A Stormy Spanish Summer (10 page)

It was that age-old instinct and drive that belonged
to man’s most potent needs that was compelling him now to smooth his hand over the quivering of Fliss’s taut stomach and then to cup her hip as he pulled her into his own body so that her flesh could feel and know the desire it had aroused in his. On the wall, their conjoined shadows revealed the intimacy of their embrace, detailing the arch of Fliss’s back as he bent her back over his arm, the aroused thrust of her nipple exposed to the lamplight, the meeting and joining of their lower bodies making them one.

Fliss was completely lost. The hard pulse of Vidal’s erection felt against her bare flesh through his clothes filled her with a wanton, compulsive desire to feel his naked flesh against her own—to be able to reach out and touch him, to know him and to feel his life force.

She made no attempt to resist when Vidal picked her up and carried her over to the bed, placing her down on it. His gaze absorbed every detail of her naked body, lingering on her flesh as though he could not tear it away. A sensuality Fliss had not known she possessed caused her to move her body languidly beneath that gaze, a thrill of sweetly savage female pleasure speeding through her when she heard the stifled sound Vidal made before he joined her on the bed, holding her, shaping her, taking her mouth in an erotic kiss and keeping possession of it and her whilst he caressed her body.

The touch of his fingertips against her stomach sent jolting waves of dangerously intense delight surging through her—a delight fused with a female need to feel his touch against her even more intimately. Her body tensed, her breath locking in her lungs when Vidal’s
hand moved lower, covering her sex, infusing it with a heat that had her out-of-control desire for him flowering moistly in the sensitive flesh protected by the folded lips that she could feel swelling and opening beneath his hand.

Another minute—less than that, a mere handful of seconds—and he would discover her wet eagerness for his possession. And she
was
eager for it. She yearned for it, ached for it, hungered for it. In her imagination she could already feel his thrust within her, and her body was pulsing frantically under the stimulation of what she was thinking. She wanted him so much, so completely, so overwhelmingly, her desire for him was storming through her.

Vidal’s own breathing was harsh and unsteady, his mouth against her skin passionately demanding. The brief grate of his teeth against her swollen nipple as he drew on it caused her body to convulse on the raw pleasure of that fierce caress. She wanted him so completely and totally that nothing else mattered.

Vidal slowly released Fliss’s nipple, and then raised his head to look at her. In her eyes was all that Vidal needed to see to know that she wanted him. The look there matched the aroused anticipation of her naked body.

‘Take off your clothes,’ she told him huskily. ‘I want to see all of you. I want to feel your skin against mine, your body against mine with nothing between us. I want you inside me, possessing me as a man should possess a woman. I want
you,
Vidal.’

Fliss listened to her own words, her own demands,
with a vague sense of shock—as though they had somehow come from someone else. But Vidal didn’t seem to be shocked or even surprised by them. Instead he was doing what she had asked, his gaze never leaving her face, almost pinning her to the bed as he stripped off his clothes whilst his movements allowed the light to play greedily over the stunning reality of his male flesh.

Almost wonderingly Fliss reached up to trace the line of dark body hair that bisected his torso, only stopping when he trapped her hand flat against his belly as she reached his belly button. Without a word Fliss sat up, and proceeded to retrace the path taken by her fingertips with a line of soft kisses which gradually became more intense as her own desire gripped her.

Now both her hand and her head were held immobile in Vidal’s grip, their quest short-circuited, their goal denied.

Above her downbent head she could hear Vidal talking to her, his voice strained and muffled. ‘I can’t let you go on. Not now—not whilst my body craves the intimacy of yours so badly.’

‘Yessss!’
Fliss answered him fiercely. ‘Yes, Vidal.’

When he released her and moved back from her, getting off the bed and reaching for the trousers he had discarded, Fliss started to reach out to him frantically, to protest—and then she stopped, her eyes widening when he removed his wallet and opened it.

It was just as well that he had taken measures to prepare himself should he have ended up in bed with Mariella, Vidal acknowledged grimly as he removed the protective sheath from its wrapper.

The interruption to their intimacy had given Fliss time to recognise what was happening—what she was doing. Away from the heat of the desire Vidal’s caresses had aroused in her something about the brisk expediency of his preparations had broken the spell she had been under. The reality of what was happening was now in stark contrast to the fantasy she had been creating. This surely was the time to stop, to be practical and truthful and tell Vidal the truth. But how?

She took a deep breath, and her voice was unsteady as she told him huskily, ‘There’s no need for you to … to do that, because …’

Because I’m a virgin,
she had intended to continue. But before she could do so Vidal interrupted.

