It was a long time since Cally had been kissed.

So long that she had almost forgotten how it felt to have a large hand cupping the back of her head and warm lips exploring her face. She closed her eyes and relaxed into his embrace, her heart thudding against her ribs as his lips found hers.

When she opened her eyes he was looking intently at her, his dark eyes brilliant with desire.

“Let’s go somewhere more comfortable and more private,” he said huskily. He stood up, drawing her with him. “My room…or yours?”

Dear Reader,

This is the second story I have set in Valdecarrasca, an imaginary Spanish village inspired by about twenty real villages in the lovely part of rural Spain where I’ve lived for the past ten years. The first book in the series was A Spanish Honeymoon (#3789). Other characters in this book have appeared before. The story of Richard and Nicola Russell is told in Turkish Delights, published by Harlequin® in 1993, while Simón and Cassia Mondragon appeared in A Night To Remember (1996).

Nowadays many readers buy their books online and join in discussions about their favorite romances on message boards such as the one at www.eHarlequin.com.

As a World Wide Web enthusiast, I believe the Web can be used to enhance our enjoyment of reading. While writing this book, I made a list of Web sites with pictures and text related to the story and its background.

If you would like to have this list of URLs (Web site addresses), e-mail me at anne@anneweale.com. Please bear in mind that I do a lot of traveling and may be away when your e-mail arrives. I’ll reply as soon as possible.

Happy reading!

Anne Weale

The Man from Madrid
Anne Weale

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ONE

THE muffled jangling of a distant bell made Cally give a soft snarl, the way Mog did when something annoyed him. Though, by nature, both she and the large tabby cat were good-tempered beings from whom smiles and purrs were more characteristic. It was just that right now she was busy preparing the bedrooms for tonight’s guests and didn’t want to be interrupted.

Leaving the floor mop propped against the wall, she crossed the landing, catching a glimpse of herself as she passed a large mirror. Any resemblance between the figure in jeans, T-shirt, sneakers and household gloves and her real self, the high-flying young businesswoman, designer-suited and always immaculately groomed, was ‘purely coincidental’ as the disclaimers in books said, she thought with wry humour. Who, seeing her now, would guess that a week ago she had been chairing a meeting in London?

Running down the three flights of stone stairs that connected the floors in the tall old Spanish house, she hurried to open the left-hand section of the massive door. In times gone by, when it was fully open, it had allowed a mule and cart to pass through to the stable at the rear of the premises.

In the street outside the great door stood a man of the type Cally had sometimes imagined but never actually met: a Spaniard to die for.

Well over six feet tall and built in proportion to his height, he had hair as dense and glossy as a black labrador’s coat and features that were a replica of those on the Moor’s head fountain in the village. Unlike the Moor he didn’t have a beard, only what might be designer stubble or merely the result of a mountain walker not bothering to shave for a couple of days ‘on the hill’ as the British walkers called their excursions into the mountains.

It was the heavy backpack he had shrugged off his broad shoulders and propped against his long legs that made her think he was a walker looking for a bed for the night.

He said, in Spanish, ‘Good afternoon, señorita. I’ve reserved a room for three nights. My name is Nicolás Llorca.’

When someone, a woman, had made the reservation by telephone, Cally had assumed that Señor Llorca was a company representative, using the casa rural owned by her parents as an inexpensive base for his sales sorties in the area. During the week they rarely had Spanish guests and not many at weekends. Most of their visitors were foreigners like her father and mother.

‘Please come in, señor. We weren’t expecting you to arrive until later, but everything is ready for you,’ she answered, in the fluent Spanish he was unlikely to guess was not her native tongue.

‘Have you come far?’ she asked, as he ducked his head to avoid hitting the lintel of the wicket door made in an era when Spanish country people were rarely if ever six-footers.

‘Not far.’ He left it at that. So far he had not smiled as men usually did when they met her—especially Spanish men.

Not the friendly type, thought Cally.

She said, ‘I expect you’d like to dump your pack before you do anything else. I’ll show you your room.’

Leading the way back to the top of the house, she wondered if the bed in the room she had planned to give him would be long enough for someone of his height. Perhaps it would be better to switch him to the room with a cama de matrimonio where he could lie diagonally.

The other double rooms had twin beds, but then most of the couples who came here looked as if, like her parents, they had given up sex some time ago. Cally had been told by a Spanish friend that, in rural Spain, the hurly-burly of the marriage bed came to an end at the menopause. After that husbands had to look elsewhere for those pleasures. If true, it seemed a sad state of affairs.

Opening the door of the room she had decided to give him, Cally walked in ahead of him.

‘I hope you’ll be comfortable here. There’s a shower with plenty of hot water.’ She indicated the door leading off the bedroom. ‘Dinner is from half-past seven because we have a lot of foreign guests. We’d be grateful if you’d be at the table not later than nine. Our cook doesn’t live in and likes to go home by ten. If there’s anything you need, you have only to ask.’

While she was speaking, Señor Llorca had been giving the room a comprehensive glance, taking in the furniture that had seen better days before being refreshed and made harmonious by a coat of paint and some simple stencils, the inexpensive rush mats and the pictures picked up for a few hundred pesetas at rastros.

What he thought of it—whether it was better or worse than the rooms he was used to sleeping in—was impossible to tell.

‘Thank you,’ he said politely.

‘There’s a roof terrace with a nice view of the valley just across the landing. If you’d like a cold beer, there’s an honour bar on the landing,’ Cally informed him. ‘It would be helpful if you’d bring used glasses down to the main bar when you’ve finished with them.’

With that she removed herself from his presence.

Left to himself, Nicolás opened his pack, took out his wash pack, put it on the end of the bed and started to strip off.

For reasons of his own, this morning he had left his car in the care of a reputable garage in a town ten kilometres away and spent the day following tracks through the mountains which eventually had led him here, to the village of Valdecarrasca, where he intended to stay for as long as was necessary to achieve his several objectives.

As the girl who had let him in had promised, there was an ample supply of hot water. Removing the fiddly little freebie of wrapped soap from the soap rack, he replaced it with his own larger bar, and enjoyed an all-over lather to remove the sweat brought on by a long tramp under a hot sun.

Although it was October, and the leaves on the vines he had passed on the road leading into the village were turning brown or dark red, the weather was still very hot by northern European and North American standards.

Thinking about the girl, as he used the freebie mini-bottle of shampoo on his hair, he was puzzled by her. All the people in these parts spoke two languages: Valenciano, the language of this region of Spain, and castellano or Castilian, the lingua franca of all Spain.

She had welcomed him in castellano, speaking it with an accent that would not have surprised him in his own milieu in Madrid but was unusual coming from a cleaner in a small village environment. But then her whole manner had surprised him: her self-possession, amounting almost to an air of authority, and her total lack of what he categorised as girly come-ons. He might have been sixty for all the personal interest she had shown in him.

Accustomed to a level of interest that might have flattered him when he was eighteen but that he could do without now, Nicolás found her indifference to him refreshing.

Thinking about her narrow waist and trim but rounded backside going ahead of him up the staircase, he found himself becoming aroused. Amusing oneself with country girls had been acceptable in his father’s and grandfather’s time. But it was not his style. There were plenty of sophisticated young women in Madrid willing to co-operate when he needed feminine companionship, and perhaps, one day, he would marry one of them. But unlike his brother he was under no obligation to choose a bride. Also having seen at close quarters the uncomfortable relationships into which marriage usually deteriorated after a few years, he was in no hurry to try it.

Turning the shower’s control from hot to cold, he also switched his thoughts to the reasons he was here.

