Vidal, smiling into the camera through a curtain of water from a fountain. In it her mother had her arm round Vidal’s shoulders—a protective, caring arm, as though, young as she herself had been, she was very aware of her responsibility towards the boy she was holding.

‘Vidal’s grandmother was a very strict disciplinarian who did not approve of what she thought of as my indulgence of Vidal.’ The Duchess paused. ‘Your mother suffered greatly at the hands of our family. Poor Felipe was such a quiet, gentle person. He hated upsets of any kind, and was very much in thrall to his adoptive grandmother. Understandably so. She had brought him up, following the death of his mother, according to her own strict regime and what she thought his mother would have wanted for him. He hadn’t inherited any money from his parents and so was financially dependent on my mother-in-law. Felipe pleaded with her to be allowed to do the honourable thing and marry your mother, but she flatly refused to allow it. She wouldn’t even agree to advance enough money to him to enable him to make financial provision for the two of you. She could be very unforgiving. In her eyes both Felipe and your mother had broken the rules, and deserved to be punished for doing so. Felipe had no money of his own, no home to offer your mother, no means of earning a living. His job within the family was that of managing the family orchards.’

‘And his grandmother wanted him to marry someone else,’ Fliss pointed out.

‘She did,’ the Duchess agreed. ‘My mother-in-law could be very harsh at times—cruelly harsh, I’m afraid. I confess that I could never warm to her, nor her to me. But Vidal’s father, like Vidal himself, was a very strong and moral man. He was in South America on business when his mother found out about the relationship. It is my belief that had he been here he would have done his
best to see to it that matters were handled differently. As it was, he never returned. His plane crashed and everyone on board was killed.’

Fliss drew in a sharp breath, unable to stop herself from sympathizing. ‘How dreadful.’

‘Yes, it was, for all of us, but especially for Vidal. He had to grow up very quickly after that.’

Quickly, and into a man who was as harsh and unforgiving as the grandmother who had no doubt taken a hand in his upbringing, Fliss thought bitterly.

It was hard for a child to grow up with the death of one of its parents, but even harder for one parent to be alive and a child be denied contact. She could remember her mother answering her own naive childhood questions as to why her parents were not together and married.

‘Your father’s family would never have allowed us to marry, Fliss. Someone like me could never be good enough for him. You see, darling, men like your father, from important aristocratic families, have to marry girls of their own sort.’

‘You mean like princes marrying princesses?’ Fliss remembered asking.

‘Exactly like that,’ her mother had agreed.

‘I had no idea that things had gone as far as they had when Annabel was sent away,’ the Duchess was saying now, looking rather grim.

‘I was conceived by accident on the night she and Felipe parted. Neither of them had intended … My mother said my father had always behaved like a perfect gentlemen, but the news that she was being sent away led
things to get out of control.’ Fliss immediately defended her mother, feeling that she was being criticised. ‘My mother didn’t even realise at first that she was pregnant. Then when she did her parents insisted that she write to my father to tell him.’

She wasn’t going to have the Duchess thinking badly of her mother, who had, after all, been an innocent and naive young girl of eighteen, desperately in love and heartbroken at the thought of being parted from the man she loved.

‘That was when my mother received a letter back saying that she had no proof that I was Felipe’s child, and that legal action would be taken against her if she ever tried to contact Felipe again.’

The Duchess sighed and shook her head. ‘My mother-in-law insisted. In her eyes, even if your mother had previously been acceptable to her as a wife for Felipe, the fact that she had allowed him such intimacies …’ The Duchess gave a small shrug ‘In families such as ours there is something of the long-ago traditions of the Moors with regard to the women of the family and the sanctity of their purity. In Vidal’s grandmother’s day girls of good family never so much as left the family home without the escort of a
duenna
to guard their modesty. That is all changed now, but I’m afraid a little of what has been passed down in the blood lingers. There is a certain convention, a certain fastidiousness, a certain requirement within the family that its female members abide by a moral code and that—’

‘That brides are virgins?’ Fliss suggested.

