by Penny Jordan
They went up the stairs and he rapped briefly on one of the doors, opening it and gently pushing Shelley into the room ahead of him.
The Condessa was up and dressed and sitting at a small writing desk. In the bright morning sunlight she looked pale and drawn; pain shadowed her eyes, and Shelley could see that what she had taken for pride and indifference was in fact merely an agonising effort at self-control.
Watching Jaime bend to kiss his mother’s cheek, Shelley felt an unfamiliar wave of pity for her stepmother.
‘I have brought her to you, Mama, and now it is up to you to persuade her to stay. This afternoon I am taking her to the villa, and now I must leave you both to go and inspect the vines.’
‘Poor Jaime; he has to work very hard—unlike his father, and yet I think he enjoys it.’
Although she spoke briskly Shelley could see the hesitation in her eyes.
‘Jaime has told me the story of how you came to know about your father. We had no idea. He was such a wonderful man.’ Her voice wavered and became thready. ‘I cannot tell you…’
Incredibly, Shelley found that it was she who comforted the Condessa and not the other way round, for who could not pity this woman in her loss?
‘It was his dearest wish to be reunited with you…’
‘Perhaps it was as well he wasn’t,’ said Shelley wryly, trying to lighten the atmosphere. ‘He might have been badly disappointed.’
To her relief the Condessa smiled slightly. ‘Ah, now I can see that you are his child. You speak very much as he did. That same dry humour.’
She opened a drawer in her desk and withdrew a heavy photograph album, which she proffered to Shelley, with a hesitant, ‘I thought you might…’
‘Oh, yes!’
With those two words Shelley effectively destroyed the barriers between them. With a voice that gradually grew stronger and firmer, the Condessa took Shelley slowly through the album.
She saw that she took her own bone structure from her father; that he was tall, and that his eyes, as she might have expected, were those of a compassionate man. She saw him standing with the Condessa on their wedding day, one arm round a much younger and stiff-backed Jaime’s shoulders. She saw him playing with both Jaime and Carlota, working in the vineyard and at his easel, and through the Condessa she saw not just the photographs but also the living man.
When the last page of the album had been turned, the Condessa closed it and put it on one side before looking uncertainly at Shelley.
‘I loved your father very much—all the more, perhaps, because of my unhappiness during my first marriage. I’d like to be given the opportunity to love you as well, Shelley, if you can bring yourself to…’
Shaking her head to silence her, Shelley reached out to touch her hand.
‘Let’s start again, shall we?’ she suggested softly.
The Condessa got up and kissed her warmly. ‘At the end of the week we go to Lisbon for a month, and of course you must come with us. The family will want to see you…’ As though she guessed that Shelley was going to refuse, she hurried on, ‘Please, it is what your father would have wished. We are your family now, Shelley.’
‘I…’
She could get the time off work. She hadn’t had any holidays the previous year, and wasn’t that one of the things that had brought her to Portugal in the first place? A desire to be part of her father’s second family?
‘You must.’ The Condessa was suddenly more assured and in control. ‘Jaime will insist. Your father was very anxious that the two of you should meet. He had hoped—’ she broke off and sighed. ‘Your father was a very romantic man; it was one of his dreams that you and Jaime might fall in love as we did.’
It was hard to conceal her shock, but somehow Shelley managed it. In a bemused state of mind she allowed herself to be swept along with the Condessa’s plans, and learned that her stepmother had high hopes of a romance developing between Carlota and one of her second cousins.
‘Not that I believe in arranged marriages for my children, you understand…but Santos is a charming young man and already very much in love with Carlota.’
As her father had hoped she might fall in love with Jaime?
Over lunch Shelley discovered that Carlota, far from being the shy, withdrawn teenager she had anticipated, was in reality cheerfully extrovert, with a heartwarming tendency to speak first and think afterwards. She also discovered that the Condessa and her two children shared the sort of family intimacy she had always envied, with Jaime occasionally interrupting his sister’s boisterous chatter to remind her rather drily that they had all agreed they would try to give Shelley a good impression of them, this second time round.
