by Penny Jordan
Over lunch they talked. Jaime mentioned his father and was quite frank about the fact that they had never got on.
‘He was of the old school—he believed that children should be neither seen nor heard. I always seemed to irritate him somehow. He was not a man who believed in sparing the rod.’
He saw her shocked face and grimaced.
‘It was not perhaps so bad. I was away at boarding school most of the time, but I hated to see how he hurt and upset my mother. When he died I was glad. Does that shock you?’
Shelley shook her head. ‘No…not at all. I felt the same way about my grandmother. I didn’t realise then what her death would mean. I was too old to be adopted, so I was moved from one set of foster-parents to another until I was old enough to go to university. It wasn’t until I left there that I realised that my grandmother had probably always resented me—that wasn’t her fault, nor was it her fault that she couldn’t love me—she had loved my mother and she had lost her.’
‘But it was her fault that she deliberately deceived your father.’
‘Yes, but I can’t let that make me bitter. Bitterness can’t bring back the past.’
Across the table Jaime covered her hand.
‘Your father was a wonderful man. It was he who taught me to take a more distant view of my own father. He helped me to understand that the flaws in my father’s personality were his responsibility and not mine. Up until then I’d always felt guilty because I wasn’t the son my father wanted. When he was angry with me he used to blame my deficiences on my English blood. He thought I was too soft. That was one of the reasons he sent me to boarding school.’
He saw Shelley shudder and said quietly, ‘Yes, I agree. No child of ours will be brought up that way. I want our children with us. You do want children, don’t you, Shelley?’
Something quivered inside her, a knowledge born that she hadn’t guessed was there. ‘Yes, very much.’ Especially your children, she wanted to say, but she held the words back.
‘If we have a son I should like to name him for your father.’
Tears stung her eyes. ‘I would like that, too.’
‘I hope they will like animals. That was the one interest I shared with my father, but he never really loved his polo ponies. He used to say that I was too sentimental. I think when we marry that my mother and Carlota will come to live here in Lisbon. Most of her friends and family are here. While she had your father the quinta was enough for her, but now…’
He didn’t need to go on. Shelley could guess how empty the quinta must seem to the Condessa without the man she loved in it.
‘You will not have a totally easy life,’ Jaime warned her. ‘Luisa and her mother are employed by my mother, and although I can afford to pay for help in the running of the quinta I am not an immensely wealthy man. Neither am I a poor one. The quinta makes progress every year, and there will always be enough money for us to have a comfortable life.’
‘I wouldn’t want to be surrounded by servants and waited on hand and foot,’ Shelley assured him truthfully. ‘I want to run my own home, bring up my own children.’
‘And so you shall.’ He was still holding her hand and he raised it to his lips, softly caressing her fingertips, her stomach turned to jelly, her breath leaking painfully away.
‘Right now there is nothing I want more than to make love to you’ Jaime told her softly. ‘Don’t make me wait too long, querida. I am not a particularly patient man, and my bed feels lonely and cold at night.’
A vivid mental image of the two of them in bed together made her go weak at the knees. What on earth was she hesitating for? She knew she loved him, almost obsessively so; he loved her; he wanted to marry her. Suddenly she ached with her need for him, so much so that she didn’t want to wait any longer. She wanted him now…today…this afternoon.
Without daring to look at him, she said hesitantly, ‘We don’t have to wait—do we? Couldn’t we go to your apartment…’
There was a tense silence, and when she looked up at him there was a white line of tension round his mouth.
‘No. We could not.’
The harshness of his voice shattered her; the humiliation of his rejection striking right through her barriers, shattering her self-confidence.
‘Don’t look at me like that.’ His voice was softer, but his mouth still looked harsh. ‘I cannot take you to my apartment and make love to you as though we were no more than participants in a casual affair. Your father…’
Shelley stared at him. ‘Why do you want to marry me, Jaime?’ she demanded huskily. ‘Because of my father?’
Was this the reason for her unease? Was it because she sensed that Jaime wanted her because she was her father’s child?
‘That is not the reason I want to marry you,’ he told her flatly. ‘How could you think that? Although I will agree that it is part of the reason why I feel I cannot take you to my bed until we are married. Do you not think I have not thought a thousand times since we met of how it would feel to have your naked body in my arms, of how I would enjoy to give and take pleasure with mine? Do you think I have not felt exactly what you are feeling now, only a thousand times more so?’
She could see that he was angry, and his anger was reassuring.
‘Even if you were not your father’s child, the very fact that you are living under my mother’s roof, that you are a guest with our family…I am still Portuguese enough for these things to be important to me, querida. In this country a man does not deliberately embark on the seduction of innocence…or at least not until after the marriage ceremony. Then I promise you I will make you beg me to make love to you.’
He was making love to her now, Shelley thought dizzily. Just listening to his husky, muttered words was making her shiver with physical pleasure.
‘I believe we are having our first quarrel,’ he said wryly, the anger suddenly dying out of his eyes. ‘Let me take you out for dinner tonight, and then we will go dancing. At least that way I will get to hold you in my arms. Have you noticed how assiduous my mother has become at seeing that we are not left too much alone?’