The Duchess looked at her. ‘I would put it more that
the men of the family are very protective of the virtue of their women. It has always been my belief that had Vidal’s father returned safely to us here in Granada he would have insisted that your mother’s innocence was honoured and your position within our family recognised. You are, after all, a member of this family, Felicity.’

The sight of the young maid coming out to ask if they wanted fresh coffee had Fliss shaking her head and excusing herself. It had been a long day. And tomorrow would be an even longer one now that she had insisted she wanted to see the house that had been her father’s home, which he had now left her. A day in which she would be spending time in the company of the one man her instinct for self-preservation told her she should be spending as little time with as possible.

‘F
ELICITY,
I
KNOW
that Vidal plans to leave immediately after breakfast tomorrow morning for the estate, so I won’t keep you up any longer.’

The Duchess and Fliss were drinking their afterdinner coffee, sitting at a table on the vine-covered veranda outside the dining room.

Fliss had been very relieved indeed to discover that Vidal would not be joining them for dinner, as he already had an engagement with some friends.

It was true that she was feeling tired—drained, in fact, by the tension of the day—so she thanked the Duchess for her kind consideration and stood up, agreeing that she
was
ready for bed.

Having suspected that even though there would only be the two of them for dinner the Duchess would dress formally, Fliss was wearing her black dress, thankful that she had packed it. The jersey dress was an old favourite, and it looked good on her, she knew. She had bought it in a sale, and even then had baulked a little at the price, but the matt black fabric was cleverly cut and draped, and Fliss had quietened her conscience by
saying that the dress was an investment piece that would earn its keep in terms of cost per wear.

She had washed and dried her hair before dinner, noticing that the sun had already lightened some of its strands.

It was not quite midnight—early, she knew, for the Spanish—but she had to smother a yawn as she made her way back to the main hallway and the stairs, through a succession of rooms all with imposing double doors that opened one into the other in the classical fashion, each one of them filled with heavy and no doubt extremely valuable antiques.

Upstairs in her bedroom Fliss noticed appreciatively that the bed had been turned down invitingly for her, and that it had been made up with fresh sheets at some stage. It would be pure luxury to sleep in such beautiful sheets—Egyptian cotton, with an obviously high thread count, and smelling ever so faintly of lavender.

Her mother had always loved good-quality bedlinen. Had she developed that appreciation of it whilst she was in Spain?

Fliss sighed as she removed her dress.

Tomorrow she would see her father’s house—his home—the home he had left to her, finally acknowledging her. Under the safe privacy of the shower she let her eyes fill with emotional tears. She would have willingly traded a hundred houses for a few precious weeks with her father and really getting to know him, she admitted stepping out of the shower and reaching for a towel, drying her damp body.

Wrapping a fresh towel round herself, she went into
the bedroom to remove her sleep shorts and top from the drawer where she had placed them, hesitating when she looked towards the bed and imagined the cool smoothness of the luxurious sheets against her bare skin. Such a sensual pleasure—a small, private self-indulgence.

Smiling to herself, Fliss removed the towel and slid between the waiting sheets, breathing in blissfully as she did so. Their touch against her skin was even more heavenly than she had imagined, subtly easing the tension of the day from her body. She would sleep well tonight, and that sleep would equip her to face tomorrow—and Vidal.

Tiredly, Fliss switched off the bedroom lights.

In the silent garden below Fliss’s closed bedroom windows, with only the stars to see him, Vidal frowned up at those windows. Right now, instead of standing here, dwelling with irritation on Fliss’s behaviour and her insistence on seeing her father’s house for herself, he should have been enjoying the charms of the elegant Italian divorcée who had obviously been invited to his friends’ dinner party as a dining partner for him. She had made her enjoyment of his company plain enough, discreetly suggesting that they conclude the evening
à deux
at her hotel. She’d been dark-haired, very attractive, and a good conversationalist. There would have been a time when he would have had no hesitation in accepting her offer, but tonight …

But tonight what? Why was he here, his mind filled with the irritation that Fliss was causing him, instead of in bed with Mariella? The reality was that, much as
he’d enjoyed the company of his old friends, excellent though the meal had been, he had found his thoughts preoccupied with Fliss. Because of the problems she was causing him—that was why. There was no other reason. Was there?

