A Stormy Spanish Summer (9 page)

Vidal had ended his call.

‘We have to get back to the
castillo,’
he told her. ‘Ramón has arranged for me to see the water engineer. A decision needs to be made with regard to the problem with our water supply. We can come back here in the morning if you wish to see upstairs.’

His voice suggested that he couldn’t understand why she should want to, but Fliss had a more pressing question she wanted to ask.

‘Did my father know about my mother’s death?’

She could see the way Vidal’s chest lifted as he breathed in.

‘Yes, he did know,’ he told her.

‘How do you know he knew?’

She didn’t need to see the way Vidal’s mouth compressed or to hear his irritably exhaled breath to know that she was testing his patience. But she didn’t care.

‘I know because I was the one who had to break the news to him.’

‘And he …
no one
thought that I might have needed to hear from him, my only living relative, my father …?’

All the pain she had felt at losing her mother at eighteen came rushing back over her.

‘It was you—you who kept us apart,’ she accused Vidal.

The look in Vidal’s eyes silenced her, choking the breath from her lungs.

‘Your father’s health suffered a great deal when he was parted from your mother. His doctor felt that it was best that he lived a quiet life, without any kind of emotional pressure. For that reason, in my judgement—’

‘In
your
judgement? Who were
you
to make judgements and decisions that involved me?’ Fliss demanded bitterly.

‘I was and am the head of this family. It is my duty to do what I think right for that family.’

‘And preventing me from seeing my father, from knowing him, was what you thought “right”, was it?’

‘My family is also your family. When I make decisions concerning it I make them with due regard to all those who are part of it. Now, if you can manage to cease indulging in this welter of infantile emotionalism, I would like to get back to the
castillo.’

‘To see the engineer—because watering your crops is more important than considering the harm you have done and owning up to it.’ Fliss gave a bitter laugh. ‘Of course I should have realised that you are far too arrogant and cold-hearted to ever
think
of doing anything like that.’

Without waiting for him to reply, she headed for the door.

Fliss looked down at the food on her plate with a heavy heart, her hand going to her throat, where her mother’s chain should have been. She could still feel the cold shaft of dismay she had felt when she had looked in her bedroom mirror and realised that it wasn’t there.

At first she’d hoped that it had simply come loose and slipped down inside her top, but when several careful searches of the clothes she had removed and then the entire bedroom floor had not revealed the precious memento of her mother, she had been forced to recognise the truth. She had lost the chain and locket that had been such a treasured link not just with her mother but also her father—because he had given the jewellery to her mother in the first place.

Her distress went too deep for the relief of tears, and
so, dry-eyed and heavy-hearted, she had forced herself to change for dinner into her black dress—just as she was—trying desperately to force herself make polite conversation with Ramón’s wife, Bianca.

The estate manager and his wife had been invited to join them for dinner—as a way of underlining the warning Vidal had given her earlier with regard to Ramón himself? Fliss wondered a little grimly. If so, there had been no need. Even without his wife she would not have felt inclined to encourage Ramón’s lunchtime would-be flirtation with her. Charming though the estate manager was, his presence did not provoke any kind of desirous feeling within her, never mind create those feelings to the self-control-obliterating extent that Vidal’s presence did.

Fliss’s fork clattered down onto her plate as she fought to deny what she had just admitted to herself. By what cruel trick of nature could it have happened that she was so intensely and physically aware of and responsive to the one man above all others she should have been safe from finding in any way attractive?

Picking up her fork, she turned her attention to Bianca in an attempt to distract herself. Ramón’s wife was an attractive, if rather remote-looking woman in her early thirties, with classically Spanish good looks. Given what Vidal had told her about Ramón, it was perhaps not surprising that Bianca’s manner towards her should betray some reticence Fliss acknowledged, and she herself was hardly in the right mood to set about reassuring the other woman and drawing her out—although the good
manners her grandparents and mother had insisted upon were urging her to do her best.

There were several times, though, when she wasn’t able to prevent her hand from creeping up to her throat in search of the missing chain, and a shadow clouded her eyes when she was forced to accept its absence.

A white wine from the vineyard in Chile in which Vidal had a financial interest was served with their meal of fish, caught locally on the coast, and then a sweeter wine was poured by Vidal when the dessert arrived—an almond dish made from the estate’s own almonds.

It was when he was filling her glass that he said unexpectedly to Fliss, ‘You aren’t wearing your chain.’

The fact that he had noticed it in the first place was enough to catch Fliss off-guard, even without the emotional pain of having to acknowledge its loss, but somehow she managed to control her reaction and admit huskily, ‘No. I seem to have lost it.’

