Celebrate the legend that is bestselling author

PENNY JORDAN

Phenomenally successful author of more than two hundred books with sales of over a hundred million copies!

Penny Jordan's novels are loved by millions of readers all around the word in many different languages. Mills & Boon are proud to have published one hundred and eighty-seven novels and novellas written by Penny Jordan, who was a reader favourite right from her very first novel through to her last.

This beautiful digital collection offers a chance to recapture the pleasure of all of Penny Jordan's fabulous, glamorous and romantic novels for Mills & Boon.

Penny Jordan is one of Mills & Boon's most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan's characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.

Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband, she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.

Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors. Her significant contribution to women's fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

A Stormy Spanish Summer
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

‘FELICITY.’

There was no emotion in the voice of the tall, dark-haired, aristocratic Spaniard looking down at her from his six-feet-plus height. No welcome of any kind for her. But even without the disapproval and the almost rigid distaste she could see in his expression, Felicity knew that Vidal y Salvadores, Duque de Fuentualba, would never welcome her presence here on his home soil—her home soil in one sense, given that her late father was Spanish.

Spanish, and Vidal’s adopted uncle.

It had taken every bit of courage she’d had and nights of sleeplessness for her to come here, but there was no way she was going to let Vidal know that. No quarter would be asked from him by her, because she knew that none would be given. She had had proof of that.

Panic fluttered in her stomach, rising swiftly inside her to set her heart thudding and her pulse racing. She must not think about that. Not now, when she needed all her strength. When she knew that that strength would dissolve like a mirage in the heat of the Andalusian sun if she allowed those dreadful, shameful memories to surface and those sickening images to form inside her head.

Fliss felt she had never longed more for the comforting and supportive love of her mother—or even the courage-inducing presence of her trio of girlfriends. But they, like her mother, were now absent from her life. They might be alive, not dead like her mother, but their careers had taken them to distant parts of the world. Only she had remained in their home town, and was now its Deputy Tourism Director—a responsible, demanding job.

A job that meant she could tell herself she was far too busy to have the time to build up a meaningful relationship with a man?

Thinking such thoughts was like biting down on a raw nerve in a tooth, the pain immediate and sharp. Better to think about why she had decided to use some of the leave entitlement she had built up through the long hours she worked in order to come here, when the reality was that her father’s will could have been dealt with quite easily in her absence. That was certainly what Vidal would have wanted to happen.

Vidal.

If only she had the courage to fly free of her own past. If only she wasn’t shackled to the past by a shame so bone deep that she could never escape from it. If only… There were so many if onlys in her life—most of them caused by Vidal.

In the heat of the concourse outside the busy Spanish airport into which she had just flown, filled with other people milling around them, he took a step towards her. Immediately she reacted, her body tensing in angry rejecting panic, her brain freezing so that she couldn’t either speak or move.

It might have been seven years since she had last seen him, but she had recognised him immediately. Impossible for her not to do so when his features were cut so deep into her emotions. So deep and so poisonously that even now the wounds caused by those cuts had still not healed. That was nonsense, Fliss told herself. He had no power over her now—no power of any kind. And she was here to prove that to him.

‘There was no need for you to meet me,’ she told him, forcing herself to raise her head and look him in the eyes. Those eyes that had once looked at her in a way that had flayed the skin from her pride and her self-respect and left them raw and bleeding.

Her stomach churned again as she watched his far too handsome, arrogant, aristocratic male profile tighten into hauteur. His mouth curled in contemptuous disdain as he looked down at her, the late-afternoon Spanish sunlight shining on his thick dark hair. She was five feet seven, but she had to tilt her head back to meet his gaze, her own firing up from warm blue into heated violet as she met the look he was giving her.

She was hot and travel weary, and her body reacted to the unfamiliar heat as she resisted the need to lift the heavy weight of her thick, dark gold shoulder-length hair away from the back of her neck. She could already feel it starting to curl round her face in the humid heat, overcoming the effort she had made to straighten it into an immaculate elegance. Not that her appearance could ever compete with the true elegance of the smartly turned-out Spanish women around her. She favoured casual clothes, and was dressed in a pair of clean but well-washed and faded jeans, worn with a loose white cotton top. The jacket she had been wearing when she had boarded her flight in the UK was now stashed away in her roomy leather handbag.

Vidal frowned as his gaze was drawn inexorably to the windblown sensuality of her naturally honey-streaked hair, reminding him of the last time he had seen it. Her hair, like her body, had been spread against her bed, enjoying the amorous attentions of the boy who had been fondling her before Vidal and her mother had interrupted their illicit intimacy.

