by Penny Jordan
From the minute she had first seen him, stepping out of the expensive car he had driven from London to their house, Fliss had been smitten, developing a huge crush on him. She could vividly remember the day she had inadvertently walked into the bathroom when he had been shaving. Her besotted gaze had been glued to his naked torso. Of course that kind of intimacy had sent her febrile teenage longings surging out of control. Theirs had normally been a mostly female household, so the sight of any bare male chest would have had her studying it in secret curiosity, but when that bare chest belonged to Vidal …
She had felt almost sick with excitement and longing when she had finally managed to step back out of the bathroom, her imagination working overtime and conjuring up various scenarios in which she had not merely looked at it but even more breathtakingly excitingly been held close to it. It was all very well to mock her sixteen-year-old naivety now, but wasn’t it the truth that she was still every bit as personally unfamiliar with the actual reality of sexual intimacy, bare skin to bare skin, now as she had been then?
Clumsily Fliss turned round, as though in flight from her own knowledge of herself. But the fact was that there was nowhere to run to from the reality of her virgin state. No matter how many defensive barricades she had built around herself, no matter how strong an aura of adult womanly confidence she had taught herself to manifest, and no matter how closely she guarded the secret of her past-its-sell-by-date virginity, she could not escape from the truth.
What was the matter with her? she challenged herself. She had lived with being sexually inactive for years. It had been her own decision to make and to keep. It was just one of those things. The pace of modern life, the need to establish her career, had somehow prevented her from meeting a man she wanted enough to let go of the past.
It would be pure self-indulgence for her to start feeling sorry for herself. By many people’s standards Fliss knew that her childhood had been a privileged one. She still considered herself to be privileged now—and not just because she had had such a wonderful mother.
With her grandparents and her mother dead, the big house had seemed so empty—and yet at the same time filled with painful memories. At the height of the property market, before it crashed, Fliss had been approached by a builder who had offered her an unexpectedly large sum of money for the house and its land. After trying to work out what her mother would have wanted her to do she had gone ahead and sold the house to him, and bought herself the flat in the converted Georgian townhouse. Her work in the Tourism Department of the very pretty market town in which she lived kept her busy, and she had plenty of friends—although many of her schoolfriends were now pairing off and making ‘nesting’ plans, and her three closest friends from school and university, whilst single like her, now lived and worked overseas.
A brief rap on her bedroom door had her getting up off the bed and tensing as she waited for the door to open and Rosa to appear—no doubt radiating further disapproval.
However, it wasn’t Rosa who stepped or rather strode into the room, but Vidal himself. He had changed from his business suit into a more casual shirt and a pair of chinos, and had also had a shower, to judge from the still-damp appearance of his slicked-back hair. Her heart turned over inside her chest cavity in slow painful motion, her breath seizing in her lungs. Her awareness of the intimacy of him being in her bedroom brought back too many memories of the past for her to feel comfortable even before the door had closed and locked.
Once before Vidal had come into her bedroom.
No! She would not allow herself to be dragged into the dark agony of that dreadful place where those memories were stored. It was the present she needed to focus on—not the past. It was she who must challenge and criticise Vidal—not the other way around.
Summoning her strength, she demanded, ‘Why did you tell me that your mother would be here when that was a lie?’
The sudden surge of blood creeping up along his jaw betrayed his real reaction to her challenge, even if he was trying to deny it by giving her a coolly dismissive look.
‘My mother has been called away to visit a friend who is unwell. I was not aware of her absence myself until Rosa informed me of it.’
‘Rosa had to tell you where your mother is? How typical of the kind of man you are that you need a servant to tell you the whereabouts of your own mother.’
The hot, angry red blood surged over the sharp thrust of his jawline like an unstoppable tide.
‘For your information, Rosa is not a servant. And as for my relationship with my mother—that is not a subject I intend to discuss with you.’
‘No, I’m sure you don’t,’ Fliss answered him grimly. ‘After all, it is in no small part because of you that I never got to have a relationship with my father. You were the one who intercepted my private letter to him. And you were the one who came all the way to England to bully my mother into pleading with me not to try to contact him again.’
‘Your mother believed it would not have been in your best interests for you to continue to write to Felipe.’
‘Oh, so it was for my sake that you stopped me communicating with him, was it?’ Fliss’s voice was icy with sarcasm as the memory of all the anguish and humiliation Vidal had caused flooded past her defences. He was cruel and arrogant. Willing to destroy others without compunction so that he could have his own way. ‘You had no right to stop me knowing my father, or denying me the right to at least see if he could love me. But then we know that love for another person isn’t a concept someone like you understands, is it, Vidal?’