Was she imagining the way in which Vidal’s gaze lingered on her throat before he moved on to fill first Ramón’s and then his own glass? Her vulnerable flesh was certainly burning as though it had.

Desperate not to either think about her lost chain and locket or her contradictory reactions to Vidal, Fliss focused her attention again on Bianca, asking her about her children. She was rewarded with the first genuine smile the other woman had given her all evening, and Bianca launched into a catalogue of the wonderfulness of their two young sons.

Listening to her, Fliss couldn’t help wondering what it must feel like to have a child and be a mother—to feel
that sense of joy and fierce maternal pride she could see so clearly in Bianca’s response. Bianca had produced a photograph of their sons. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, with warm olive skin, they looked like miniature images of their father.

Against her will, Fliss’s gaze was drawn to Vidal, who was now deep in conversation with Ramón about the engineer’s recommendations for fixing the problem with the water. Of course, she had no need to try to imagine what Vidal’s sons would look like. After all, she had a photograph of Vidal himself as a boy. She had grown up with that image and it was surely imprinted within her for ever. His sons’ mother would contribute to their gene pool, too, though, and she would be …

She would be everything that she herself was not, Fliss reminded herself, her hand trembling as she held her wine glass. Why on earth should she care who Vidal married, what his sons would look like, or even if he had any? Why, indeed? And equally, why did she have that curious ache of mixed longing and loss deep inside her body, right where her womb was?

T
HE
evening was over, and Fliss was back in her bedroom. The bareness of her neck against the snowy backdrop of the towelling robe she had pulled on after her shower reminded her of what she had lost and filled her with fresh guilt.

Her mother had always worn, treasured, and guarded her locket. Fliss didn’t have a single visual childhood memory in which she could
not
see it round her mother’s neck, and now
she
had lost it through her own carelessness. Somehow in its own way that hurt as deeply and painfully as the loss of her mother herself, and brought back for her the confused and unhappy feelings she had had as a young child, questioning why she did not have a father. That chain and its locket had bound her parents together, and through that bonding it had bound them to her as well. It had been her only material connection that was shared by them both, and now it was gone. That precious link had been broken.

But she still had another link with her father, Fliss reminded herself. She still had the house that he had left her.

Only for now, she reminded herself. Vidal had made
it clear that he both expected and wanted her to sell it to him.

Fliss was just on the point of slipping out of the bathrobe and getting into bed when a knock on her door came. Hastily pulling the robe back onto her shoulders and clasping it closed in front of her, she went to answer the knock, assuming that it must be one of the maids.

Only it wasn’t one of the maids. It was Vidal, and now he was inside the room and closing the door behind him.

‘What do you want?’ Would he hear the anxiety in her voice and guess that it came from an awareness of her own vulnerability to him? Fliss hoped not as she watched his mouth twist in cynical contempt.

‘Not
you,
if that is what you are hoping for. A man—any man to satisfy the desire you probably hoped to extinguish with Ramón? Is that what you hoped I might be, Felicity?’

‘No!’ The denial was torn from her throat.

Make-up-free, her hair tousled and her feet bare, not to mention the fact that her body was equally bare beneath the enveloping robe, Fliss was acutely conscious of feeling at a disadvantage compared with Vidal, who was naturally still wearing the light wool suit and the pale blue shirt he had worn during dinner.

But it was her emotional vulnerability to him that disadvantaged her more, she told herself as Vidal dismissed her denial with a savage,
‘Liar.
I know you, remember?’

‘No, you don’t. You don’t know me at all. And if you’ve come here just to insult me—’

‘Is it possible to insult a woman like you? I should have thought you were beyond that—a woman who gives herself to all and sundry in a tawdry mockery of what man-to-woman intimacy should really be.’

The words he spoke, each insult he made, felt like a knife wound to her heart and her pride.

‘I’ve brought you this,’ Vidal told her curtly, changing the subject, and opening his hand to reveal her chain and locket nestling in his palm

The sight of it robbed Fliss of the ability to speak. She had to blink and look again to make sure that she wasn’t seeing things.

‘My locket,’ she said, and she shook her head in disbelief as she switched her gaze to his face to demand disjointedly, ‘How …? Where …?’

Vidal’s shrug was dismissive, almost bored, Fliss felt, as he told her, ‘I remembered that you were wearing it when we went into the house, so it seemed logical that you might have lost it there. After I had said goodnight to Bianca and Ramón, I drove over there. I recalled that you were playing with the chain when we were in Felipe’s office, so I started my search there, and as luck would have it that was where I found it—on the floor next to the desk.’

‘You did that for …?’