Shelley had, and she grinned as she remembered what the Condessa had said to her. Suddenly she felt relaxed enough to talk to him about what was in her mind, although she wasn’t prepared for the thunderous look of anger her words provoked.
‘But Jaime, I must go back to England some time,’ she protested.
‘But not until after we are married,’ he countered stubbornly. ‘Why are you so anxious to go back now if it is not because secretly you wish to escape from me?’
He sounded so jealous that she was hard put not to smile.
‘I’ve already tried to explain,’ she said gently. ‘Everything’s happening too quickly for me. I need time…and living so close to one another like this isn’t giving me the distance I need to accustom myself to the fact that we are going to get married. It isn’t that I don’t love you…I just need time. I could go home for, say, two months, to settle everything over there, and then come back…’
She could tell that Jaime wasn’t happy about her suggestion, but she really felt she need a brief period of respite and reality before she could actually commit herself to marriage. The separation she was suggesting was as much for Jaime’s sake as her own, although once again she found his vehemence oddly out of character for a man who was in every other way so self-contained and controlled.
‘You’re obviously determined about this?’
‘About going home for a short time? Yes…yes, I am…’ She met and held his eyes. ‘We don’t really know one another yet, Jaime.’
‘I know that I love you,’ he countered roughly, ‘and I thought you loved me.’
‘I do.’
His expression softened slightly. ‘Very well. Let’s discuss it properly tomorrow.’
‘But tonight…’
‘Not tonight,’ he said firmly. ‘Tonight is for romance.’
‘You won’t get me to change my mind, Jaime,’ she warned him.
He looked at her and smiled, and later she was to remember that smile and deride herself for her own naïveté.
* * *
Although the Condessa had wanted to buy her some new clothes, Shelley had baulked at allowing her to pay for them, and had insisted on buying them out of her own money. Most of the clothes already in her wardrobe were chosen for their suitability for work, and it had been a novel experience to buy silky evening dresses and fashionably flimsy shoes.
She wore one of her new purchases that evening—an azure blue silk that draped cleverly round her body, hinting at its slim shapeliness without being revealing. One padded shoulder had a burst of sequins on it that caught the light as she went downstairs to meet Jaime, the long, tight sleeves hugging her slender arms.
He came out of his study just as she reached the bottom of the stairs, and the sight of him in a crisply formal dark dinner suit and an elegantly starched white shirt made her breath catch in her lungs.
‘I like you in that.’ Just the way he looked at her was a caress, heating her blood, and making her ache to be in his arms. ‘The colour suits you.’
‘Your mother chose it.’
How formal they sounded, almost as though he was just as nervous as she was herself.
‘The car’s outside.’
They were dining at what he had told her was one of Lisbon’s foremost nightclubs. Shelley dined out regularly as part and parcel of her work, but this was different; tonight she was with the man she loved.
Jaime took her hand as he led her into the foyer of the nightclub. A dinner-jacketed waiter showed them to their table, which was far enough away from the dance floor and the small band for the music not to be too intrusive. Several couples were already dancing as they were shown to their table. As she watched them, Shelley saw Jaime say something to the waiter, who quickly disappeared.
The elegance of the other diners confirmed Shelley’s initial impression that the nightclub was extremely exclusive. Nearly all the women wore evening dresses and expensive jewellery, and all the men were dinner-suited.
The waiter returned with an ice bucket which he ceremoniously placed beside the table. Two glasses followed.
‘I ordered champagne,’ Jamie murmured to her. ‘I hope you like it?’
The only time she could remember drinking it was at weddings, but the deliciously dry golden liquid that bubbled down her throat was very different from the comparatively tastless stuff she had drunk before. It seemed to dance along her veins before exploding in her stomach, lifting her into a mood of delicious excitement.
The waiter poured her a second glass while she was studying the menu, but she felt almost too light-headed to concentrate, and instead begged Jaime to order for her.
‘The champagne has made me too woolly-headed to know what I want to eat,’ she admitted as he raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m not normally so feeble.’
‘Nor am I the type who considers a woman isn’t capable of choosing her own food and wine, but on this occasion…’
He described several of the dishes to her, asking her for her preferences, and in the end they both settled for the same seafood cocktail with its special sauce, followed by lobster.
Shelley discovered that both of them shared a preference for fish as opposed to meat, and also that they both preferred to eat sparingly.
Over their champagne they discussed their views of health foods, and the importance of fresh, organically grown vegetables. Shelley was pleased to discover that, like her, Jaime believed a healthy diet was important. He told her about his efforts to grow his grapes as naturally as possible, explaining how the use of various chemicals affected the finished product.
They were so busy talking that Shelley was on her third glass of champagne before she realised she had already consumed two.
The arrival of their seafood cocktail helped to check the fuzzy dizziness induced by the champagne, but she was coming to accept that her life and her future lay with Jaime. Slowly she was coming to believe that he did love her, and that all her fears and anxiety sprang from the past rather than the present.