At six o’clock, Cally was laying the long table where everyone staying with them would eat, when she heard male footsteps on the stairs. Moments later she heard the Spaniard asking if anyone was about.

She went round the corner from the dining area of the ground floor into the lounge area. ‘I’m here. How can I help you?’

He had shaved, she noticed, and changed into light-coloured chinos and a check cotton shirt in place of the jeans and navy T-shirt he had been wearing on arrival.

‘I suppose it would be too much to hope that, in a building of this age, you have a socket where I can plug in the modem of my computer?’ He was carrying a small black case.

When she was in Spain, a computer was Cally’s lifeline. But she didn’t tell him that. She said, ‘The office has a modem socket. We’re too rural to have broadband here, but we do have two telephone lines so you won’t be blocking incoming calls. Just make a note of how long you’re online, please.’

She showed him the small room, off the lounge, she had fixed up as an office. As it had no window, she switched on a wall light and desk lamp. The desk was clear of clutter. She gestured for him to use it.

‘If your cable isn’t long enough to reach the socket—’ pointing to where it was ‘—there’s an extension lead you can use.’

‘Thanks, but that won’t be a problem. Do you have many guests who want to use the Internet?’ He sounded surprised.

‘Not many, but we do have business people staying here on week nights. Until you arrived with your backpack, I thought you were probably one of them. If you have any problems, just call. My name is Cally.’

When she would have left him, he forced her to pause by asking, ‘What is Cally short for?’

‘Calista…but no one uses it.’

‘Would you rather they did?’

She shrugged. ‘I’ve been used to the short form since childhood. Can I get you something to drink while you’re picking up your mail?’

‘A lager would be good.’

‘Coming up.’ She went to fetch it.

Like him, she had changed, he had noticed. Now she was wearing a black skirt that hugged her hips but was full at the hem and a T-shirt that showed the shape and size of her breasts, neither too small nor too heavy. Her waist was cinched by a red belt, and her shoulder-length hair, which earlier had been secured by one of those stretchy things, was now held by a red plastic clip. Like all Spanish women, she had pierced ears. He hadn’t noticed her earrings earlier, but this evening she was wearing small silver beads that caught the light when she turned her head.

By the time she came back with a tall glass and a bottle of San Miguel on a small tray, Nicolás had logged on and was waiting for his emails to finish downloading.

He looked up at her and said, ‘Gracias.’

Without glancing at him or the bright screen, she murmured, ‘De nada,’ and turned away.

She had a musical voice and good ankles, he noticed before she disappeared. Then, starting to open the emails, he forgot about her.

As Cally finished laying the table, her father came home. Shortly before Señor Llorca’s arrival, he had gone to the ferretería in a neighbouring village to buy some screws. She knew why the errand had taken so long but, unlike her mother, she wouldn’t make a sarcastic comment and he wouldn’t make an excuse.

Cally had learnt long ago that her father and mother were not like ordinary parents. They were the adult equivalent of juvenile delinquents: irresponsible, bolshie, sometimes endearing, more often exasperating.

She had loved them when she was small but gradually, over the years, her affection had been eroded by the realisation that neither of them loved anyone but themselves.

Fortunately she had also had a grandmother—dead now—who had rescued her from some of her parents’ worst excesses by paying for her to go to a boarding school in England and having her to stay for much of the holidays.

‘Have all the punters shown up?’ her father asked. When they were not in earshot, he always referred to his paying guests as the punters.

It had not been Douglas Haig’s idea to take on a casa rural. As with most of their attempts to make money, or at least keep a roof over their heads, it was Cally’s mother who had been the driving force. But he didn’t mind running the bar and playing the genial host.

‘Yes…all present and correct,’ said Cally. ‘I expect they’ll be down before long.’

As she spoke, the wicket door opened and a small plump woman with an old-fashioned cotton wraparound pinafore over her dress came in. This was Juanita, a widowed neighbour who cooked the evening meal when Mary Haig had one of her migraines or, as now, was away.

Juanita and Cally were chatting in Valenciano when a couple who had introduced themselves as Jim and Betty came down the stairs. Their room had been booked by Jim whose surname was Smith. But it wouldn’t have surprised Cally to learn that Betty had a different surname. That they might be in a partnership rather than a marriage mattered not a jot to her. She had never had a long-term partner or relationship herself. What other people did was their business. But Jim and Betty were of the generation who had grown up when ‘living in sin’ was something people frowned on, and it might be that they did not feel entirely comfortable about their present status. There has been an occasion when two elderly couples who hadn’t met before had been staying at the casa rural and one of the women had made a remark about ‘your husband’ to the other, causing visible embarrassment. Since then, Cally had been careful never to jump to conclusions that might not be correct.

‘Good evening. Would you like a drink? The bar is open,’ she told them, as Juanita bustled away to start preparing the menu they had agreed on earlier.

Sometimes, when all the guests were reserved types, it was necessary to do some ice-breaking to encourage them to socialise. Tonight, however, they were all outgoing personalities and were soon talking nineteen to the dozen, the men discussing golf courses and the women comparing notes about children and grandchildren.

To her surprise, while pre-dinner drinks were still in progress, Señor Llorca appeared. This was unexpected. Even in country areas the Spanish had their evening meal much later than most of the foreigners, and in the big cities they dined very late indeed.

Her father had joined the golfing-talk group, and Cally was behind the bar, reading El Mundo, a Spanish paper she had bought that morning but hadn’t had time to look at. As the Spaniard approached the bar, Juanita came to the hatch that connected the bar with the kitchen and asked a question.

Cally answered her, then turned back to face the Spaniard. ‘Another San Miguel?’ she asked.

‘No, I’ll have a glass of wine—red, please.’ He sat down on one of the bar stools, which reduced his height slightly but still kept his eyes on a level well above hers.

‘The house wine is “on the house”, but if you’d prefer something better we have quite a good cellar.’ She handed him their wine list.

As he scanned it, she studied his face, taking in the details that combined to give it as powerful an impact as the lean and authoritative features of the Moor who had once ruled this region and whose followers, by intermarrying with the indigenous people of Spain, had bequeathed their dark eyes and proud profiles through many generations to people living today.

In this man the evidence of his lineage was particularly striking. His cheekbones, the cut of his jaw, the blade-like bridge of his nose and, above all, his dark-olive skin and black eyebrows and hair, combined to give him the air of having stepped down from a painting of a time in Spanish history that had always strongly appealed to her.

He gave the list back to her. ‘I’ll try your house wine.’

Perhaps he couldn’t afford the expensive wines, she thought, as she filled a glass for him. Though he didn’t give the impression of being hard up. Lightweight, slimline computers, such as the one he had been using in the office, were usually a lot more expensive than bulkier laptops.

‘You speak Valenciano,’ he said, referring to her brief exchange with Juanita. ‘Were you born in this village?’

Cally shook her head. ‘I was born in Andalucia. I’ve lived in several parts of Spain. Which reminds me, I forgot to ask for your identity card when you arrived. We have to keep a record of our visitors. If you don’t have it on you, later will do.’

‘I have it.’ He reached into his back pocket and produced a wallet. His identity card was slotted into one of the pockets designed for credit cards, of which he had an impressive array, she noticed.

‘Thank you.’ After making a note of the details, she handed it back, noticing, as he took it, the elegant length of his fingers and the absence of a wedding ring.

‘Is there room at the table for me to eat with the rest of your visitors?’ he asked.

‘Certainly. We can seat twenty people. If we don’t have a full house, the proprietor and I eat with the guests. But I ought to warn you that, although the others all live in Spain, they’re unlikely to speak more than a few words of Spanish. They come from the expat communities on the coast where they don’t need to be fluent, or even to speak Spanish at all.’