For me,
she had been about to say, but she was glad that she’d paused before doing so when he told her flatly, ‘I know how much it meant to your mother and how she cherished it.’

Vidal made himself cut across the hesitant vulnerability he could hear in Fliss’s voice. He didn’t want
to see her as vulnerable or deserving of compassion, because if he did—if he allowed that image of her into his head and his heart—it would mean … It would mean what?

It would mean
nothing,
Vidal assured himself grimly.

Fliss nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, she did.’ Of course he had not gone to look for it for
her.
Vidal would never do anything for her. ‘I’m glad you found it,’ was all she could allow herself to say, and she reached out to take it from him, her outstretched fingers curling back into her palm as she recoiled from actually touching him. Because she was afraid. Of what? Afraid of touching him, or afraid that once she did she wouldn’t be able to stop?

He shouldn’t have come here. He had known that. So why
had
he? Vidal derided himself. To test his self-control? To prove that he could walk through fire? To suffer the torment he was now suffering? He knew that beneath her robe Felicity was naked. He knew that given her sexual history, her sexual proclivities, he could reach for her and take her now, satiate himself in her, with her, until the need that gnawed unceasingly at him, that cried out to him, was silenced.

A tremor knifed through Fliss’s body.

‘Take it,’ Vidal demanded, holding out his hand to her, the gold glistening in his palm.

For a moment they looked at one another, neither of them saying anything. Fliss’s breathing and her balance were both slightly unsteady as her senses registered the sensual tension in the air between them. Vidal lifted his
hand, and for a second Fliss thought that he was going to reach out and touch her. She moved back from him, forgetting that a low table was right behind her until she stepped back into it.

She heard Vidal curse as she stumbled, but even then she held up her hands to fend him off, prepared to fall rather than risk being touched by him. Only it was already too late. His hands were gripping her upper arms, and his face was hard with hostility and contempt as his gaze raked her face and then fell to the now open front of her robe.

One of them made a small sound. She wasn’t sure if it was Vidal or herself. Her chest lifted abruptly, its movement driven by an urgent need to expand her lungs and take in more oxygen. Time seemed to hold its breath. She was certainly holding her own breath, Fliss knew, as they looked at one another in silence. Was she the first to break that eye contact, her gaze drawn helplessly down to Vidal’s mouth, her own lips parting on a quivering gasp of longing? Fliss didn’t know. She only knew that when she looked up into Vidal’s eyes again they were smouldering with the sensual intent of a man who knew that the woman he was with wanted him.

‘No.’

Her denial was a soft, agonised sound of despair, but Vidal ignored it. His gaze was obscured, so she couldn’t see what was in his eyes as he looked down at her mouth. Fliss’s heart was thundering with reckless, out-of-control thuds, driven by her heightened awareness of both him and her own longing. She watched as he lowered his head, his lips almost touching her own,
his breath an unbearably tormenting caress against her mouth. Unable to stop watching, Fliss moved closer to him.

‘Damn you!’

Fliss could hear the anger in Vidal’s voice as he thrust her away from him. Her chain lay on the floor between them. Instinctively she moved forward to pick it up, and then froze in shock when Vidal took hold of her again.

‘You just can’t stop yourself, can you?
Any
man will do, won’t he? Any man as long as he gives you this.’

He was kissing her, and she could feel his contempt. She could taste it. He wanted to humiliate her, to destroy her, and she wanted … She wanted to make him see that he was wrong about her. She wanted to punish him for misjudging her. She wanted to see his pride lying shredded in the wreckage of his misconceptions. And now she could do that. Now she could turn his anger-fuelled passion into her own salvation. The sacrifice of her belief that sexual intimacy should be something born out of mutual love would ultimately be Vidal’s humiliation.

Maybe this had always been meant to happen? Maybe it was the only way she would ever be able to walk free of the emotional pain he had caused her? Maybe this was something she needed to experience to be able to finally destroy the foolish dreams she had once had?

Slowly and deliberately, as though her body was weighted and drugged, Fliss moved closer to Vidal, deliberately grinding her lower body into his in a motion she had seen actors using. She lifted her hand to the buttons on Vidal’s shirt, concentrating on unfastening
them as his tongue thrust fiercely against her own. A quiver of sensation ran through her but she ignored it. This wasn’t about her own desire—at least not her own desire for Vidal—it was about her desire to be free of everything in her life that had been tied to him.

His shirt was unfastened now, and he was still kissing her. A hard, demanding kiss without any softening warmth or tender emotion. How long would it be before his anger cooled and he pushed her away again? She must not let that happen. Somehow she must keep feeding his anger until it became physical arousal and desire. And perhaps the best way to do that was to confirm his judgement of her.

