by Penny Jordan
In the room to which the maid showed her a buffet lunch had been laid out on a heavily carved wooden sideboard. Three places were set at the immaculately polished mahogany table, and the reason for that was made apparent when Vidal walked into the room, accompanied by a good-looking dark-haired younger man, who gave Fliss a warm smile of open male appreciation as soon as he saw her.
Vidal introduced them. ‘Felicity—Ramón Carrera. Ramón is Estate Manager here.’ Ramón’s warm smile faded to a very respectful inclination of his head when Vidal added, ‘Felicity is Felipe’s daughter,’ before striding over to the buffet and telling them both, ‘Come—let us eat.’
Going to pick up one of the plates on the table, Fliss grappled with the unexpectedness of Vidal introducing her openly as his adopted uncle’s daughter—thus acknowledging her as a member of the family as easily as though there had never been any past secrecy or unwillingness to recognise her. Why had he done it? Because he had felt it necessary to explain her presence and hadn’t wanted anyone on the estate to jump to the conclusion that just because he had brought her here it meant they were personally involved romantically? Of course, being the man he was, he wouldn’t want anyone thinking that. He had made his dislike of her plain enough, after all.
As she ate her food, whilst the two men talked about estate matters, Fliss pondered on why the thought of Vidal pointing out that she was here because she was Felipe’s daughter and not because of any personal emotional involvement with him had the power to make her feel such an intense stab of angry pain.
‘You have not tried our wine yet,’ she heard Ramón saying, ‘It’s a new Merlot we have just started producing here.’
Dutifully Fliss raised the glass of red wine to her lips and breathed in its heady bouquet, intrigued by the hint of what smelled like scented blossom mixed with the rich smell of the wine itself, before taking a cautious sip. She had been right to be cautious, Fliss recognised, as she felt the wine’s full-bodied warmth spreading through her body.
‘It’s excellent,’ she told Ramón truthfully,
‘It is Vidal who deserves your praise, not me.’ Ramón smiled. ‘It was his idea to import some new vines from a vineyard in Chile in which he has a financial interest, to see if we could replicate the excellent wine they produce there.’
‘What we have produced here is unique to this area.’ Vidal joined in the conversation. ‘Something of the smell of our orchards has been incorporated in the wine.’
‘Yes, I noticed that,’ Fliss agreed, taking another sip from her wine glass. The wine really was good. Its scent was making her want to bury her nose in the glass to breathe in more of it.
‘Vidal said that he wanted to produce a Merlot that reminded him of riding through the orchards on a warm spring morning,’ Ramón enthused. ‘A lovers’ wine that is full of promise and the joy of being alive. It has been very well received in the industry. I think, Vidal, that we should perhaps have named it for Señor Felipe’s oh-so-beautiful daughter,’ Ramón told Vidal, giving Fliss another admiring look.
Vidal felt as though someone had sliced straight into his gut as he watched Fliss smile warmly at Ramón. She had not mentioned there being a current man in her life, but even if there was, given what he knew about her, she was hardly likely to think it necessary to stop at one—especially when she was far away from him.
Abruptly he stood up, announcing brusquely, ‘We should make a move, I think. You will report back to me about that problem with the irrigation system before tonight, please, Ramón. If we are going to have to get a senior engineer out I would prefer it to be tomorrow, whilst I am still here.’
‘I’ll go and find out what’s happening,’ Ramón confirmed, rising from his own chair and then coming to hold Fliss’s chair for her with a courtly gesture as she too moved to stand up.
Excusing himself to go and get on with his work, Ramón left Fliss and Vidal to walk out into the early-afternoon sunshine together.
Since she had expected that her father’s home would be within walking distance of the castillo, Fliss was surprised when Vidal placed his hand beneath her elbow to direct her back towards the car. She could feel first her arm and then her whole body burning with the heat caused by her proximity to him, causing her an immediate panic and a need to get away from him. It would be unbearable if he should guess the effect he had on her. Fliss could just imagine how much he would enjoy the humiliation that would bring her. But no amount of fear of that humiliation though was enough to stop her nipples from hardening to push determinedly against the covering of her bra and her dress. It was almost as though they wanted to shame her by flaunting their arousal and their willing availability in front of Vidal.