For the first time, he smiled at her. The effect of it startled Cally. Even when younger, she had never been as susceptible to masculine charm as most of her girlfriends. Now, at twenty-seven, she was almost immune to it. Yet when this man flashed his white teeth at her, she felt almost as powerful a reaction as if he had leaned across the bar and kissed her.

‘I have some English,’ he said. ‘Enough to make polite conversation. But they’ll be too busy talking to each other to pay much attention to me. If it’s possible, I’d like to sit where I can talk to you…about this village and the valley,’ he added. ‘Or, if you will be busy keeping an eye on the guests, perhaps I can talk to the proprietor. Does he speak Spanish?’

‘Not very much,’ said Cally. ‘Señora Haig has a better command, but she’s away at the moment. I expect I can tell you whatever you want to know.’

‘How long have you worked for them?’

Before she could explain that she didn’t work for them, one of the guests came to the bar to have his glass refilled. ‘Same again, please, love,’ he said to Cally, and then, to the Spaniard, ‘Buenas tardes, señor. Hace bueno hoy.’

His Spanish accent was terrible, but his intentions were good, and the younger man smiled as he answered, in English, ‘Good evening. Yes, it’s been a very nice day and the forecast for tomorrow is the same. But then Spain’s excellent weather is what brought you to this country, I expect.’

‘You’re right there, chum,’ said the Englishman, visibly relieved that he wasn’t going to have to stretch what was probably a very limited repertoire of Spanish phrases.

Cally was adjusting to the discovery that Nicolás Llorca spoke English with no trace of a Spanish accent. To speak it so perfectly, he must have learnt it very early in life and use it as frequently as she used his language.

She felt slightly annoyed that he hadn’t made that clear to her. To tell her he had ‘some English’ had been deliberately misleading. Clearly, the man was bilingual and should have said so.

She wondered if he had minded being addressed as ‘chum’. The Englishman hadn’t intended to be offensive, in fact had been trying to be friendly. The trouble with the British was that they lacked an instinctive sensitivity to the manners and customs of other nationalities. Americans tended to be the same. They both assumed that the kind of easy familiarity they took for granted was acceptable everywhere. But sometimes it wasn’t.

‘No need to sit by yourself. Come and meet the rest of us,’ said the Englishman, with a gesture at the other foreigners.

The Spaniard rose from his stool. ‘Would you excuse me?’ he said to Cally.

‘Of course.’ His courtesy pleased her. It would have annoyed her if he had just walked away, as if a general factotum in a casa rural was not entitled to be treated like a lady. It would have shown he was no gentleman.

She watched him being introduced, or rather introducing himself to the older people: shaking hands with the men, kissing the hands of the women with an easy gallantry that suggested he was at home in circles where the gesture was commonplace.

When Cally announced that dinner was ready if they would like to take their places at the table, the foreign guests formed pairs and chose seats side by side, leaving the chair at the head of the table to be taken by her father while she and Nicolás Llorca sat at the opposite end.

Again his sophisticated manners came into play when he drew out a chair for her before seating himself. None of the other men present had done it for their companions.

‘Thank you, but why don’t you sit next to Peggy? Then you’ll have someone to talk to when I’m helping Juanita,’ she suggested.

‘Yes, come and sit beside me, dear,’ said Peggy, patting the seat of the chair he had been holding for Cally and giving him a skittish look. She was old enough to be his mother but was refusing to surrender to late middle-age. Her hair was an unnaturally vivid auburn, her tan the result of hours of dedicated sun-bathing, her bosom a masterpiece of uplift.

For the first course there was a choice of fish soup or salad. Juanita ladled out the sopa de pescado for those who wanted it while Cally took round the plates of ensalada and small bowls of alioli sauce. Baskets of bread were already on the table, thick slices of the pan integral she preferred mixed with softer white bread, a concession to guests reared on steam-baked English factory bread whose teeth might not be equal to dealing with crusts.

Nicolás, as she was starting to think of him, was listening to some dramatic anecdote told by Peggy when Cally slipped into the chair on his other side. Casting an anxious eye in her father’s direction, she recognised—though no one else would—signs that his neighbours’ conversation was boring him. And when he was bored he reached for the carafe of wine more often than when he was interested.

She thought longingly of the day she was due to fly back to her real life in London. She didn’t mind giving up two weeks of her holiday allowance to give her mother a break from Valdecarrasca, and her parents a break from each other. In some ways she enjoyed being here, surrounded by vineyards and mountains instead of city streets and traffic jams.

But being a commissioning editor for a major publishing house was no longer the secure, lifetime job it had been in the days when publishing had been famously described as ‘an occupation for gentlemen.’ Today it was a far more cutthroat business with take-overs and redundancies being as commonplace as in most other occupations.

What was worrying her at the moment was that Edmund & Burke, the imprint she worked for, had been taken over by a global corporation which had a new CEO. Everyone was waiting to see how this formidable woman, Harriet Stowe, would restructure the UK segment of the company. She had the reputation of being a ruthless decision-maker in whose view literary merit was unimportant compared with profitability. Edmund & Burke were famous for the quality of their books, but they didn’t produce bestsellers. It was on the cards that Ms Stowe might decide to axe them.

This was not, therefore, a good time for Cally to be away from the office. But her mother’s plan to visit a friend had been fixed long before the future of Edmund & Burke became uncertain, and Cally knew that, had the trip been postponed, her parents’ marriage would also have reached a crisis point. She lived in dread of them deciding to separate for neither had the resources to survive on their own. They were not happy together, but apart they would be in deeper trouble, and the burden on Cally would be even heavier than it was already.

From the other side of the table, Fred, who was Peggy’s companion, leaned towards Cally and said, ‘I suppose the people in the village who own all the little vineyards are rubbing their hands at the thought of selling them off to property developers. They can see themselves getting rich, the way the Spanish who owned land on the coast did back in the sixties and seventies.’

‘If the vineyards become building plots, the valley will lose all its charm,’ said Cally. ‘They’ll make money, but they’ll lose their quality of life. It’s a pity there aren’t more stringent planning laws. I don’t think people should be allowed to spoil the mountains by putting up holiday villas wherever they want. There should be a limit above which nothing can be built.’

‘There probably is,’ Fred said, grinning. ‘But the builders can get round that with a little of the old…’ He demonstrated his meaning by rubbing his thumb against the tips of his fingers. Then, looking at Nicolás, he added, ‘No offence meant, señor. But we all know it happens. Always has…always will.’

‘My country is not the only place where graft is used to get round the regulations,’ Nicolás answered dryly. ‘Bribery exists everywhere. But I agree with Señorita Cally that it would be a pity if the uncontrolled development that has marred too many stretches of Spain’s coasts were allowed to continue inland. On the other hand, people like yourselves—’ with a gesture at the rest of the diners ‘—want to enjoy your retirement in a better climate, so some over-development here is inevitable.’

Turning to Cally, he asked, ‘What is your surname?’

‘Haig.’ She spelt it for him.

His black eyebrows shot up. ‘You’re half-British?’

‘I’m all-British. That’s my father at the end of the table.’

‘So that’s why you speak perfect English. I thought you were Spanish.’

‘Your English is perfect too. How does that come about?’

‘It’s a long story. I’ll explain some other time.’ Although his answer came smoothly, she had an intuitive feeling that somehow her question had put him on the spot. She couldn’t think of any reason why that should be the case, but she felt certain it was. For a moment she was tempted to press him, but she knew that it wouldn’t be right when he was a guest, albeit a paying guest.

In any case it was time to clear the first course and serve the second. This was one of Juanita’s specialities, berenjenas mudéjar.