His body was already reminding him of that unwanted ache of angry and unexpected desire she had aroused in it. He could still smell the scent of her body, still remember the taste of her. The taste and the feel.

Determinedly he suppressed the unwanted clamour of his senses. What he had felt was a momentary lapse, he assured himself, caused by his body’s memory of a girl it had once desired. Nothing more than that. It was an aberration which was best ignored instead of focused on and thus allowed to grow beyond its real importance. It meant nothing. It was his problem and his misfortune—a misfortune that could never be revealed to anyone else—if he had come to realise there was a flaw in his nature that cleaved to an idealistic belief in a once-in-a-lifetime love, a flame that no other love could match.

In his case that flame had had to be extinguished.

Vidal knew himself. He knew that for him the woman he loved must be a woman he could trust absolutely to be loyal to their love in every single way. Felicity could never be that woman. Her own history had already proved that.

The woman he
loved?
Just because as a young man he had been foolish enough to look at a sixteen-year-old girl and create inside himself a private image of that girl as a woman it did not mean anything other than that he
had been a fool. The innocence he had thought he had seen in Felicity—the innocence he had fought against his desire for her to protect—had been as non-existent as the woman created by his imagination. That was what he needed to remember—not the feelings she had aroused in him. There was no point in looking backwards to what might have been. The present and his future were what they were.

Grimly Vidal turned away from the window to walk back into the house.

‘How long does it take to get to the
castillo?’

Fliss’s question was delivered through firmly controlled lips as she stared straight ahead through the windscreen of an imposingly luxurious limousine. She was seated in the passenger seat whilst Vidal pulled away from the family townhouse and into the busy morning traffic.

‘About forty minutes—maybe fifty, depending on the traffic.’

Vidal’s response was equally terse, his attention outwardly focused on the road ahead of him. Although inwardly he was far more aware of Fliss’s presence in the car next to him than he liked to admit.

She was wearing a light-coloured summer dress, and as she had walked out to the car ahead of him he had seen how the sunlight striking through it revealed the long slender length of her legs and the curve of her breasts. Now, despite the leather smell of the car’s upholstery, he could still smell the fresh scent of Fliss’s skin—clean and yet subtly, erotically female—its delicacy
causing within him an automatic need to move closer to her and so catch the scent properly.

Inside his head an image formed of Fliss’s body pressed close to his in paganly sensual offering. Cursing inwardly, Vidal fought to suppress his own body’s sexual reaction to that image, dropping his hand from the steering wheel and driving one-handed so that his arm could shield the physical evidence of his arousal from Fliss. He was thankful that she was staring ahead and not looking at him. The reality of seeing her now, as the woman she was and not the girl who had refused to leave his memory, should surely have diminished that desire—not increased it.

The silence between them was dangerous, Vidal acknowledged. It was allowing thoughts to flourish that he did not want to have. Better to silence them with mundane conversation than to give them free rein.

Keeping his voice neutral and distant, he told Fliss, ‘In addition to showing you your father’s house, I have some estate business to attend to before we return to Granada.’

Fliss nodded her head and then, unable to hold back the question, she asked him quickly, ‘Did … did my mother ever visit my father’s house?’

‘Alone, you mean? To spend time in private with your father?’

Fliss could hear what sounded like disapproval in Vidal’s voice. The same disapproval no doubt felt by his grandmother.

‘They were in love,’ she pointed out, immediately
defensive of any criticism of her parents. ‘It would only be natural if my father—’

‘Had taken your mother to his house with the intention of bedding her, without any thought for her reputation?’ Vidal shook his head. ‘Felipe would never have done that. But then I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that
you
should think of it, given your own behaviour and sexual history.’

Fliss sucked in her breath, her lungs cramping tensely before she exhaled, furious shaky. ‘You know nothing of the reality of either of those things.’

Vidal turned to look at her, disbelief hardening his expression. ‘Are you seriously expecting me to listen to this? I know what I saw.’

‘I was sixteen, and—’

‘And a leopard doesn’t change its spots.’

‘No, it doesn’t,’ Fliss agreed furiously. ‘You’re the living proof of that.’

