by Anne Mather
‘And?’
Now Enrique was getting impatient, and the German hurried on with his explanation. ‘There were lots of children in the pool, and the last we saw of David—’
‘The last?’ whispered Cassandra faintly, her nails digging unconsciously into Enrique’s arm, and he turned to give her a sympathetic look.
‘He seemed so content,’ continued Franz Kaufman helplessly, putting an unknowing possessive hand on his son’s shoulder. ‘Frau Kaufman and I, we felt quite able to leave the boys to play while we went to the cafeteria to have a coffee.’
‘You left them?’ exclaimed Cassandra, but once again Enrique gave her a warning stare.
‘It was not our fault,’ put in Frau Kaufman suddenly, apparently deciding her husband was being too conciliatory. ‘Horst said that David told him he was going down the—what is it they call it, Franz? The chute, ja? Horst did not want to go with him.’ She shrugged. ‘David did not come back.’
‘Oh, God!’
Cassandra felt sick. She had thought that things couldn’t get worse, but they had. David could be anywhere, with anyone. Dear God, she had heard such stories about boys of his age being lured away by unscrupulous men. Right this minute, he could be fighting for his life—
She caught her breath. He might even now be lying at the bottom of the chute in the water park. She hadn’t thought of that. Oh, God! What was she going to do?
A sob escaped her, and Enrique, who had been asking more questions of the other family, turned to her with sudden concern.
‘Querida,’ he said softly, using an endearment she had never thought to hear from him again. ‘Cassandra, try and be positive. It may be that David lost his way back to the wave pool. Ortegar is a big complex. He could be with the director right now, waiting for someone to come and collect him.’
‘Do you think so?’ Cassandra realised belatedly that she was still gripping Enrique’s arm and immediately dropped her hands to her sides. She shook her head. ‘I’ve got to go there.’ She hesitated, and then added in a low voice, ‘Will you take me?’
‘I would be happy to take you, señora,’ declared Herr Kaufman before Enrique could respond. He ignored his wife’s disapproving glare and touched Cassandra’s arm. ‘It is the least I can do.’
‘Oh, well—’
Cassandra was turning to him when Enrique spoke. ‘That will not be necessary, señor,’ he said firmly. ‘David is my nephew. Naturally, I am the one to escort Señora de Montoya to Ortegar.’
‘If you say so.’ Herr Kaufman’s manner was stiff now, as if Enrique’s command of the situation had devalued his offer and he was offended by it. ‘But I must say, we searched the complex very thoroughly, and there was no sign of your son, señora.’
Cassandra shook her head, unable to answer him. Didn’t he realise that that was the last thing she wanted to hear? If David had disappeared, couldn’t he allow her to hope for just a little while longer?
‘That was why we came back here,’ added his wife shortly. ‘We cut our day short because we hoped that if David had got lost, he might have got a lift back.’
‘A lift?’ Cassandra’s throat was dry. ‘Who with?’
‘There were plenty of English people there,’ said Frau Kaufman defensively. ‘He could have gone with any one of them.’
‘But David’s not like that,’ protested Cassandra, and then, catching Enrique’s eyes on her, she shut up. He was right. There was no point in attributing blame. She should know, better than anyone, that David wasn’t always predictable.
The sound of a mobile phone ringing cut into their exchange. It was close, but not that close, and she was hardly surprised when Enrique excused himself and headed for the Mercedes.
She watched him anxiously. There was no reason for her to feel apprehensive about that phone call, but she did. Yet that was stupid. No one knew that Enrique was with her. Certainly no one at the Ortegar water park.
Enrique picked up the small phone and flicked open the mouthpiece. ‘Sí?’ she heard him say, with obvious impatience, and then whatever was being relayed to him from the other end of the connection caused his expression to darken in obvious disbelief.
Cassandra took an involuntary step towards him. Somehow, she didn’t know how, she sensed that the call had to do with David, and she was suddenly reminded of her doubts earlier in the day. Doubts about David going to Ortegar, about Ortegar’s closer proximity to the de Montoya estate…
Pressing a hand to her throat, she continued down the path, and Enrique watched her approach with dark, enigmatic eyes. Please, she prayed silently, let David be all right.