Angrily Vidal looked away from her. Her presence here was unwanted and unwelcome, her morals an affront to everything he believed in, but like the dark matter at the heart of a poisoned wound there was also that kernel of self-knowledge that raked his pride and refused to be locked away and forgotten.

To have looked into the wanton sensuality of her face, to have witnessed the manner in which she, at sixteen already an experienced tramp, had flaunted that sensuality mockingly in front of him, without a trace of shame, should have filled him with disgust and nothing but disgust. Only along with that disgust, like a sword plunged straight through his body, there had been that momentary pride-searing, lightning surge of desire. It had burned a brand of searing self-contempt through him, and the embers had never fully cooled.

She might be able to get under his skin, but he could never allow her back into his heart.

She shouldn’t have come here, Fliss told herself. Not knowing that she would have to confront Vidal. Not knowing what he thought about her and why. But how could she not have come? How could she have denied herself this final opportunity to know something of the man who had fathered her?

Unlike her, Vidal looked impeccably cool in the heat, his suit that shade of neutral light beige that only continental men seemed to be able to wear with confidence, the blue shirt he was wearing beneath his jacket somehow emphasising the falcon gold of his eyes. A hunter’s eyes, a predator’s eyes, cold with cruelty and menace. She knew she would never forget those eyes. They haunted her nightmares, their gaze sliding over her like ice, their chilling contempt burning her skin and her pride.

She was not going to allow Vidal to see how she felt, though. She wasn’t going to shrink away in fear beneath their incisive, lacerating focus, just as she wasn’t going to be intimidated by him. Only to herself was she prepared to admit that it had been a shock to find him waiting for her at the airport. She had not expected that—even though she had written to the lawyers informing them of her plans—plans she knew he would not like or approve of, but which she had no intention of changing. A thrill of triumph laced with adrenalin shot through her at the thought of getting the better of him.

‘You haven’t changed, Vidal,’ she told him, summoning her courage. ‘You still obviously hate the thought of me being my father’s daughter. But then you would do, wouldn’t you? After all, it was in part thanks to you that my parents were forced apart, wasn’t it? You were the one who betrayed them to your grandmother.’

‘They would never have been allowed to marry.’

Fliss knew that that was true—her mother had said so herself, with more sadness in her voice than bitterness—but Fliss wasn’t going to give up the opportunity to seize the moral high ground from Vidal so easily.

‘They might have found a way, if they’d had more time.’

Vidal looked away from her. Inside his head was a memory he didn’t want to have brought back to him: the sound of his own seven-year-old voice, naively telling his grandmother about the way in which he and his au pair had unexpectedly bumped into his adopted uncle when she had taken him on a visit to the Alhambra—not realising then that his uncle was supposed to have been in Madrid on family business, and certainly not realising the significance of that seemingly unexpected meeting.

His grandmother had realised what it meant, though. Felipe had been the son of her oldest friend, Maria Romero, an impoverished but aristocratic widow. When Maria had learned she had terminal cancer, and only a matter of months to live, she’d asked her friend to adopt twelve-year-old Felipe after her death and raise him as her own son. Both his grandmother and Maria had held the old-school belief that those of certain families—of certain blood and tradition—should always and only marry those who shared those things.

Guilt. It was a heavy burden to bear.

‘They would never have been allowed to marry,’ he repeated.

He was hateful, arrogant, with a pride as cold as ice and as hard as granite, Fliss thought angrily. Technically her mother might have died from heart failure, but who was to say that part of that failure had not been caused by a broken heart and destroyed dreams? Her mother had only been thirty-seven when she’d died, and Fliss eighteen, just about to go to university. Eighteen and a girl still—but now, at twenty-three, she was a woman.

Was that a hint of guilty colour she could see burning up the golden skin bequeathed to him by generations of high-born nobles of supposedly pure Castilian blood? She doubted it. This man wasn’t capable of such feelings—of any kind of real feelings for other people. His blood didn’t allow that. Blood which some whispered had once been mixed with that of a Moorish princess coveted by the proud Castilian who was her family’s enemy and who had stolen her away from that family for his own pleasure, giving to the wife who shared his bloodline the boy child born of his forbidden relationship, and leaving his stolen concubine to die of grief at the loss of her child.