‘Meaning what, exactly?’ Vidal challenged.

‘Meaning that I knew then what you thought of me, and why you judged me the way you did, and I know you still feel the same way now,’ Fliss told him.

Vidal’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. She had
known
how he had felt about her, despite all he had done to try and keep his feelings hidden from her—for her sake, not for his own? But of course she had, Vidal taunted himself. He had assessed her maturity and her readiness to know of his desire for her on her age, mistakenly believing her to be an innocent.

‘Well, in that case,’ he assured her curtly, ‘no matter what you know, let me assure you that I do not intend to
allow those feelings to affect my duty and my responsibility to carry out my late uncle’s wishes with regard to your inheritance.’

‘Good,’ was the only response Fliss felt able to muster.

So it was true. She had been right. He had disliked her all those years ago and he still did now. She had already known that, so why did his confirmation of it make her feel so … so hurt and abandoned?

She had known how he felt about her when she came here. Or had she secretly been hoping for a miracle to happen? Had she been hoping for some kind of fairytale magic to wipe away the anguish she carried inside her? Leaving her free to … To what? To find a man with whom she could truly and completely be a woman, free to enjoy her sexuality without the stain of shame? Why did she need Vidal’s belief in her innocence to do that? She knew the truth, after all, and that should be enough. Should be. But it wasn’t, was it? There was something within her that could only be healed by. By what? By the touch of Vidal’s hand against that sore place in reparation and acceptance of her as she really was?

It was her father she had come here to seek—not Vidal’s acceptance of his misjudgement of her.

She had travelled a long way from the idealistic girl who had looked at Vidal and completely lost her heart. She knew that he was not the heroic figure she had created inside her head from her own adoration of him. He had shown her that himself when he had so misjudged her. There was no reason at all for her senses to be so aware of him now, for merely being here
with him to make her ache with a dangerous resurgence of her teenage longing. But that was exactly what was happening.

Try as she might, she couldn’t resist turning her head to look at him, imprinting his image on her senses.

The open neck of the shirt he was wearing revealed the straight line of his collarbone and the golden sleekness of his throat. If she looked properly at him no doubt she would be able to see where beneath his shirt his body hair lay. She could remember the pattern of it from that time she had walked into the bathroom.

Stop it,
Fliss exhorted herself desperately. The anxiety she was causing herself was raising tiny beads of sweat along her hairline, whilst her pulse and her heartbeat had started to thud nervously, as though in fear. She
was
afraid, she admitted. She was afraid of her own imagination and of the wilful power of the deep-rooted core of sensuality within her. It seemed to have grown out of nowhere, and previously she would have strenuously denied that she even possessed it.

Perhaps it was being here in her father’s country that was unleashing previously hidden aspects of her makeup and bringing to life unfamiliar passions. It was much easier to cling to that thought than to allow herself to fear that it was Vidal himself who was responsible for this unwanted and dangerous flowering of such a deeply sensual side of her nature. Just as he had been when she was sixteen.

Vidal checked his rearview mirror—not because he needed to do so, but because it would prevent him from glancing sideways at Fliss. Not that he needed to look at
her to see her. Inside his head he had a perfectly visible image of her—although this image was one that, in defiance of his wishes, showed her eyes cloudy with arousal and her lips softly parted from his kiss. Such thoughts were not acceptable to him. And such desires …?

Grimly Vidal pressed his foot down on the car’s accelerator. They were free of the city now, and the powerful car leapt forward.

As a pre-teenager, curious about her father and his homeland, but knowing that her mother found it painful to talk about him, Fliss had spent many hours in bookshops and the library, studying maps, descriptions and photographs of Granada and the Lecrin Valley. Later at university she had gone online to learn more, but no amount of that kind of exploration could come anywhere near the reality of the countryside they were now in.

She knew, of course, that the Lecrin Valley formed part of the natural Parque de Sierra Nevada, and that after the expulsion of the Moors from the area it had been left virtually untouched for many centuries, so that the countryside was dotted with a wealth of Moorish monuments, flour mills, and ancient castles in addition to the whitewashed Pablo villages that had once been home to the Moor population.