Enrique finished the call almost simultaneously with her reaching the car, and tossed the phone back onto the console. ‘He is at Tuarega,’ he said shortly, and she didn’t know whether he was relieved or angry. He went past her to tell the Kaufmans, and Cassandra crumpled against the wing. A momentary dizziness assailed her. He was safe! David was safe! Thank God!
It was only when Enrique came striding back to the Mercedes that she felt the beginnings of her own anger towards her son. No wonder he had been so eager to go out with the Kaufmans, she thought bitterly. He must have known exactly what he was going to do. Only Enrique had thwarted him by coming here.
‘Get in,’ said Enrique, swinging open the door, and Cassandra looked up at him with wary eyes.
‘Aren’t you going to tell me how he got to Tuarega?’ she asked, aware that it was difficult to keep the tremor out of her voice. But she felt so helpless, so angry with her son. She couldn’t believe he had been so reckless.
‘I will tell you on the way,’ Enrique said tersely. ‘Come: we are wasting time.’
Cassandra hesitated, but then, glancing back at the other family, who were still clustered together outside the pensión, she decided to do as he said. She didn’t want to get into explanations with the Kaufmans, explanations she couldn’t begin to justify. Time enough for that later, when she’d had the opportunity to gather her thoughts.
‘I ought to get changed,’ she murmured, reluctant to appear before any members of his family in her cropped tee shirt and shorts, but Enrique merely gave her a considering look.
‘I thought you were worried about your son,’ he remarked, and the gentleness that had been in his voice earlier had all disappeared now.
Cassandra frowned. ‘I am.’
‘Get in, then,’ he directed, walking round the bonnet to get behind the wheel. ‘It is an hour’s drive to Tuarega. Better not to give him time to have second thoughts, no?’
Cassandra scrambled into her seat without further ado. ‘Do you think that’s likely?’ she asked, unable to prevent the question, and Enrique grimaced.
‘No,’ he said, starting the engine. ‘I think he is exactly where he intended to be all along. Unfortunately, there was no one but my steward around to welcome him.’
‘Your steward?’ Cassandra glanced sideways at him as the car pulled away from the pensión. ‘Was that who rang?’
Enrique nodded. ‘It was.’
‘Your mother’s away?’
‘My mother is staying at the apartamento in Seville,’ he replied. ‘So that she can be near my father.’ His lips twisted with sudden irony. ‘Gracias a Dios!’
Cassandra stiffened. ‘You’ve changed your mind about telling your parents about David?’ she asked swiftly, but his reaction mocked her fleeting optimism.
‘You wish,’ he retorted with a short unfeeling laugh, and her eyes dropped to her hands, twisted together in her lap.
What had she expected? she chided herself. Enrique’s only concern was the shock it would give the older de Montoyas to learn that they had a grandson after all these years. He didn’t care about her feelings. He never had. She had only to remember the way he’d ignored her at his brother’s funeral to know that Enrique believed she deserved nothing but his contempt.
Her eyes filled with tears, blocking her nose and making it difficult for her to breathe. She turned her head a
way so that he wouldn’t notice and stared out at the beauty of the scenery surrounding them.
They had left Punta del Lobo behind and the busy coastal area was giving way to bare plains and fertile valleys. Cortijos, or farms, where white-painted cottages hid amongst avenues of citrus fruits and olive trees, followed the contours of hills that were tinged with purple in the lengthening shadows of late afternoon.
This had been her husband’s homeland, she reminded herself, rubbing an impatient finger along the ridge of her nose. He had been familiar with these hills, these valleys, and, because the blood of the de Montoyas ran in David’s veins, wasn’t it natural that he should feel some affinity with it, too?
She looked down at her hands again, only this time her eyes were drawn to Enrique’s feet in their expensive leather loafers. He wasn’t wearing any socks, she noticed, his narrow ankles disappearing beneath the uncuffed hems of his cotton trousers. They were loose-fitting around his calves, only defining the body beneath when they reached his knees and the powerful thighs above them. His tee shirt was tucked into the drawstring waistband, and the leather cords hung down between his legs, drawing her attention to the unmistakable bulge of his sex…
God!