‘I know berenjenas are what the Americans call eggplants and we call aubergines,’ Cally heard Peggy say to Nicolás, while she was taking the plates round. ‘But what does mudéjar mean?’

As no one else was speaking at that moment, everyone heard his reply.

‘Mudéjar refers to the Moors who stayed behind when Queen Isabella’s army had forced the Arabs who ruled a great part of Spain into retreat. The Moslems who stayed became slaves, but they were valued for their artistic gifts. You see their influence in what’s called the mudéjar architecture of the thirteenth century. This excellent dish is another reminder of how much this country owes to seven hundred years of Moorish culture.’

He lifted his glass of wine and looked at Juanita, still busy doling out steaming spoonfuls of baked sliced aubergines in a garlicky sauce. ‘A la cocinera…to the cook.’

As the others echoed his toast and Juanita beamed her gratification, Cally warmed to him on two counts: for his compliment to someone who was all too often ignored, and his grasp of his country’s history.

She wished it had been her father who had answered Peggy’s question and proposed the toast, but he never read books and he took the meals set before him, his clean clothes and all other creature comforts totally for granted. Perhaps it wasn’t his fault. He had been spoilt by his mother, her other grandmother, and was not the only man of his generation who thought it a woman’s duty to make things comfortable for the man in her life.

Which was one of the reasons why Cally had serious reservations about ever allowing another man into her life. She knew they were not all selfish encumbrances like her father, but many were, and it could be difficult to recognise a man’s true nature when, in the early stages of a relationship, he was on his best behaviour.

‘Hot plates. Now that is a treat,’ said Peggy. ‘So often, in Spanish restaurants, the plates are cold and it cools down the food before you’ve had time to enjoy it.’ She gave Nicolás a friendly nudge with her elbow. ‘I don’t mean to sound critical ’cos I love Spain. I wouldn’t go back to Birmingham if you paid me.’ She lifted her glass and looked round at the others. ‘Viva España!’

Cally had just placed a plate in front of Fred. Across the table she caught Nicolás’s eye. His face expressionless, he gave her a barely perceptible wink. It had a similar effect to his first smile: something turned over inside her.

Then, like the red light that flickered in the notification area of her computer’s monitor screen when her virus protection program detected something nasty in an email attachment, a voice in her head said, Watch it! This guy is dangerously attractive.

The berenjenas were followed by lamb cutlets with brown earthenware bowls of the vegetables that the Spanish usually served separately but the British liked to accompany their meat course.

Finally, there was a choice of puddings: Juanita’s homemade flan, Mrs Haig’s home-made ice cream, or Cally’s fruit salad, laced with kirsch.

‘You give excellent value for money,’ said Nicolás, who had waited for her to sit down before starting to eat his flan.

‘We try to. It’s the way to bring people back. But we have strong competition from other casas rurales in the region. What made you choose this one and how did you find us?’

‘I read a book by Rafael Cebrián about the mountains in this area. He describes a place called the Barranc de L’Infern, which sounds an interesting challenge. Have you heard of it?’

Cally nodded. The name meant the ravine of hell and everything she had heard made it sound a place to avoid. ‘There’ve been several accidents there…some of them fatal. It’s particularly dangerous after rain. You shouldn’t attempt it alone. You might never get out.’

‘Don’t worry. I’m going to go through with some guys who know what they’re doing.’ He paused, looking into her eyes with a curiously intent expression. ‘But I’m glad you’re concerned for my safety. When I arrived here, I had the feeling you didn’t much like the look of me.’

This was so far from her first reaction on seeing him—that he was the most fanciable male she had seen in a long time—that she almost laughed.

Instead she said coolly, ‘I’m sorry if I seemed unwelcoming. I didn’t mean to. Excuse me, I need to attend to the coffee.’

In the kitchen, Juanita said, ‘How long is he staying, the Madrileño?’

‘Three nights. How do you know he’s from Madrid?’

‘His voice…his manners…his air. He’s very handsome, don’t you think?’

‘Paco is handsome,’ said Cally, referring to the best-looking young man in the village who was a worry to his mother and had broken several girls’ hearts.

‘Paco es uno desgraciado,’ said Juanita contemptuously. ‘You can’t compare that good for nothing with a man of education and breeding. I worked for the upper classes when I was young. I recognise a gentleman when I see one.’

‘You’re a snob,’ Cally told her, smiling. ‘There are as many bad lots among the rich and the aristocrats as among ordinary people. Probably more.’

‘That’s true,’ the cook conceded. ‘They’re no better…but also no worse. Wouldn’t you rather be a rich man’s pampered wife than a poor man’s slave like your mother?’

She was devoted to Mary Haig but, having herself had a husband who spent too much time in bars, took a disapproving view of Douglas.

‘I would rather stand on my own feet and be independent,’ said Cally.

‘You can say that now, while you’re still at your best. You won’t always be young and attractive. A time will come when you’ll want some babies and a man to keep you warm in bed. I know you have a fine career in London, but when you are thirty-five you may not find it so satisfying.’

At the dining table, Nicolás was listening to Peggy but thinking about Cally. He had perfected the art of seeming to be engrossed by older women’s conversation while following his own train of thought at his mother’s dinner parties. Sometimes she roped him in to fill a gap and, though such occasions bored him, he felt an obligation to help her out when he could.

His mother was very rich, and had once been a beauty, but now she was deeply unhappy because cosmetic surgery could not preserve the ravishing face she had had in her youth and none of her husbands and lovers had lived up to her expectations. So now she was a pill junkie, filling her days with meaningless social engagements and pouring out her troubles to several shrinks and any of her five children who could be persuaded to listen to a tale of woe heard many times before.

Seeing at a glance that Cally’s father was what his American friends called a lush, Nicolás wondered why a girl of her obvious intelligence was wasting herself as a maid of all work in the backwoods of rural Spain. With her ear for languages, there must be better things for her to do.

He saw her coming back with the coffee tray and sprang up to take it from her.

‘Oh…thank you.’ When their fingers touched as she surrendered the tray to him, a charming flush gave her cheeks an apricot glow.

She wasn’t tanned like the other women. Her complexion suggested she spent little time in the sun. He preferred her creamy pallor to the almost orange colour of Peggy’s skin. Cally was like a solitary lily in a bed of garish African marigolds, he thought. Not that he disliked his fellow guests. He admired their courage in uprooting and transplanting themselves. They were enjoying their lives, more than could be said for his mother in her palacio in Madrid, or indeed for most of his bored and world-weary relations.

When Cally went to bed, most of the guests had already gone to their rooms. But her father, the man called Bob and Nicolás were still talking and drinking in the lounge. Nicolás was not drinking as much as the other two. In fact he had had only two or three glasses the whole evening. He wasn’t talking as much either, just asking the occasional question and listening intently to their replies.

She hoped he would go to his room soon, before it became obvious her father had drunk too much.

In bed, she turned with relief to the book she was reading, an out-of-print history of the early days of air travel that she found far more absorbing than the current crop of short-lived bestsellers. When the church clock struck eleven for the first time, she put it aside and turned out her bedside lamp. By the time, a few minutes later, it repeated the eleven chimes, she was settled down ready to sleep.

But when it began to strike midnight she was still awake, her mind in a whirl of uncertainty about the future. At half-past midnight she got up, shrugged on a thin cotton robe and took her small torch from the bedside table.

There were no sounds from below as she padded barefoot down the stairs, the tiled treads cool under her soles. The ground floor was in darkness. Someone, probably not her father, had remembered to switch out the lights.