They were on their main course when they were interrupted by a tall, dark-haired woman who came over to their table and placed her hand caressingly in Jaime’s dark-suited arm. Her fingernails were long and painted the same deep red as her dress. Cold brown eyes surveyed Shelley contemptuously, as Jaime performed the introductions, and Shelley learned that the woman was the daughter of a business colleague of Jaime’s.
‘Oh come on, Jaime. There is much more to our relationship than that,’ she protested when he introduced her as such. The brown eyes held Shelley’s. ‘I’m sure your stepsister isn’t naïve enough to believe you live like a monk.’
Shelley tensed as she caught the determination in the other woman’s eyes. She wanted Shelley to know that there was something more intimate between them than mere friendship. The muscles in her stomach cramped protestingly and although it tasted like cardboard, Shelley forced herself to go on eating her meal with every evidence of enjoyment.
‘Shelley and I are going to be married.’
Jaime’s quiet words shocked the other woman; Shelley could see that. Her eyes widened and then hardened implacably.
‘I see…’ Her voice trickled down Shelley’s spine with the chill of ice cubes.
She turned to Jaime ‘Well, darling, I suppose you know what you’re doing. By the way, Papa would like you to call and see him about the new development.’
‘I’ll give him a ring next week.’
As she moved away from them Shelley caught the strong musky scent of the other woman’s perfume. It made her stomach churn with nausea. She couldn’t look at Jaime, so instead she concentrated on her meal.
‘Sofia and I were once lovers, as you’ve probably guessed.’ The cool words were said without emotion. ‘Before you ask: no, I didn’t love her, and neither did she love me…but she is a woman who tends to be possessive over what she thinks of as her property. I’m sorry she upset you.’
‘I’m not a fool, Jaime. I realise there will have been other women in your life.’
‘Maybe so…but knowing about them and being confronted by one are slightly different matters. Had our situations been reversed, I assure you I would have been far from sanguine.’
Shelley looke up at him in surprise. ‘You mean you would have been jealous?’
‘Is that so surprising? Of course I would, but I promise you you have no reason at all to be jealous of Sofia. We once had a brief affair, instigated by her, and long ago over, but she is the sort of woman who delights in making trouble.’
His words should have reassured her, but the other woman was so beautiful. Why had Jaime fallen in love with her and not Sofia? All her doubts came rushing back, her appetite completely gone. Sofia’s untimely appearance had destroyed her earlier euphoria, and Jaime was looking very grim. Shelley looked at him and saw that he was gazing across the room to Sofia’s table.
‘I didn’t realise you were involved in any business outside the quinta,’ she said huskily, trying to get her mind off Sofia. ‘What sort of business is her father engaged in?’
‘The construction industry. I sold him some land that was left to me by one of my father’s aunts. It is much further down the Algarve than the quinta. I believe he intends to build a hotel complex on it. Now, shall we forget all about Sofia and her father? Would you like a sweet, querida, or would you prefer to dance?’
All she really wanted to do was to leave, but instead she smiled and said that she felt too full up to eat a sweet.
‘Then I shall order coffee for us and then we shall dance. I hope you realise that the only reason I brought you here tonight is so that I can hold you in my arms, without taxing my self-control beyond its fragile limits,’ he teased, when he had ordered their coffee. ‘Because if not, I shall soon demonstrate to you that it is so.’
Later, held closely against his body as they moved together on the dance floor, Shelley refl
ected that it was no wonder that Sofia had been so catty with her. It would be very hard to lose a man like Jaime. With the knowledge she shivered, causing him to tighten his hold of her and look down into her eyes.
‘Are you cold?’
She shook her head and watched his expression change, passion replacing concern as he murmured against her skin.
‘Ah, perhaps you tremble because like me you wish we were engaged in a dance of another kind. Perhaps it is just as well you are my mother’s guest, querida, otherwise I might be tempted to steal you away in the fashion of my Moorish ancestors.’
Something in his voice made her retort waspishly, ‘These days women are not helpless victims to men’s desire, Jaime. We are able to think and feel for ourselves. Choose our own lovers…’
‘That is true,’ he agreed suavely a hint of a smile curving his mouth as he added, ‘but it is also surely true that as yet there is no way a woman can compel a man to make love to her if he does not have that desire.’
But could he manufacture that desire? The niggling thought subsided as the beat of the music slowed and their movements slowed with it. Shelley could feel the heart of Jaime’s body through their clothing. Surely this could only be real, and her doubts were just the product of her own lack of self-esteem? His hand caressed her waist through the silk of her dress and moved upwards to rest just beneath her breast. Sensation quivered through her as she felt the unmistakable arousal of his body, and with it a primitive stab of feminine victory. He and Sofia might once have been lovers, but now he was hers. Instinctively she pressed closer to him, shutting her doubts out of her mind, aching to be alone with him, to be possessed so completely by him that there wasn’t room for any more doubts. And yet hadn’t it been only this afternoon that she had told him she intended to go back to England to escape from just exactly this awareness of his sexual mastery over her, the same mastery that she was silently yearning for right now.
She felt his hand move down her back, caressing her spine. Her own hands slid beneath his jacket and she heard him catch his breath.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said roughly.