She dragged her eyes away from his crotch, feeling a film of sweat breaking out on her upper lip. This was crazy! Crazy! How could she be thinking such thoughts about a man who had done his best to ruin her life? She must be out of her mind. ‘I suppose you think it is all my fault?’
His words broke into the turmoil of her thoughts, and for a moment she could only gaze at him, uncomprehending. ‘I beg your—?’
‘For David’s running away from the Kaufmans,’ prompted Enrique, his brows drawing together when he saw her flushed cheeks and glittering eyes. ‘What is it? What is wrong? Are you ill?’
Only stressed out, she wanted to say bitterly, but she could hardly blame him for the shameful direction of her thoughts. That was all her doing, and she despised herself for allowing sex to colour her reactions to him.
‘Just—hot,’ she said instead, raising her hands to lift the weight of her hair away from her neck. Despite the car’s air-conditioning system, her body seemed to be on some other planet. And it was only when she realised how the action caused her breasts to press provocatively against the thin fabric of her top that she quickly lowered her arms again. She wiped a knuckle surreptitiously over her upper lip. ‘Um—is it much further?’
‘Perhaps—twenty minutes,’ answered Enrique tightly, and she guessed he’d noticed her embarrassment. Or perhaps she’d embarrassed him, she considered wryly. Though it wasn’t likely. Enrique de Montoya was always in control of himself and his actions.
She was easing her thighs off the seat, allowing some air to pass between her skin and the leather, when he glanced her way again. ‘You are not comfortable?’
‘I’m fine,’ she lied hurriedly. Then, forcing herself to look about her, ‘Herr Kaufman said that your father’s estate is famous for the bulls it breeds.’ She took a steadying breath. ‘I didn’t know he was a farmer.’
‘A farmer?’ Enrique spoke drily. ‘Is that what Kaufman told you?’
‘Isn’t it true?’
Enrique shrugged. ‘En rigor—strictly speaking, that is—I suppose he is right. Anyone who is involved with the land can be called a farmer. But there is much more to it than that. Much more to breeding bulls than getting a cow with calf. And, as it happens, my father is first and foremost a businessman. He knows about growing grapes. He knows nothing about breeding bulls.’
Cassandra understood. ‘But you do, right?’ Her lips tightened. ‘I should have known.’
Enrique gave a harsh laugh. ‘Why do I get the feeling that that is not a compliment?’ he asked. ‘What would you know about it?’
‘I know that it takes a certain kind of person to breed bulls to be slaughtered in the bullring,’ retorted Cassandra, uncaring if she was overstepping the bounds of politeness. When had Enrique ever cared what he said to her? ‘It’s cruel, barbaric!’
Enrique sucked in a breath. ‘And therefore I am cruel and barbaric also?’ he suggested with dangerous civility, and Cassandra knew a twinge of fear.
‘I—don’t know,’ she muttered, not prepared to make any accusations. Then, because she despised her cowardice, ‘Are you?’
‘I dare say we will find out,’ he responded bleakly, his long fingers flexing on the wheel. ‘Right now I am more concerned with what your son may have said to Mendoza.’
Cassandra gripped the edge of her seat. For a few shameful moments she had forgotten where she was, what she was doing here. But now the knowledge that she was soon to see her son again brought a quiver of apprehension to ferment the turmoil in her stomach.
She had never expected to come here, to see the place where Antonio had been born, where he had grown up. She had never wanted to come here, she told herself fiercely. Had never wanted to meet the family who had rejected her while her husband was alive and were rejecting her still. It was David who was welcome here. Not her.
They were driving through another valley now, a green fertile valley with a pretty village clinging to the hillside above a rocky gorge. The spire of a church rose above a stand of pine and cypress trees and the road narrowed to pass between white-walled cottages where carts and loaded mules held their own against more conventional traffic.