‘I never thought you were right about her in the first place,’ Carlota told him with considerable relish. ‘You see, I knew that anyone who was part of Papa Philip must have something good about them,’ she told Shelley steadily.
At the end of the table the Condessa sighed.
‘We should have shared your faith, Carlota. I hope that Shelley can forgive us…’
‘There were extenuating circumstances,’ interrupted Shelley firmly. ‘And as I said this morning, I think we should have a fresh start. In your position I’m sure that I too would have leapt to similar conclusions.’
‘That’s very generous of you.’ This time is was Jaime who spoke. Shelley couldn’t help wondering what he had thought of her father’s romantic hopes for them. Latin males had a very strong sense of family loyalty, but surely not strong enough to lead them into marriage?
‘Luisa said you spent an awfully long time with Mama this morning,’ Carlota commented to Shelley. ‘I hope she persuaded you to come to Lisbon with us.’ She made a wry face. ‘It’s so stuffy having to see all the family, but I promise you they’ll all dote on you, Shelley. All of them adored Papa Philip.’
‘Shelley is coming to Lisbon with us,’ confirmed the Condessa, adding briskly, ‘and you will not speak of the family like that, please, Carlota. Sometimes I wonder if another two years at school…’
‘School…’ Carlotta pulled a face. ‘It wouldn’t have done any good. You know I’m not academic, Mama.’
‘I certainly know that you don’t try to be,’ agreed her parent drily. ‘Now finish your lunch. Jaime is going to take Shelley to the villa this afternoon.’ A shadow crossed her face. ‘I should come with you, Shelley, but I know you’ll understand when I say that I’m not ready to face the memories it holds yet…it was there that your father and I first met…’ The older woman looked tired and drained again.
‘I’m glad you have agreed to come to Lisbon with us,’ Jaime commented a little later when he met Shelley outside the house. He gave her a brief sideways look and added softly, ‘It will give us a chance to get to know one another better, and it will also do my mother good to have you to fuss over and show off. It might help to take her mind off her grief—at least a little. She is not well herself. Her heart is not strong. We feared when your father first died that she herself would simply give up and fade away, but now that you have come…’
As he guided her towards the car parked in front of the quinta, Shelley wondered why the Condessa had told her about her father’s private hopes for her and Jaime. Surely she too was not thinking… But no, she was letting her imagination run away with her. Those sort of family-connived-at marriages were out of date these days. And yet there was her inheritance, an inheritance which tied her very securely to her new family. Could that inheritance have been in the nature of a ‘dowry’, a bribe even to Jaime so that he…? But no, she was being ridiculous. He was not the sort of man who would allow his life to be organised for him like that.
‘You know, scarcely a day goes by when I do not miss your father. He was a very special man.’
He helped her into a comfortably upholstered Mercedes—a far cry from her own utilitarian vehicle. The inside of the car smelled of leather mixed with the faint tang of a masculine cologne. Shelley found it acutely disturbin
g, reminding her as it did of the scent of Jaime’s skin.
‘You obviously thought a lot of him,’ she responded tautly, and then tensed as another thought slid as smoothly as cream into her mind. Just how deep was Jaime’s love for her father? Deep enough for him to marry a woman he did not really love? This wasn’t England. Here a man might marry and yet still maintain a completely separate life, independent from his wife and family. Marriages in this part of the world were not always the union of two people deeply in love. A faint pulse of fear began to travel along her veins. But why was she getting so tense and worked up? Even if Jaime did have some sort of weird idea of proposing marriage to her because he felt it was what her father would have wished, she was perfectly free to refuse him.
But was she strong enough to refuse him? This man had already aroused within her a maelstrom of emotions more intense than anything she had experienced before. In a short space of time she had gone from loathing him to…loving him? No! Never! And yet… She shivered.