Angry with herself, she took refuge from her unwanted sensual vulnerability to him and her inability to control it by telling him scornfully, ‘I suppose it’s beyond your dignity as a duke to walk to the house?’
This drew a grim look from him as he told her coldly, ‘Since it’s a mile-and-a-half walk along the road, or a mile as the crow flies, I thought it would be easier to use the car. However, if you prefer to walk …’ He looked down at Fliss’s flimsy sandals as he spoke, causing her to recognise with a new surge of anger that he had won that particular run-in between them.
They had travelled quite a distance down the long drive, in a silence that bristled with mutual hostility, before Vidal announced in a peremptory tone that would have immediately got Fliss’s back up even without the added insult of what he had to say, ‘I must warn you against indulging in a flirtation with Ramón.’
‘I was not flirting with him,’ Fliss snapped in outrage.
‘He made it plain that he found you attractive, and you allowed him to do so. Of course we both know how eager you are to accommodate the desires of any man who chooses to express them to you.’
‘Trust you to throw that in my face.’ Fliss tried to defend herself. ‘You just couldn’t wait to do so, could you? Well, for your information—’
‘For your information,’ Vidal interrupted her coldly, ‘I will not have you indulging your promiscuous sexual appetite with Ramón.’
She must not let the pain of what he was saying touch her. If she did—if she let it into her heart—then it would surely destroy her. It proved how vulnerable she already was that she should actually feel herself aching to tell him that he was wrong, and demand that he listen to the truth. Vidal would never listen to the truth because he didn’t want to hear it. He wanted to think the worst of her—just as he had wanted to prevent her from making contact with her father. To him she was someone who just wasn’t good enough to be treated with compassion and understanding.
‘You can’t stop me taking a lover if I want to, Vidal.’ It was the truth, after all.
Without looking at her, Vidal replied grimly, ‘Ramón is married, with two young children. Unfortunately his marriage is going through a difficult time at the moment. Ramón is known to have an eye for pretty girls, and his wife is not at all happy about his behaviour. I have no wish to see their marriage fall apart and their children left without a father, and I promise you, Felicity, that I will do whatever it takes to make sure that does not happen.’
Vidal had turned off the main drive and onto a narrow, less well-maintained track, at the end of which, rising above the heavily laden orange and lemon trees, Fliss could see the top storey and attic windows of a red-roofed house. It gave her the perfect, much-needed excuse not to respond to Vidal’s crushing comment, but instead to retreat into what she hoped was a dignified silence—whilst her heart thumped jerkily against her chest wall in a mixture of anger and chagrin.
In that silence Vidal drove them through what felt like a tunnel of spreading branches. Sunlight dappled through them to create an almost camouflage effect on the bark of the trees, and the crops in the close-mown grass below them. And then Fliss got her first proper glimpse of the house. Her breath caught in her throat, her heart flipping dizzily with emotion. If it was possible to f
all in love with a house then she just had, she recognised.
Three storeys high, whitewashed, it filled her with delight. There was delicate detail in its iron-grille-surrounded balconies, and there were bright slashes of colour from the geraniums tumbling from pots outside the house and the bougainvillea blossom against the lower walls of the house. Oddly, there was something almost Queen Anne about the architectural style of the building, so that there was a familiarity about it—as though somehow it was welcoming her, Fliss thought emotionally as Vidal brought the car to a halt outside a pair of wooden double doors.
‘It’s beautiful.’ The words were said before she could call them back.
‘It was originally built for the captive mistress of one of my ancestors—an Englishwoman seized in a fight at sea between my ancestor’s ship and an English vessel in the days when the countries were at war with one another.’
‘It was a prison?’ Fliss couldn’t hold back her distaste.