Very carefully and deliberately she broke Vidal’s kiss, and then equally deliberately she let the robe slide from her body. She stepped towards him and placed her lips against his, lifting her hands to his shoulders.

She heard Vidal groan, felt his hands clamping down on her waist, his mouth closing against hers.

A shiver of self-revulsion gripped her. What was she doing? She had gambled and lost in a mad moment of self-destruction, and now.

He couldn’t let this happen. Vidal knew that. He would be damned for ever if he gave in to Felicity’s allure. And tormented for ever if he did not. His body yearned and ached for her. For seven years he had had to live with the need she aroused in him. He looked down at her body and felt his own shudder violently as he fought against taking what she was offering. Of its own volition and against his will his hands lifted from her waist to her breasts, full and taut, the nipples
already hard with sensual promise. They pressed against his palms.

‘Oh!’ Fliss gasped, caught off-guard by the shock of pleasure the sensation of Vidal’s touch against her breasts had brought. She hadn’t been expecting it and it widened her eyes and made her mouth soften. Desire? Her body trembled. Was it wrong to want him, or was it part of what must happen?

Vidal could see and feel Fliss’s arousal. She wanted him! That knowledge severed the last strand of his self-control, plunging him into the millrace of his own longing for her.

He tried to dam the racing flood of his need. His heart was slamming into his chest wall. He knew what he should do, but it was impossible for him to stem the fierce tide of desire that possessed him. At some atavistic deep level his instinct said that Felicity was
his
—should always have been his, would be his.

Her lips clung to his, parting eagerly to the thrust of his tongue as he took and tasted the wild sweetness of her mouth.

Beneath the possessive pressure of Vidal’s kiss, Fliss tensed on a soft moan of delight. There was no point in her trying to control the desire leaping to life inside her, racing from nerve-ending to nerve-ending. Why attempt the impossible? Why resist what was surely preordained by fate?

The seeking, all-conquering exploration of his tongue took her own into its fierce possession, sending a star-burst of liquid arousal spilling through her whole body. And when Vidal withdrew his tongue from hers, to
stroke the tip of it tormentingly against the now swollen fullness of her lips, Fliss clung to him, cast adrift in a wild inner sea of sensual intensity.

The reason they were here together like this no longer mattered. It had evaporated like morning mist beneath the heat of the sun, burned away by the power of their shared desire.

Now it was Fliss who captured Vidal’s tongue, taking it deep within the warm wet intimacy of her mouth to caress it with her own. She was in Vidal’s arms, and they were kissing as though the connection between them had sprung to life like an invisible force that bound them together.

She welcomed the possession of Vidal’s hands against her naked breasts, straining towards him as though to offer him their arousal, her whole body shuddering wildly when he rolled her nipples between his thumb and forefinger in a caress of erotic delight that had her digging her nails into the hard muscles of his arms.

Vidal didn’t need her to tell him what he was doing to her, or what she wanted. He seemed to understand her need instinctively, arousing it, matching it, feeding and sustaining it with his touch and the growing passion of his kisses.

She had no will apart from the will to submit to the pleasure Vidal was giving her, Fliss thought dizzily, lost in the erotic heat that enveloped her, enclosing her in its embrace, possessing her senses, her thoughts and her will-power just as Vidal was possessing her body. She wanted what was happening more than she had ever wanted anything in the whole of her life. It was what
she had been born for, what she longed for. It was her fate and her destiny—a completion that had the power to make her whole.

Vidal’s hands moulded and caressed her breasts as he kissed her again, the rhythm of his fingers caressing the eager hardness of her nipples and matching the equally rhythmic thrust of his tongue against her own, creating a swiftly growing crescendo of hungry longing that pulsed and ran through her body in a silent song of female arousal. As though her desire had been hot-wired to respond only to Vidal’s touch, her body moved to the rhythm he was imposing on it, the lamplight giving her naked flesh a softly golden sheen highlighted by the arousal-induced flush that bathed her chest and throat.

A voice inside Vidal’s head urged him to stop, telling him that it was his duty to deny himself the pleasure that was feeding his desire for her, but that desire was too savagely primitive for him to resist. He had felt it the very first minute he had set eyes on her and seen her in the flesh—hitting him, possessing him, compelling him in a way that every fibre of his logical brain wanted to resist and deny. But now—dangerously—it had overwhelmed that logic, and he was answering to something within him that he had previously not realised existed: a male urge to conquer, to possess, to own for himself the woman he was holding and caressing. A thousand years of history and male pride, of conquest and victory, was surging through him with all the power of a burst dam, destroying every obstacle in its way.