In the office, she booted up the desktop computer she used while she was here and logged on to the Internet, hoping there might be an email from Nicola.

Nicola and her husband were both publishers. Richard Russell was the head of a big firm, Barking & Dollis, and Nicola was co-director of Trio, a much smaller firm. Having been through the misery of redundancy herself—in fact she had been sacked by the man who was now her adoring husband—Nicola was sympathetic to Cally’s anxieties and had promised to let her know if she heard any book trade gossip concerning Cally’s new boss.

Disappointed when no emails downloaded, Cally went to a favourite website that supplied links to the world of arts and letters. But there was nothing new there and, frustrated, she shut down the machine and went to the kitchen for a glass of water.

Three clean wine glasses were standing upside down on one of the worktops. Had Bob washed and dried them? She doubted it. His wife had said during dinner that he was useless in the kitchen.

That meant that the Madrileño, as Juanita called him, must have dealt with them. Which also meant that he had stayed in the lounge until her father finally called it a day. Cringing at the thought of Nicolás seeing her father in his cups, and perhaps even assisting his unsteady progress up the staircase, Cally put the glasses away.

Everything he had said and done had supported Juanita’s conviction that he was a caballero, the Spanish word that meant literally a horseman, but also the possessor of all the chivalrous qualities that distinguished a gentleman from lesser men.

Cally drank a tumbler of spring water brought from a font in the hills and made her way back up the stairs. Reluctant to return to bed, she decided to spend half an hour sitting outside on the roof terrace. As, unlike most Spanish houses, the casa rural had no patio, the terrace was the only place to enjoy some fresh air.

Except during cold snaps, the glazed door to the terrace was always left open, with a curtain of metal strands preventing flies from getting in. As she drew the curtain aside, she saw that one of the guests had had the same idea.

The cane armchair she had intended to sit in was occupied by Nicolás. His legs were crossed at the ankles and his bare feet were propped on the seat of another chair. Comfortably curled on his long lap was her parents’ cat, Mog, who normally made himself scarce when there were strangers in the house.

CHAPTER TWO

IF HE had been lost in thought, he reacted fast to the metallic rustle of the fly curtain as she swept it to one side. But he didn’t make a startled movement as she would have done.

Nicolás glanced over his shoulder, saw her standing in the doorway, and scooped the cat off his thighs before standing up and saying, in a quiet voice, ‘It’s too fine a night for sleeping. Come and join us. I’ve been making friends with your cat. I assume he’s the house cat. Or is he a neighbourhood cat who uses your terrace?’

‘He’s ours,’ said Cally, stepping on the terrace. ‘My mother was walking the dog she had a few years ago. They were crossing a dry river bed when she heard a kitten mewing. It was inside a plastic bag with the rest of the litter. They were about a week old. All the others were dead.’

Her tone was dispassionate, but even now, years later, remembering the incident made her blood boil with disgust for whoever had been too mean and heartless to dispose of the unwanted kittens humanely.

Nicolás’s response was equally unemotional. ‘There are some rotten people in the world,’ he said.

He was holding the cat as if it were a baby, on its back with his forearm under its spine and his other hand tickling its tummy. Mog, who normally disliked being touched by strangers, wasn’t lashing his tail but purring deep satisfied purrs.

Unbidden and unwelcome, the thought came to Cally that being held and caressed by Nicolás might cause her to purr as well. She rejected the notion as soon as it entered her mind. It must be the time of the month when her hormones were on the rampage.

The man was a stranger. She knew next to nothing about him. Because he had a way with cats didn’t mean he was equally good at making love to women. Even if he were, she was not into casual sex. She was not into sex, period. It was a snare and a delusion devised by Nature to trick people into perpetuating the species, though the trick didn’t work as well now that women had control of their bodies, at least to the extent of not getting pregnant. Controlling their reactions to the opposite sex was harder. But she had seen too many colleagues having their lives made wretched by disastrous relationships to want to risk it herself.

‘It’s very quiet here at night,’ said Nicolás, moving to sit on the low flat-topped wall that surrounded the terrace but in places was ranged with plant pots.

‘Some of our guests find the church clock disturbing.’

Against her better judgment, but reluctant to return to her room when the surrounding mountains were bathed in moonlight and the October night air was as balmy as a fine summer night in the UK, Cally sat down in the armchair he had vacated. Although she had a white lawn nightdress under her ankle-length robe, she was conscious of being without a bra or briefs. Perhaps this was because, apart from having bare feet, Nicolás was still dressed.

‘On the way to bed, I was looking at the bookshelves on the next landing. Would it be all right if I borrowed one to read in my room?’

‘Of course…that’s what they’re there for. But not many of our guests are bookworms. Mostly they’re TV-watchers.’

‘Did your parents build up the library, or did they inherit it from the previous owners of the house? Your father mentioned that he and your mother only set up the business about six years ago and had a bit of a struggle to get it going.’

‘It wasn’t easy at first. Some of the Spanish and all the German books came with the house. The last owner was a German botanist. A lot of the books I’ve found on rastros or in the secondhand paperback libraries catering to foreigners. The prices are low because most people take them back for a half-price refund, but I usually keep them.’

‘You would enjoy the bookshops and book fairs in Madrid. Have you been to my home town?’

‘Once, when we were living in the south, we had to get to England in a hurry for a family funeral. We put the car on the train at Algeciras and got off in Paris, with a stop of some hours in Madrid en route. I wanted to see the Goya paintings in the Prado, but it was closed that day. Juanita, who is cooking for us because my mother is away, went to Madrid last spring on a coach with other pensionistas from the village. She had a wonderful time. Have you always lived there?’

‘No, I was born and grew up in the country. I enjoy Madrid, but—’ He broke off as the cat suddenly sprang from his arms to the ground and then jumped onto another part of the wall and peered over the outer edge of it.

‘He’s heard something moving about under our neighbour’s roof tiles,’ said Cally, as Mog vanished. ‘He fancies himself as an ace hunter, but I’ve never known him to catch anything. You were saying you enjoy Madrid, but…’

‘But I wouldn’t want to live in a city all the time. It’s exciting and stimulating, but it can get a bit frenetic. I like to escape now and then.’

Cally was struck yet again by the fluency of his English but hesitated to press him for the explanation he had promised ‘some other time.’

‘Your situation is the reverse of mine,’ he went on. ‘Don’t you ever feel bored with Valdecarrasca? Does it offer enough excitement and stimulus for you?’

She debated telling him that she didn’t live here on a permanent basis and in fact was only an occasional visitor. But she didn’t feel inclined to talk about herself while there seemed to be things about himself he preferred not to divulge.

She said, ‘Nowhere is dull or isolated now that we have all resources of the World Wide Web at our fingertips.’

‘Do you spend a lot of time on the Web?’

‘Quite a lot. How about you?’

‘I subscribe to a couple of forums and read certain online columnists. What sort of things do you do?’

Cally had the feeling they were fencing with each other, neither wishing to reveal themselves. Yet all the time she was conscious of how attractive he was. She liked the way his hair sprang from his broad high forehead, the clear definition of his chin, the way the moonlight accentuated the slant of his cheekbones under the taut dark skin.

In her late teens, when she had sometimes indulged in romantic daydreams, this was the kind of face she had visualised but never seen in real life. Her parents had been living in Tarragona province then, and the Catalan men in that area had not been remarkable for their looks.

‘Mostly I read the book reviews at online bookshops. Sometimes I look at what’s on offer at the auction houses. The great thing about the Web is that it’s all things to all men…and all women,’ she said, smiling. ‘Whatever you’re interested in, you can find stuff about it and people who share your enthusiasms.’

‘Some people even find partners, one hears.’