‘‘If you want to see if that way. But what I would say is that it was their love for one another that imprisoned them. My ancestor protected his mistress by housing her here away from the judgement of society, and she protected the heart he had given her by remaining true to him and accepting that his duty to his wife meant that they could never officially be together.’
After what Vidal had told her, Fliss had expected the house to wear an air of sadness and disillusionment, but instead the first impression she had when she stepped into the cool white-painted hallway with its tiled floor was that the house was holding itself still, as though in expectation of something—or someone. Her father?
The air smelled soft and warm, as though the house was regularly aired, but Fliss thought that beneath that scent she could still smell a hint of male cologne. An ache of unexpected longing and sadness swept through her, catching her off-guard, so that she had to blink away her betraying emotion. She had genuinely thought that she had wept all the tears she had to weep for the father she had never known many, many years ago.
‘Did my … did my father live here alone?’ she asked Vidal—more to break the silence between them than anything else.
‘Apart from Ana, who was his housekeeper. She has now retired and gone to live in the village with her daughter. Come—I shall show you the house, and then once you have satisfied your curiosity I shall return you to the castillo.’
Fliss could sense that Vidal was holding both his impatience and his dislike of her on a very short rein.
‘You didn’t want me to come here, did you? Even though my father left the house to me?’ she accused him.
‘No, I didn’t,’ Vidal agreed. ‘I didn’t and don’t see the point.’
‘Just like you didn’t see the point of me writing to him. In fact as far as you are concerned it would have been better if I had never been born, wouldn’t it?’
Without waiting for Vidal’s reply—what was the need, after all, when she already knew the answer to her own question?—Fliss moved further into the house.
Although it was far more simple in style and decoration than the castillo, it was still furnished with what Fliss suspected were valuable antiques.
‘Which was my father’s favourite room?’ she demanded, after she had walked though a well-proportioned drawing room and explored the elegant, formal dining room on the opposite side of the hallway, as well as a smaller sitting room and a collection of passages, storerooms, and a small businesslike office situated at the back of the house.
For a minute she thought that Vidal wasn’t going to answer her. His mouth had hardened, and he looked away from her as though impatient to be free of her company. She held her breath.
But then, just as she thought he was going to ignore her, he turned back to her and told her distantly, ‘This one.’ He opened the door into a small library. ‘Felipe loved reading, and music. He …’ Vidal paused, looking into the distance before he continued. ‘He liked to spend his evenings in here, listening to music and reading his favourite books. The sun sets on this side of the house, and in the evening this room is particularly pleasant.’
The image Vidal was painting was one of a solitary, quiet man—a lonely man, perhaps—who had sat here in this room, contemplating what might have been if only things had been different.
‘Did you … did you spent a lot of time with him?’ Fliss could feel the words threatening to block her throat. Her hand went to it, tangling with the slender gold chain that had been her mother’s, as though by touching it she could somehow ease away the pain she was now feeling.
‘He was my uncle. He managed the family orchards.’ Vidal gave a shrug which Fliss interpreted as dismissive and thus uncaring. ‘Naturally we spent a good deal of time together.’
Vidal was turning away from her. Releasing her chain, Fliss looked back at the desk, her attention caught by the gleam of sunlight on the back of a small silver photograph frame. Driven by an impulse she couldn’t control, she picked it up and turned it round. Her heart slammed into her ribs as she looked down at a photograph of her mother, holding a smiling baby Fliss knew to be herself.
Her hand shaking, she put the photograph down.
Vidal’s mobile rang, and whilst he turned away to take the call Fliss studied the photograph again. Her mother looked so young. So proud of her baby. What had her father thought when he had seen the photograph? Had he been filled with regret—guilt—even perhaps longing to have the woman he loved and the child he had created with her there with him? She would never know now.
He had kept the photograph on his desk, which must mean that he had looked at it every day. Fliss tried to drive away the feeling of deep sadness permeating her, but still her questioning thoughts tormented her. Had he ever hoped that one day they would meet? He had never made any attempt to contact her.
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?