‘I might not be able to control the desire you arouse in me, Felicity,’ he told her harshly. ‘But I am not such a fool as to take the kind of risks with my sexual health that intimacy with you would involve without this protection. You may be the sort of woman who boasts that her pleasure is increased by the danger of unprotected intercourse, but I am not a man who wants to put either my own or my future sexual partners’ health at risk by going down that road. Of course if you’d prefer not to go any further …’

A horrible feeling of sickening shame was filling her, and for a minute Fliss was tempted to tell him to leave. But then the anger she had felt earlier surged up inside her again, and with it her need for justice.

Her chin lifted, and her lashes were shielding her eyes from Vidal’s scrutiny as she shrugged and said in what she hoped was a suitably deceptive breathy voice. ‘Not
go any further now, when you’ve … when I want you so much, Vidal?’

Had he been hoping that she would end it? That she would have the strength of will that he knew he did not? Vidal asked himself grimly, as his body reacted immediately and openly to her deliberate sensuality.

He could see the swollen pink softness of her mouth, her lips half parted, and her eyes were almost closed, as though she was already swooning with the pressure of her desire.

Anger and shame, Vidal felt them both—against himself and against Felicity as well. But they weren’t strong enough to hold back the need that was driving him, taking him beyond logic and reason to a place where all that existed was his longing for this one woman.

He thrust into her slowly, needing to absorb every second of something so long denied, already knowing in that place deep within himself he had fought so hard to ignore that their bodies would match perfectly, and that hers would take and hold his in exactly the same unique way in which she already held his emotions in thrall.

He shouldn’t be feeling like this. He knew what she was, after all, but it was as though something within him didn’t want to recognise that reality—as though some weakness in himself refused to believe that reality and instead wanted what was happening between them to belong to them alone. His body registered and responded to what he was feeling. What he wanted. What he needed.

His earlier driven anger gave way to a longing to
shed the past and take them both to a place where they could start anew, with this burning ache of mutual need and desire untouched by what had gone before. He was losing sight of what was real, Vidal warned himself. The certainty of the contempt and anger that had informed his beliefs for so long, was fracturing under the pressure of what physical intimacy with Felicity was doing to him. Deep within himself Vidal could feel the growing ache of a yearning that he couldn’t banish for things to be different, for
them
to be different, so that what was happening between them could be born of.

Had he forgotten the past? Did the past really matter? Wasn’t it more important that she was here now in his arms, with him in the way that he had so longed for her to be? Where was his pride? Was he really admitting to himself that he loved her?

Vidal didn’t know. He only knew that holding her like this now was sweeping away the barriers he had put up against her. His pride might say that he must not love her, but what about his heart? Denial, anger, longing, loss. Vidal felt them all—a torment of if onlys that overwhelmed him with a passionately regretful longing.

Somehow, instinctively, Fliss sensed the change within Vidal, and before she could resist it her own body was responding to it, welcoming it, wanting it, wanting
him
as the grimness of her earlier determination gave way to something far more elemental and irresistible. She wanted Vidal to feed that feeling, to caress and entice this quivering of a new and intense desire filling her. It was so much stronger than the anger-driven
determination she had previously felt, Fliss thought shakily.

She was wholly unable to stop the sounds of her pleasure bubbling in her throat as her flesh responded to the building rhythmic thrust of Vidal’s body within her own with increasing pleasure. That pleasure gripped her and flooded her, holding her captive, demanding her submission, making her forget why it was that their intimacy was happening.

Lost in the bitter sweetness of what might have been, Vidal tensed with disbelief when he felt the barrier within Fliss. His brain couldn’t ignore the message being sent to it. In the space between one breath and the next, one thrust and the next, a confusion of thoughts exploded through his head. He looked down at Felicity, whose reactions were slower. Her flesh, softened and aching with desire, was reluctant to give up its pleasure. Resistance to the thought of being denied seized her as she realised that Vidal had stopped the delicious movement that had been giving her so much delight. In his expression she could see shock and the prospect of withdrawal. A withdrawal her body did not want.

‘No.’

Her charged denial could have meant anything, but Fliss knew that Vidal understood it meant everything. She clung to him, urging him to complete the sensual possession he had begun, her gaze on his willing him to give her what she ached for so badly.

What was happening to her? Where was the anger she should be feeling? How had Vidal managed to steal it away from her and replace it with this aching sweetness
and this longing for Vidal that now possessed her? Fliss didn’t know. She wasn’t capable of logical reasoned argument any more. Her feelings were too strong for that. She only knew that everything she had always wanted was here, with Vidal.

Vidal.
His name and her own longing ached silently within her, her body, her flesh, clinging to his in a mute plea.