Cally shrugged. ‘So they say. Perhaps, if one’s looking for a partner, it’s a good place to find one. I’ve often thought that people who aren’t good-looking are at a huge disadvantage in the real world. They may have wonderful minds but they get written off because their faces aren’t pretty or handsome.’

The church clock struck a single note. It was one o’clock in the morning, she realised, and in five hours’ time her alarm clock would wake her so that she could have an hour on the Internet before it was time to shower and dress and fetch barras of freshly baked bread for the guests’ breakfast.

‘Would you like a packed lunch tomorrow?’ she asked.

‘Is that part of the service?’

‘When we have mountain walkers staying with us—yes. We charge for the ingredients but not for the preparation. If you have a flask, we’ll fill it with coffee or tea. What would you like in your bread? Jamón serrano…cold chicken…sheep’s cheese and lettuce…chorizo?’

‘Jamón serrano would be excellent. I’d like to leave about nine, if that’s convenient? What time is breakfast?’

Cally stood up. ‘Most people have it between eight and nine. But you can have it as soon as I get back from the baker’s at half-past seven, if you like.’

‘Let’s say quarter to eight.’

‘Okay…goodnight.’

As she moved towards the doorway, he stepped ahead of her and swept the curtain aside.

‘Thank you.’ She had to pass very close to him to go through the opening. As she did so, she found herself wondering what she would do if he put his hand on her waist and turned her to face him.

But he only said, ‘Buenas noches.’

As the curtain fell into place behind her, Nicolás wondered what she would have done if he had obeyed his impulse to kiss her goodnight.

All the time they had been talking, he had been conscious that under her modest dressing gown and long filmy nightgown she had been naked. For some reason, although there was nothing overtly sexy about her, in her presence he was always aware of how soft she would feel under his hands. While he had been stroking the cat, a part of his mind had been thinking about stroking Cally.

Looking over the wall, he saw that the cat had its nose close to the edge of a Roman tile and was quivering with frustration because it couldn’t reach whatever was lurking under the tile.

I know the feeling, amigo, thought Nicolás. Leaving the cat to its fruitless vigil, he left the terrace and, switching on the landing light, selected a couple of books he had noticed earlier to distract him from thinking about Douglas Haig’s tempting daughter.

When, next morning, Cally went downstairs, the first thing she did was to fill the kettle with font water that had also been filtered to remove some of the cal that quickly furred up the kettle. Her mother was always complaining about the hardness of the local water and the damage it did to her skin.

A little later she was walking back from the village bakery when to her surprise Nicolás came out of a sidestreet leading towards the vineyards. He was wearing a yellow singlet and black shorts and had obviously been for a run. He wasn’t out of breath but his skin was glistening with sweat and his black hair was damp, showing a tendency to curl at the nape of his neck.

‘How far have you run?’ she asked, as he fell into step beside her.

‘About five or six kilometres. The lanes through the vineyards are perfect…hardly any traffic.’

‘I know. I use them for walking. Do you run every day?’

‘Most days.’ He used his forearm to wipe some trickles from his forehead.

He was not, she noticed, as hairy as many Spaniards. Some women liked hairy men but her preference was for a smooth chest and only a light dusting of hairs on a man’s arms and legs. Enough to be unmistakably masculine but not reminiscent of a gorilla.

She caught herself thinking that Nicolás had exactly the right amount of body hair, at least as far as she could see. The thought was followed by another: what the hell am I doing appraising his body like this?

She was not the only one. A couple of young village women, on their way to the bakery, eyed him with interest as they exchanged good mornings with Cally. Knowing how their minds worked, she guessed that they would be wondering if he was one of the casa rural’s visitors, or someone she had in tow.

At the house, he pushed open the door for her, but did not follow her in. ‘I need to do some cool-down exercises. I won’t be long.’

Carrying the bread to the kitchen, Cally wondered if the woman across the street who kept a close eye on the comings and goings from their house was getting an eyeful of the tall stranger stretching various areas of his muscular anatomy. He must be in great physical shape to be able to run that distance and get back looking as if he could do it again if necessary. Occasionally she met holiday-makers jogging among the vineyards and looking fit to collapse.

The next time she saw him he had showered and changed into clean clothes. He had brought down a flask to be filled.

‘The notice on the back of the bedroom door says you have laundry facilities? What does that mean?’ he asked.

‘If you leave whatever you want washed in the big plastic bag that you’ll find in the wardrobe, it’ll be collected when your room is done and ready to wear by tonight.’

‘That’s better than five-star hotels. They often take twenty-four hours to turn around personal laundry.’

‘We aim to please,’ said Cally, smiling. ‘Would you like a cooked breakfast? I can do you a French omelette, or bacon with a fried egg and mushrooms, or a piece of grilled haddock with tomatoes.’

‘Is an omelette with tomatoes and mushrooms possible?’

‘Certainly. But I won’t cook it till you’ve finished your selection from the breakfast buffet. You’ll find it round the corner. I take it you’d like coffee to drink?’

‘Yes, but descafeinado rather than the real stuff, please.’

He didn’t drink much. He didn’t kick-start his day with strong shots of caffeine like many of the people she knew in London. What were his vices? she wondered. Most people had some.

When she brought him a cup of coffee, he had already drunk a tumbler of orange juice from the jug on the buffet and was eating a bowl of muesli.

‘Is it today you’re doing the Barranc de L’Infern?’ she asked.

‘Tomorrow. Will the people I met last night still be here this evening?’

She nodded. ‘I’ll start your omelette.’

When she brought it to him, he said, ‘Don’t go away. Stay and talk to me. Apart from surfing the Web, how else do you amuse yourself?’

‘There’s no shortage of things to do. There are cinemas not far away, and art exhibitions and reading groups. Also, once you get on the autopista, it’s not much more than an hour to Alicante and Valencia, both of them very lively cities.’

‘I know. I’ve been to them. Do you go there often?’

‘Fairly often.’

This was true. When flying to and from Spain, as she did several times a year, she used both cities’ airports. She liked Valencia’s airport best. It was quieter, used mainly by Spanish business people rather than the package holiday tourists who poured into Alicante, the gateway to such popular resorts as Benidorm and Torrevieja.

‘You haven’t explained how you found us,’ she reminded him.

‘On the Web. I was looking for sites about the rock-climbs in this area and found a site belonging to two professional climbers. There was a link to another site with a list of all the casas rurales. Yours seemed the most convenient for the things I wanted to do. Do you get many enquiries via your webpage?’

‘Not at first, but now more and more people are using the Web for looking for and booking holidays. I picked up an email from a prospective visitor this morning. He wanted to know if we do vegetarian meals.’ Remembering that Nicolás’s reservation had been made by telephone, she said, ‘You had someone telephone us rather than booking by email. Why was that?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. Perhaps the person I asked to make the booking was more comfortable with the telephone than email. If I wanted to extend my time here, could I do that?’

‘Certainly.’ It annoyed her that the prospect of him staying longer pleased her on a personal level as well as from a business point of view.

‘I’ll let you know tonight. How will you spend your day?’

‘This morning I’ll work. This afternoon I might drive to the coast and swim. The sea will still be warm but the beaches won’t be as crowded as they are in the summer.’

‘Yesterday, when I arrived, you were doing housework. Do you do that routinely, or is your parents’ regular cleaner off sick?’

The frank answer was that her mother had a problem keeping household help. She tended to lose her temper when things weren’t done her way. At the time Cally was born, so she had been told, it had been possible for retired ex-colonials, settling in Spain, to employ several staff and pay them low wages. But those days were long gone. Young Spanish women had jobs in offices, shops and supermarkets, and even for their mothers and grandmothers there were now alternatives to domestic service. Those who still did cleaning expected to be treated as equals and Mrs Haig’s haughty manners had not endeared her to the helpers who had come and gone, usually after a stormy altercation.