She could feel the aching burn of her emotions in the hot tears that threatened to flood her eyes. Tears! She would never—must never—ever cry in front of this man. She must never show him any weakness. Never.
‘What could you possibly know about loving someone—about loving anyone?’ Fliss hurled accusations at him in furious self-defence. She’d say and do anything to stop him guessing at the pain within her that his words had touched. ‘You don’t know what love is!’
She had no idea what she was really saying as the wild words tumbled from her lips. All she knew was that they sprang from an unending well of pain deep inside her.
‘And you do? You who—’ Furiously angry himself, Vidal closed the distance between them, shaking his head in disgust as he stopped speaking.
But Fliss knew perfectly what he had been about to say, and the accusation he had been about to fling at her.
Now panic as well as pain had her well and truly in its grip
‘Don’t touch me,’ she ordered, stepping back from him, her voice shaking with dread.
‘You can stop the play-acting, Felicity.’ Immediately Vidal’s anger was replaced by a look of contempt. ‘And we both know that it is play-acting, before you attempt to deny it and perjure yourself even further.’
Her panic levels were going through the roof, sky-high and out of control, defeating her as she struggled to bring some rationality to her reactions and her emotions.
The memories had come dangerously close, muddying the waters of what was present and what was past. Her heart was jumping around inside her ribcage and she was sixteen years old again, floundering helplessly at the confusion of feelings that were forbidden and frightening.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she lashed out wildly, ‘but you’re wrong. I don’t want you. I never wanted you.’
‘Want me?’
The silence in the room was like the still centre at the eye of a storm. It was like knowing with all her senses that the danger was there and soon it would crash down on her and consume her. And there was nowhere she could run to escape it.
‘Want me? Like this, you mean?’ Vidal said softly.
‘This’ was being ruthlessly dragged into his arms and then being pinioned against him, trapped between him and the wall behind her, as he bound her to his body so intimately that she felt as though she could feel the bones and the hard male muscles that lay beneath the sleek flesh that padded t
hem. Unlike her own, his heartbeat was steady—steady and determined. The heartbeat of a victor who had successfully captured his prey.
Was this how that long-ago Moorish princess had felt held in the vice-like grip of her captor?
Fliss’s own heartbeat raced, her pulse flickering in a wild primeval dance that took away her ability to think or even feel rationally. Had she, that long-ago young woman, also felt the same searing, soaring, confusing of fear and triumph? Fear for her independence—fear of the wild clamouring that was beating through her. And had she felt triumph because she had been able to drive the man holding her beyond his own self-control? Because she had broken something in him? Even though the price of that victory would be him exerting his power over her in retaliation?
A mêlée of thoughts and feelings rioted inside her, turning her into a version of herself she barely recognised.
He shouldn’t be doing this, Vidal knew, but somehow he couldn’t stop himself. A thousand nights and more of dragging himself from forbidden dreams in which he held her like this overwhelmed his self-control. She wasn’t sixteen any more; she wasn’t forbidden by his own moral code—even if his pride burned and recoiled at the thought of still desiring her.
The girl with the wide-eyed gaze, filled with all the heady innocence of a sixteen-year-old in the grip of her first sexual desire for a man, had never existed anywhere other than in his imagination. All the nights he had lain sleepless and tormented the bed she had been lying in had been far from chaste.
As he bent his head towards hers he could feel the thud of her heartbeat and the soft warmth of her breasts pressed against his chest—those breasts from which he had ached so badly to peel the tee shirt covering them so that he could reveal their perfection to his gaze and touch, so that he could pluck on the tormenting thrust of her nipples with his fingertips, so that he could draw them into his mouth and caress them until her body arched with longing for his possession.
No! He must not do this.
Vidal made to release her, but Fliss shuddered violently against him, the small sound she made deep in her throat drowning out his denial.
Vidal was looking into her eyes, forcing her to look back at him. Close up, his eyes weren’t one solid colour but several shades mingling together into topaz-gold. The unblinking intensity of his gaze was dizzying her, just as the heavy thud of his heart beating was commanding her own heart to match its rhythm.
In another heartbeat he would kiss her, and she would feel the cold, unforgiving dominance of those sharply cut lips. Her own parted—on a protest against what he was doing, not a sign of her docile acceptance of it, and certainly not in eager anticipation of it.
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.
CHAPTER THREE
IT 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 sc
hoolfriends 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.