‘Cold? It must be the air-conditioning. I’ll turn it down, shall I?’
Shelley forced herself to appear relaxed. How had it happened? And why? She had not come to the Algarve looking for romance, far from it, and especially not with this man. If she had been asked she would have said that he simply wasn’t her type. Too masculine and assured, too good-looking, too…too everything. The men she dated were normally far less vigorously drawn, the sort of men one could pass without noticing in the street, while Jaime… Jaime would always stand out, would always command female attention.
She didn’t want to love him, she realised, subduing a sudden flood of panic. That wasn’t what she wanted at all. It was true that she had come to the Algarve subconsciously hoping that she might find the warmth and sharing of a family life that had always eluded her, that she would lose her aloneness, but there was nothing remotely fraternal in the way she felt about Jaime. Nothing at all.
Half against her will, she found her head turning so that she could look at him.
Thick black hair curled into the nape of his neck beneath the collar of his shirt. His throat where it rose from the soft white fabric was tanned and strong, his profile slightly harsh.
‘Taking an inventory?’
His voice mocked her, a sensual gleam lightening his eyes as he turned to look at her, laughter curling his mouth as he saw the guilty colour flood her skin.
When he reached out and touched her hot cheek she almost flinched.
‘You’re very nervous. Is it me, or…?’
Shelley shook her head quickly.
‘I…I just don’t like being touched.’ Her grandmother had rarely touched her, and had in fact, without saying so in as many words, implied that she disapproved of Shelley’s own childish desire to be hugged and kissed, and so as she grew up Shelley had gradually grown more and more withdrawn, until as a teenager she had actively disliked anyone touching her.
Even now, as an adult, she found it very difficult to respond to casual demonstrations of affection from her friends both male and female, but that wasn’t the reason she had flinched away from Jaime’s lightly caressing fingers.
‘Shouldn’t you be concentrating on your driving?’
In other circumstances she would have laughed at the primness of her own voice, but now she felt too disturbed by the acuteness of her physical response. Her skin seemed to burn where Jaime had touched her, and she refused to look at him, instead staring out of the window.
They had left the vines behind and were driving through the pine forest now. In places it seemed quite dense, and she shivered a little as the trees blotted out the heat of the sun.
Jaime didn’t drive into the village but skirted round it, and when they came in view of the sea, and the hotel complex being built down the coast, Shelley said impulsively, ‘It seems such a shame to spoil the countryside with something like that. It seems so peaceful round here.’
‘It is a very quiet rural area—or at least it has been, but the hotel will mean new jobs and more money.’
‘It still seems to be an eyesore.’
Jaime shrugged as he stopped outside the villa. ‘Maybe, but you can’t see it from the quinta,’ he told her obliquely.
The villa was a lot smaller than the quinta, and the locked door in the exterior wall led into an enclosed courtyard. Flowers tumbled from terracotta pots to provide bright splashes of colour against the whiteness of the walls. The courtyard was too small for a pool, but there was a table and some chairs in one corner shaded by a small arbour of bougainvillaea.
‘Shall we go inside?’
Shelley had almost forgotten that Jaime was there, he had been so quiet. It was almost as though he knew that she had been picturing her father sitting there.
‘He used to work upstairs on the balcony,’ he told her softly. ‘He used to do a lot of seascapes. They sold very well, although he once told me that he painted for enjoyment more than anything else. He believed that he was a better businessman than he was a painter.’
He touched her arm, and Shelley followed him into the house, bumping into something in the darkness. Behind her Jaime reached for a light switch and she blinked in the brightness of the illumination.
Wooden shutters kept out the daylight. The room was simply furnished, but the wooden frame of the sofa had a rich patina and the cotton-covered cushions looked bright and comfortable.