‘What—what is this place?’ Cassandra ventured, after Enrique had already acknowledged the greetings of perhaps a score of men and women, some of whom dragged wide-eyed children out of the path of the car. Older inhabitants, mostly men, she noticed, sat smoking their pipes in the shade of flower-hung balconies, and they, too, raised gnarled hands to him as he passed. ‘Is—is it Tuarega?’
‘It is Huerta de Tuarega,’ he conceded after a moment, as if reluctant to answer her. Then, leaning towards the wind-screen, he directed her gaze upward. ‘There is the palacio.’
Palacio? Palace? Cassandra’s mouth dried. The building he had indicated was situated further up the valley, surrounded by a plateau of lush fields and orchards of fruit trees. A road, its tarmac black against the terraces of olive trees that grew lower down the valley, curved away ahead of them, but it was the palacio itself that caused such a rush of apprehension. It looked like a sprawling medieval fortress from this angle, she thought fancifully, having never imagined anything like this. How had David ever had the nerve to come here, uninvited and unannounced?
‘Does it live up to your expectations?’ enquired Enrique mockingly beside her, and she turned to give him a startled look.
‘I didn’t have any expectations.’ She swallowed. ‘I—I had no idea you lived in a—in a palace.’
‘No?’ He was sardonic. ‘But Antonio must have told you where he lived, no?’
‘Yes.’ Cassandra automatically adopted a defensive attitude. ‘He told me his family had an estate called Tuarega. In England, estates can be large or small. They’re rarely controlled from a—a palace!’
Enrique gave her a considering stare. Then, apparently deciding to give her the benefit of the doubt, he shrugged. ‘Muy bien. I believe you. But do not be alarmed. Palacios in Spain are not so rare. And Tuarega is really only a country house.’
Cassandra reserved judgement. Whatever Tuarega was, it was vastly different from anything she was used to. As they drew closer, she could make out towers and crenellations, and the unmistakable tracery of Moorish architecture.
‘It—must be very old,’ she said stiffly, trying to distract herself from the moment when she would have to get out of the car and go into the palacio, and Enrique inclined his head.
‘Some of it is, certainly,’ he agreed. ‘But over the years there have been modifications and additions, so that now it is—how would you say it?—a mish-mash of styles.’
Cassandra wouldn’t have said that. She wouldn’t have described something that was essentially so beautiful in quite those terms. Whatever its period, Tuarega was a home to be proud of, an
d for all his deprecating words she sensed that deep down Enrique felt that way, too.
The sight of a herd of cattle grazing in the pasture that adjoined the formal gardens of the palacio briefly diverted her. The beasts raised their heads to watch the car go by, and she guessed that these were some of the fighting bulls they had been talking about. Strong, sturdy, with dangerously sharp horns, they didn’t look like the domestic cattle she had seen at home and she had no desire to get any closer to them.
If Enrique noticed her unwilling interest, he made no comment. For which she was grateful. Right now, she had other things to face, to contend with, and she was glad she hadn’t known exactly what she was getting into when they’d left Punta del Lobo or she might never have had the nerve to come.
But she would, she chided herself impatiently. David was here. Her son was here. And, for all its size and magnificence, Tuarega was a place where Antonio had lived.
CHAPTER SIX
THE boy came running to meet them as they entered the arched foyer of the palacio. Sunlight was slanting down through the grilled windows set high on the walls, throwing a barred pattern across the marble-tiled floor. David’s rubber-soled shoes squeaked as he came to an abrupt halt some distance from them. Clearly, he hadn’t expected to see his mother, and Enrique wondered, not without some irritation, whether the child had any thought for her feelings at all.
‘Mum!’ he said, his mouth tilting down at the corners. Then, twisting his gaze to her companion, his expression changed. ‘Tio Enrique!’ He was evidently proud of his pronunciation and he gave his uncle a delighted smile. ‘I’ve been waiting to see you.’
Cassandra said nothing, and the awkward silence that followed his outburst was broken only by the appearance of an older man behind him. Enrique guessed Mendoza had been indulging in a little siesta and he evidently hadn’t expected his charge to come rushing to greet them. Maybe he’d not heard the car, but David’s ears were younger, and sharper, and in this place the sound of an engine could be heard for miles.