by Penny Jordan
Bent back over Vidal’s arm, clinging to his shoulders for support, Fliss could only shudder violently with previously unknown pleasure. A pleasure that was so intense it was almost more than she could bear. She wanted to tear her dress from her body and hold Vidal’s mouth captive over her breast whilst he satisfied the growing tumultuous ache the fierce suckling movement of his mouth was creating—and at the same time she wanted to hide herself from him and what he was making her feel as fast as she could.
A cord of sensation like forked lightning zig-zagged inside her, running from her breast to the heart of her sexuality, making her want to plant her hand over that part of herself to both hide and calm its frantic hungry beat.
Scooping her up, Vidal pulled her tightly against him, so that she could feel his arousal, igniting another shaft of lightning within her as she responded to the sensual male message from his body.
Above her she could see the blue sky. She could smell the hot scent of their bodies mingling with the heady perfume of the roses. If he were to lay her down now and cover her flesh with his own—if he were to take her and possess her … Fliss felt her heart lift inside her chest and thud like a trapped bird. Wasn’t this what she had wanted all those years ago when she had looked at Vidal and yearned for him?
Shock coursed through her, filling her with revulsion for her own behaviour, making her demand emotionally, ‘Stop it—stop it! I don’t want this.’
The frantic panic in her voice cut through Vidal’s own arousal, filling him with an appalled sense of self-disgust. What on earth had possessed him? He knew what she was. He had seen and heard it for himself.
As soon as he had released her Vidal turned his back to her, sharply aware of his body’s hard arousal—an unwanted and unwarranted arousal as far as he was concerned. How could he have let that happen?
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 c
ould 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.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘FELICITY, 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 en
joyed 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.