But Cally was not about to reveal this to Nicolás. She said, ‘Not many women want to do other people’s housework as well as their own nowadays. It’s understandable. Actually I find it rather satisfying.’ Though I wouldn’t want to do it full-time, was her unspoken addendum.

He gave her another of those disconcertingly intent looks. ‘It seems a waste of your capabilities.’

‘You don’t know that I have any other capabilities,’ she said lightly.

‘You read. You’re a linguist. Your whole appearance and manner indicates intelligence and initiative. You have the computer skills that are essential in most jobs today. I’d say you could handle any number of interesting careers.’

It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him she had a career that delighted and fulfilled her, but somehow to say that seemed to be tempting fate to snatch it away from her.

‘Thank you for your confidence,’ she said, with more warmth than she had shown him so far. ‘Normally I don’t pry into guests’ backgrounds unless they volunteer information. But I have to admit I’m curious about what your work is.’

He smiled and it had the same effect as before. Something inside her melted.

‘Have a guess?’ he suggested.

She could visualise him in a doctor’s white coat, or an airline captain’s uniform or even, because he had so much charisma, as a TV presenter on one of the more intelligent programmes. But if he were the latter, Juanita would have recognised him from the pages of Hola! the popular Spanish magazine that had spawned Hello!.

‘Something scientific perhaps?’

He shook his head but, before he could tell her what he did, they were joined by Peggy and Fred.

To Cally’s annoyance, after Peggy had said good morning, she added archly, ‘Are we interrupting something. Are we de trop, as the French say?’

Nicolás had risen to his feet. He said pleasantly, ‘Not at all. I’m just off. That was an excellent omelette, Cally. Thank you. I’ll be back in good time for dinner.’

Disappointed that she hadn’t found out what he did, Cally said, ‘You’ll find your packed lunch and your flask on the worktop just inside the kitchen door.’ She turned to the others. ‘Would you like something cooked for breakfast?’

After all the guests had gone out for the day, and her father had gone to play golf with his two particular cronies, Cally heaved a sigh of relief at having the house to herself for a few hours. She left Nicolás’s room till the last. As she made beds, changed towels, mopped floors and emptied the contents of waste paper baskets into a black bin bag, she thought about Nicolás’s occupation and found herself wishing she were with him, climbing some steep mule track surviving from the days when most journeys were made on foot and the quickest route between many villages was by way of trails laid by the Moors long ago.

When she unlocked the door of his room, she felt a bit like Bluebeard’s wife entering the forbidden chamber. Which was a silly feeling to have. He was just another guest, a transient visitor she would most likely never set eyes on again.

He had left the plastic laundry bag on the upright chair near the door. It contained the T-shirt and jeans he had worn on the day he arrived, the sports shirt he had worn last night and his running kit. But no undershorts or socks. Their absence was explained when she went into the shower room and found them hanging on the shower rail, already almost dry. He must have washed them the night before.

He had also made the bed and, instead of the clutter of possessions left lying about in the other guests’ rooms, tidied away most of his belongings. On the bedside table were two books borrowed from the shelves on the landing, the top one being The Wandering Scholars, a classic, written in the twenties, about life in mediaeval Europe. The one underneath was a travel book she would have liked to publish had the typescript been offered to her instead of to a commissioning editor with another publisher.

Cally took his laundry downstairs to load it into the washing machine. Then, in an involuntary act that troubled her all afternoon when she used her mother’s car to drive to the coast, she lifted his bundled-up shirt and buried her nose in its folds. She knew that even scrupulously clean people left traces of their natural scent on their clothing, but he hadn’t worn the shirt for long enough to do that. But his running singlet did carry his scent and, far from being unpleasant, it conjured up a vivid memory of his athletic body and its polished bronze sheen. She found herself trembling slightly, swept by feelings long repressed and believed to be under control. But, suddenly, they were not, and she was afraid of where they might lead her.

At first, when he mentioned extending his visit, she had been pleased. But now she thought that the sooner he went the better for her peace of mind. She had enough on her plate, professionally, at the moment without getting out of her depth on a personal level.

Nicolás ate his lunch sitting in the sun in the garden of a long-deserted house.

As well as the long brown barra filled with Spanish mountain ham and cut into three sections, Cally had provided him with a banana, an apple and some green-skinned but sweet tangerines. For dessert there was a bar of plain black chocolate and a substantial chunk of pan de higo which was made from dried figs embedded with almonds.

Thinking about their conversation earlier, he had the feeling that Cally was in a no-win situation that was fine for her parents but a disaster for her. In his own family, some members made use of other members, though never of him. He had learnt early on to make his own decisions and stick to them.

A possible reason for her failure to assert herself and get a life of her own was the fact that she had grown up in a country of which she was not a national. In practical terms, she wasn’t British but nor, despite her fluency with the language, was she Spanish. He had noticed that the children of diplomats often felt a sense of displacement. They lacked the deep roots of people raised in the country where they were born.

He had spent a lot of his own life outside Spain because his father’s profession had taken him overseas and, after his parents’ divorce, Nicolás had spent more time with his father than with his capricious, self-centred mother. But despite this cosmopolitan background, at heart he felt wholly Spanish. This land was where he belonged. Where did Cally feel she belonged? Probably nowhere.

Remembering her remark that, on the autopista, it wasn’t much more than an hour’s drive to Valencia or Alicante, he thought of the fast car he had left in a garage because it would attract too much attention in the village car park.

Maybe, if he extended his time here, he could take her out for an evening of sophisticated pleasures. Unless there was a boyfriend in the background.

It was hard to believe that an attractive chica of what—twenty-four? twenty-five?—would not have a man in her life, but his feeling was that she didn’t.

By the time he had finished eating, it was the hottest part of the afternoon. As a child he had seen the workers on his maternal grandfather’s estates lying down in the shade for a siesta. Having read The Wandering Scholars until the church clock struck three this morning, he decided to take a nap under the drooping branches of an old fig tree.

When he woke up it was cooler. He went back inside the house and prowled its large empty rooms, considering various possibilities for its future.

When the guests assembled for pre-dinner drinks that evening, they all had tales of their days’ activities to tell.

Fred and Peggy had had lunch at another casa rural an hour’s drive away. ‘But we didn’t like it as much as yours,’ Peggy told Douglas Haig. ‘It was modern. It had no atmosphere.’

Tonight she was wearing a clinging red dress and dangling diamanté earrings which Cally felt were over the top for the setting which was rustic rather than glitzy. She suspected that Peggy was hoping to make an impression on Nicolás, which seemed ridiculous in the light of their respective ages. But perhaps Fred didn’t give her the attention she craved. He seemed the down-to-earth type. Cally would have expected Peggy to be married to someone more dashing: the kind of man who, when going out in the evening, wore a blazer with a foulard cravat inside the collar of his shirt and had a moustache or a carefully trimmed beard.

When Nicolás appeared and came to the bar, he was wearing the shirt she had washed and ironed for him.

‘Did you press my shirt?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Thank you.’

She used the phrase often heard in Spain when someone was responding to thanks. ‘De nada. It’s part of the service. What would you like to drink?’

‘A glass of the house red, please.’

As she filled a glass for him, she asked, ‘Did you have a good day? Where did you go?’ She assumed he had a map of the area and would know where his route had taken him.

‘An excellent day…and I enjoyed my lunch. It’s years since I had any pan de higo.’