Vidal felt the quiver within Fliss that held him to her. He should end this now. There were questions that needed to be asked. Old history must be rewritten. But they were here in this moment, in this place he had wanted to take her for what felt like a lifetime. And she wanted him.

Reality had no place here. This was a place of broken dreams that could be mended, shattered hopes restored and old pain banished.

His body made its own decision, and its possessive movement within her caused Felicity to make a soft purring sound deep in her throat. The way she was looking at him now was the way she had looked at him at sixteen, in her innocent longing. Only now her gaze was the gaze of a woman—her desire the desire of a woman. He had ached for her for so long.
Loved
her for so long.
No!
But it was too late for him to make that denial. His body wasn’t listening. It was gripped by a tide it was impossible to stem.

He moved within her, carefully but surely, silencing the small sound she made as her flesh tightened in what began as pain only to be transformed into pleasure, until her body was free to respond to his possession as
it wanted to. As it had been created to do, Fliss thought hectically as the world and reality began to lose focus, and there was only Vidal to cling to between waves of pleasure spiked with a need that grew with each one.

Finally the need that drove her reached its culmination in a burst of pleasure so intense that she could hardly bear it, crying out to Vidal in a tangle of words mingled with tears of release as he held her and let his own body take its pleasure in the final dying spasms of hers.

V
IDAL
looked into the darkness, probing it, trying to find a way through it. The bedroom was warmly lit and everything was clear. Some things were painfully clear, etched in sharp detail inside his heart for ever. The darkness he needed to probe lay within himself, within his gross negligence in not knowing. In not having known. It broke his pride, and worse than that—after all, what right did he have to pride now? Instead he was filled not just with his own pain but far more importantly with Felicity’s.

The shattering of his delusion showed him how unworthy of her the love he had fought so hard against admitting actually was. Somehow he should have
known.
He would never forgive himself for that failing, and he suspected neither would Felicity.

‘Am I right in thinking that the … intimacy we have just shared was at least on your part aroused by a need to punish me? To prove to me that I was wrong about you?’

‘I haven’t spent the last seven years plotting to be seduced by you, if that’s what you mean,’ Fliss parried.

They were still in bed together and, much as she
would have liked to get up and protect herself by getting dressed again, she suspected that if she did Vidal would know immediately she was doing so because she felt vulnerable.

Vulnerable because her body felt almost giddily euphoric and delighted with itself, delighted with Vidal, and all too ready to explore the possibility of experiencing a repeat of the pleasure he had just given her. It was as though in place of her virginity Vidal had given her flesh a need that it believed only
he
could satisfy. And if that was true.

But, no—she must not start thinking like that. She must remember instead how she had felt before that pleasure. She must remember why it had been so important to her that Vidal confronted the reality of her virginity.

Vidal pressed her before she could say anything else. ‘No more games, Felicity.’ His voice was controlled and empty of emotion. ‘You urged me to take your virginity not to pleasure me or even yourself but to punish me. Not as an act of intimacy, but as an act of retribution.’

Since his voice was so expressionless it was surely strange that she should feel as though he was holding within him a great weight of some hidden emotion. He was just trying to make her feel she was in the wrong, Fliss told herself. And he was doing it because he didn’t want to admit that
he
was the one who had been wrong.

‘You misjudged me and you kept on misjudging me,’ she reminded him. ‘You kept on throwing my supposed past in my face. I didn’t deliberately set out to plan what
happened, if that’s what you think, but when the opportunity presented itself, yes—I did want it to happen.’

‘You could have stopped when you recognised I had realised that you were a virgin.’

A quiver of apprehension flickered down her spine. Had he guessed that she had ended up wanting him so much that the original purpose of what she was doing had ceased to matter? That way lay fresh humiliation for her. She was twenty-three now, not sixteen, and the very idea of having secretly longed for him for all those years was not one she was prepared to entertain.

‘Maybe I felt that if I did there would always be a question over the … the factual evidence, and that you might choose afterwards to believe that you had imagined my virginity.’

‘Maybe?’

Fliss gave a small nervy shrug. ‘What was the point in leaving things there? You’ve always disliked me, Vidal,’ she continued before he could answer her. ‘We both know that. I wanted to make sure that we both knew the truth.’

‘So you remained a virgin on the off chance that the opportunity might arise for you to confront me with that truth?’

He was mocking her. Fliss was sure of it. She could feel her self-control slipping away from her.

‘Have you any idea what it’s like to be branded as you branded me? Not just by your words and your beliefs about me, but … but by the way in which they impacted on the way I felt about myself. I’m twenty-three. How do you think I felt about the thought of having to explain
to a man I might fall in love with that I haven’t had sex. He’d think I was a freak.’