‘The villa is only quite small,’ Jaime told her. ‘Just this sitting-room downstairs, a small dining-room and the kitchen—I’ll show you those later. There’s something else I want you to see first.’
Curious, Shelley followed him up a narrow flight of stairs. Three doors led off it, but it wasn’t those that held her attention; it was the framed portraits that lined almost every inch of wall space in the long narrow hallway.
Disbelievingly she stared at them, turning round and then round again. Her breath seemed to be suspended somewhere deep inside her chest, her heart drumming heavily. She went up to the first portrait and touched it with trembling fingers. Tears flooded her eyes as she tried to read the inscription.
Behind her, she heard Jaime say in a quiet voice, ‘There was another, the first one he did, but I destroyed it. I was jealous, you see, of this unknown girl who occupied so much of Papa Philip’s time and attention. I thought he would be angry with me—my mother was—but instead he was just very sad. He painted them because they were all he had of you. One for every year from the year he first found out about you. He painted one every year after that…trying to guess how you would have grown…changed…’ He went up to the last painting and took it down, carrying it back to her, holding it so that he could study both her and the portrait.
‘It’s a remarkable likeness, isn’t it?’
Shelley nodded, too moved to speak. Here in this small, enclosed space was the real evidence of her father’s love; here in these portraits that he had painted of her. One for each year of her life after he had discovered she was alive.
‘The man who told him about you—he must have been a neighbour of yours at one time. He tried to help your father trace you, and when he couldn’t he sent your father some photographs of his own children that you were on. Your father said you looked very like your mother. I suppose that’s what helped him to guess what you would look like as you grew up.’
Shelley could only nod her head. The likeness that stared back at her from the canvas Jaime was holding was almost unbelievable. It was instantly recognisable as her, even though the hair was not quite right, shorter than her own, and darker, as she believed her mother’s had been.
‘Do you understand now why I was so resentful of you when you arrived…so determined to believe the worst?’ demanded Jaime huskily. ‘As a teenager I was deeply jealous of you, and although my jealousy faded as I grew to maturity, some of the resentment still lingered. Can you forgive me?’
Shelley bent her head. She didn’t want him to see her tears. She felt unbearably moved by what her father had d
one. She wanted to be left alone to study his portrait gallery of love, and yet at the same time she was frightened. Frightened of her own emotion, frightened that if Jaime wasn’t here with her, she would break down completely. How well she could understand his jealousy.
‘Shelley?’
She realised she hadn’t answered his question and looked up at him.
‘Shelley.’
She knew before he moved that he was going to take her in his arms, and she moved blindly towards him. The fierce pressure of his fingers gripping her arms and the heat of his mouth as it moved urgently on her own were shockingly unexpected, and for a moment she tensed. Jaime raised his head and looked down at her. ‘I want you, Shelley,’ he told her thickly. ‘I want you.’
Desire seemed to engulf them with devastating speed. The sensation of the hardness of the stairs against her back was forgotten in the white-hot heat of feeling as Jaime’s body moved against her own. His kiss deepened, turning her blood molten, his mouth moving to her cheek and then her throat, his hand easing aside the neck of her blouse so that he could caress her skin.
She shivered beneath his touch, wondering hazily why it was that just the touch of this man’s fingertips against her collar-bone could be so devastatingly arousing. Her breasts ached and pulsed, her nipples hard within the silk covering of her bra. When Jaime’s hand slid inside her blouse and cupped her fullness she tried to suppress the fierce sound of pleasure rising in her throat.
His fingers were on the buttons of her blouse, tugging impatiently. Eagerly she pressed against him, hazily aware that she should have been shocked by what he was doing, that she should have been stopping him instead of brazenly encouraging him, but the flood of relief that engulfed her when his hands cupped her breasts and not her bra told her how little she wanted to stop him and how much she wanted this deliriously aching pleasure.
‘I want you…’
The words were thick and indistinct, burning hot against her skin as his mouth travelled down her throat and over the softness of her body.