‘It’s one of my weaknesses. I like fresh figs best, when they’re available, and dried figs are good too, but the local dried figs are small and at this time of year the figs imported from Turkey tend to be past their best, so I go for pan de higo. But it’s dangerously more-ish.’

Because his English was as idiomatic as her own, she took it for granted he would understand the expression.

‘It doesn’t appear to be doing any damage to your figure.’ Switching to Spanish, he added, ‘I’m sure all the somewhat overpadded ladies behind me have looked enviously at your slim waist.’

To her annoyance, Cally felt herself blushing. She had always thought of Italian and French as being more musical languages than Spanish, but when Nicolás spoke castellano, in that caressing tone of voice, it sent a quiver down her spine.

She was relieved when her father joined them. It was not until many days later that she remembered that Nicolás had not answered her question about his day’s route.

For dinner that night, instead of serving a first course, Juanita and Cally handed round big dishes of hot and cold tapas including barquetas de espárragos which were boat-shaped pastry containers filled with parsley and chive sauce topped with asparagus tips.

‘Mm…I’d like the recipe for these,’ Cally heard Peggy say to Nicolás. They were both eating chorizo puffs, she noticed.

‘They’re good, but they’re seriously fattening I’ve heard,’ she heard him answer.

Peggy gave a little shriek of dismay. ‘Why did you have to tell me that? Still, men like a curvy woman, don’t they?’ The flirtatious look she gave him made Cally feel embarrassed for her.

‘I don’t think most of us are attracted by model girls’ figures,’ was his reply. Then Cally had to move out of earshot.

When everyone moved to the table, he sat next to her father, leaving Peggy to exercise her femme fatale manner on one of the other men. Cally sat at the other end of the table, as she had the night before, but this time with different neighbours. Fulfilling her role as hostess and watching to see that everyone was enjoying their food and had wine in their glasses prevented her from listening to more than an occasional snatch of the conversation at the far end of the table. But she did observe that her father was in what she thought of as his Expert on Everything mode, and Nicolás was listening but saying little himself.

When the meal was over and Juanita had gone home, the guests seemed inclined to stay up later than they had the night before. When she felt her absence for quarter of an hour wouldn’t be noticed, Cally went to the office to pick up her email.

Every day she received an email news update from The Bookseller, a weekly magazine that was the bible of the British book trade. What she read in the latest update about the firm she worked for made her groan aloud.

Edmund & Burke sees sales and profits dive. The third-quarter figures will increase fears that E&B will be forced into a period of retrenchment by its US parent. Results released show that sales at E&B fell 7% in the three months ended 30th September. The previous year’s figures had been bolstered by the inclusion of one of its titles in the Oprah Book Club selection (see Media Watch below).

Cally scrolled down to the Media Watch section. What she read made her even more depressed. According to a report in the Financial Times, Edmund & Burke’s parent company would have to cut costs by two hundred million dollars over the next twelve months. Inevitably drastic cuts would have to be made by the UK subsidiary.

She read the update again. Then, too upset to open the rest of the emails, none of which was important, she logged off. For three or four minutes she sat slumped in the chair, knowing that by the time she returned to London the imprint she worked for would have been axed and her name would have been added to the long list of editors made redundant in recent years.

And where else, when publishing was awash with unemployed editors and other publishing industry discards, was she going to find another niche to suit her particular talents?

Cally returned to the lounge only because she felt she ought to be around in case anyone wanted more coffee or drinks. She didn’t join the cheerful group sitting on the comfortable chairs and sofas, but slipped unobtrusively behind the bar to be there if she was wanted but unnoticed if she wasn’t.

A few minutes later, while she was pretending to read the paper but thinking about the dire news from London, Nicolás came over.

‘Are you all right?’ he said, as she looked up. ‘When you came back, you looked upset.’

‘You imagined it,’ she said lightly. ‘I’m fine. Like another drink?’

‘No, thanks. What I’d like is to go with you up to the roof terrace and talk about books. Will you come?’

‘I can’t. I’m on duty.’

‘You’ve been on duty all evening. I’m sure your father can cope. Come on…let’s get some fresh air,’ he said persuasively.

At that moment Peggy gave a screech of raucous laughter that made Cally wince. Fleetingly, she saw the same pained expression on his face. Suddenly the thought of the peace and quiet of the terrace, with a congenial companion, was irresistible.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Why not?’

But even as she said it, several reasons why it wasn’t a wise move occurred to her. She ignored them.

CHAPTER THREE

‘DID you enjoy the roast lamb?’ she asked, as she went up the stairs ahead of him.

‘It was excellent…real home-cooking,’ said Nicolás. ‘In restaurants it’s usually been cooked earlier and re-heated in the micro. It never tastes the same. This morning, you mentioned that a vegetarian rang up. Do you get many of them?’

‘Not many, but we have a good repertoire of vegetarian dishes when they do come.’

‘Did you go for a swim as you said you might?’

It was flattering that he remembered the details of their breakfast-time conversation in such detail.

‘Yes, I enjoyed it…as long as I kept looking out to sea and not at the poor old coast which seems to have sprouted more villas and apartment blocks every time I go.’

‘You don’t go often?’

‘Not very often. I used to be mad about swimming as a child, but it seems to be losing its allure. It takes forty minutes to get there and my mother’s clapped-out old car has started to make worrying noises.’

‘You haven’t a car of your own.’

‘I don’t need one.’ She didn’t want to start explaining about living in London, especially now when her whole way of life there was hanging in the balance. ‘Dad doesn’t often go out at night so I have the use of his, which is newer and more reliable, if I want to go to a movie or wherever.’

‘There isn’t a steady boyfriend to take you about?’

‘No,’ said Cally. ‘No, there isn’t. Do you have a steady girlfriend?’

They had reached the top landing. As he had the night before, Nicolás moved ahead of her to draw aside the fringe-like curtain. But before he did, he said, ‘If I had, I shouldn’t have suggested a tête-à-tête with you.’

‘I don’t see why having a girlfriend would debar you from friendly conversations with other women,’ said Cally, as he moved the curtain out of her way.

‘From friendly conversations—no. But are our reactions to each other purely friendly?’ he asked, as he followed her onto the terrace.

Cally tensed. At that moment all thought of the doomsville email was swept from her mind as effectively as if she had looked across the plana, as the locals called the floor of the valley, and seen a spaceship landing there.

‘What else could they be? You only arrived yesterday.’

‘How long does it take to feel attracted to someone?’

Cally moved to the edge of the terrace and stood with her arms folded and her back to him. She didn’t know what to say. She could deny that she was attracted to him. But would he believe her?

Before she had made up her mind how to respond, she felt his hands on her shoulders, gently but firmly turning her to face him.

‘I don’t think I did imagine that something had happened to upset you,’ he said quietly. ‘You came back into the lounge looking as pale as death. Can’t you tell me about it? A trouble shared is a trouble halved, as my first English teacher used to say.’

He sounded so concerned and kind that, for a few mad seconds, she was tempted to lean against him and pour out all her anxiety. But then, as she stared at the top button of his shirt, Nicolás put the backs of his fingers under her chin and tilted her face up to his.

What happened then was outside all her previous experience. She forgot everything but an overwhelming desire to be in his arms and feel his lips on hers.

It would have happened. In those seconds it seemed inevitable. But then, from somewhere downstairs, they heard someone calling her name, the calls becoming louder and more urgent.

‘Cally…Cally…where are you?’

‘It’s your father,’ said Nicolás, stepping back and heading for the landing.

Pulling herself together, wondering what could require her urgent attention, she followed and heard Nicolás call down the staircase, ‘Cally is up here.’

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