‘So it’s my fault, is it, that you were still a virgin?’

‘Yes. No. Look, I don’t see the point in us discussing this. I just want to draw a line under it and move on. Like I’ve said, I know that you’ve never liked me, or the fact that I exist. You proved that when you wouldn’t let me write to my father.’

‘You wanted me.’

The words slipped so adroitly under her guard caused Fliss to exhale shakily in shock.

‘No. I wanted justice.’

‘You were aroused by me—by my touch, my possession.’

‘No. I was aroused by the knowledge that you would be forced to admit you were wrong. Strong emotions can do that. After all, you don’t even like me. But you. you.’

‘Made love to you? Aroused you? Possessed you?’

He was too quick, his logic too sharp for her to combat right now, when all she could do was think about the delight of the pleasure he had given her. And long for a repeat of that pleasure? Desperately, Fliss struggled to find a way in which she could be as practical and unaffected by what had happened as Vidal obviously was. But the truth was that there wasn’t one. The truth was that if he turned to her now and took her back in his arms … if he touched her as he had done before …

‘I don’t want to talk about it. I just want you to go.’ No, she didn’t. She wanted him to stay. She wanted him
to stay and hold her and—and what? Love her? She wasn’t sixteen any more, Fliss reminded herself.

Vidal closed his eyes. Why was he doing this? What was he hoping for? To force her to say she loved him in the same way that he had been forced to accept his misjudgement of her? Was that really the kind of man he was? A man whose pride demanded that she love him simply because he loved her? There was a sour taste in Vidal’s mouth, a heavy weight on his heart. Hadn’t he already damaged her enough?

Fliss heard Vidal exhale. Not in a sigh of regret, of course. That was impossible. She didn’t trust herself to turn round and look at him when she felt him move away from her to leave the bed. She didn’t watch him either as he dressed and thankfully, finally, left the room.

Her earlier euphoria had left her now. She felt drained and empty, hollowed out emotionally apart from the forlorn ache deep inside her heart. What she wanted more than anything else was to be held in Vidal’s arms, to know that what they had shared was special. Was she really so much of a fool? Was that really what she had expected? That like in some fairy story her kiss would instantly transform everything and cause Vidal to fall passionately in love with her?

Passionately in love with her? That wasn’t what she wanted at all. Was it?

Wasn’t there hidden away inside her the kernel of her sixteen-year-old self, with all the dreams and romantic illusions—delusions—she had then possessed? And wasn’t the truth that the intimacy they had shared had
left her in great danger of that kernel splitting open, so that the seed inside it could grow into new life?

Fliss buried her face in her hands, her whole body shaking as she tried to tell herself that it was all right; she was safe and she did
not
love Vidal.

In his own room Vidal stood motionless and silent. He should really take a shower, but Felicity’s scent still clung to his skin, and since that was all he would ever know of her now, apart from what was captured within his memory and his senses, he might as well indulge himself and cling to it for as long as he could. Like an adolescent overwhelmed by his first real love.

Or a man knowing his only love.

He couldn’t hide from the truth any longer. He had never stopped loving Felicity.

This was the place to which his jealousy and passion had brought him. This barren place of self-loathing and regret—a true desert of the heart in which he would be for ever tormented by the mirage of what might have been. It gave him no comfort or satisfaction to know that Fliss had wanted him, or that her desire—the desire
he
had aroused in her—had ultimately overtaken whatever ideas of retribution and punishment she might claim, had kept her in his arms. He knew enough about the power of true desire to recognise it—in himself and in her. He could, had he had the stomach for it, have forced her to admit her desire for him—but what satisfaction would that have given him?

He had done her a terrible wrong in misjudging her, and there were no excuses he could plead in mitigation
of that wrong, no way back to change it. He would have to live with that for the rest of his life. A second intolerable burden to add to the one he already carried, had carried for the past seven years. The burden of loving her without reason or logic and so completely that there could never ever be room in his life for another woman. There. He had admitted it now. He had loved her then and he still loved her now—had never stopped loving her, in fact, and never would.

It was the burden that Felicity herself carried, though, that weighed most heavily on his conscience and on his heart. Out of his pride and jealousy had come the belief that by guarding her innocence until she was mature enough to receive his courtship he could eventually win the heart of the girl with whom he had fallen in love. As that young man, that arrogant and selfish man, he had not been able to bear the thought of another man taking what he had wanted and denied himself. He had been furious with Felicity for choosing another man above him, and he had misjudged and punished her for that.