Fliss could well imagine that a family that had spawned a man like the one standing in front of her now could have committed such a terrible act. When her mother had first told her the tale of that long-ago Castilian duque she had immediately linked him in her own thoughts to the current duque. They shared the same cruel disregard for the feelings of others, the same arrogant belief that who they were gave them the right to ride roughshod over other people, to make judgements about them and then condemn them without ever allowing them to defend themselves. The right to deny a child access to her father, prevent her knowing and loving her father simply because they did not consider that child ‘good enough’ to be a part of their family.

Her father. Inside her head Fliss tasted the words, rolling them round her tongue, their flavour and intimacy both confusing and new. She’d spent so much of her life secretly wondering about her father, secretly imagining them meeting, secretly wanting to bring about that meeting. At home, in her smart flat in an elegant Georgian house which had been converted into apartments set in beautifully maintained gardens, complete with a tennis court and an indoor swimming pool and gym for the use of the residents, Fliss had a box in which she kept all the letters she had secretly written to her father but never sent. Letters she had kept hidden from her mother, not wanting to hurt her. Letters that had never been sent—all bar one of them.

Her great-grandmother might have been the one to originally part her parents, but it was Vidal who had prevented her from making contact with him. Vidal who had denied her the right to get to know her father because he had not thought her ‘good enough’ to be acknowledged as part of his family.

At least her father had attempted to make some kind of reparation for allowing her to be shut out of his life.

‘Why have you come here, Felicity?’

The coldness in Vidal’s voice stirred Fliss’s pride.

‘You know perfectly well why I am here. I’m here because of my father’s will.’

As she spoke the words my father, Fliss felt her emotions pushing up under the control she always tried to impose on them. There had been so much pain, so much confusion, so much shame within her over the years, born of the rejection of her and her mother by her father’s family. And for her it was Vidal who personified that rejection. Vidal who’d denied and hurt her—in many ways far more than her father himself had.

Vidal. Fliss forced down the emotions threatening to swamp her, afraid of what might happen to her once they did, of what she might have to confront within herself once their roaring tide subsided, leaving her vulnerabilities revealed.

The truth was that she wasn’t here because of any material benefit that accrued to her from her father’s will, but because of the emotional benefit—the emotional healing she longed for so much. There was no power on this earth, though, that would ever be able to force her to reveal that truth to Vidal.

‘There was no need for you to come here because of Felipe’s will, Felicity. The letter his lawyer sent to you made the terms of it perfectly clear. Your presence here is neither needed nor necessary.’

‘Just like in your eyes neither my mother nor I were needed in my father’s life—not needed and not necessary. Quite the opposite, in fact. How arrogant you are, Vidal, to feel you have the right to make such judgements. But then you are very good at making judgements that affect the lives of others, aren’t you? You think you are so much better than other people, but you aren’t, Vidal. Despite your rank, despite the arrogance and pride you lay claim to through your Castilian blood, in reality you are less worthy of them than the poorest beggar in the streets of Granada. You despise others because you think you are superior to them, but the reality is that you are the one who should be treated with contempt. You are incapable of compassion or understanding. You are incapable of real emotions, Vidal, incapable of knowing what it truly means to be human,’ Fliss told him emotionally, hurling the words at him as feelings she had suppressed for too long overwhelmed her.

White to the lips, Vidal listened to her. That she of all people should dare to make such accusations against him infuriated him.

‘You know nothing of what I am,’ he told her savagely.

‘On the contrary—I know a great deal about you and what you are,’ Fliss corrected him. ‘You are the Duque de Fuentualba, a position you were born to fill—created to fill, in fact, since your parents’ marriage was arranged by both their families in order to preserve the purity of their bloodline. You own vast tracts of land, both here and in South America, you represent and uphold a feudal system that requires others to submit to your power, and you think that gives you the right to treat them with contempt and disdain. It was because of you and what you are that I never got the chance to know my father whilst he was alive.’

‘And now you are here to seek revenge? Is that what you are trying to tell me?’

‘I don’t need to seek revenge,’ Fliss told him, fiercely repudiating his accusation. ‘You will by your very nature bring that revenge down on your own head—although I am sure you won’t even recognise it for what it is. Your nature, your outlook on life, will deny you exactly what you denied my parents—a happy, loving, committed lifelong relationship, entered into for no other reason than the two people within it loved one another. My revenge will be in knowing that you will never know what real happiness is—because you are not genetically capable of knowing it. You will never hold a woman’s love, and most pitiful of all you will not even realise what you are missing.’

His very silence was unnerving on its own, without the look he was giving her, Fliss recognised. But she was not her gentle, vulnerable mother, made fearful and insignificant by a too arrogant man.

‘Has no one ever told you that it can be dangerous to offer such opinions?’

‘Maybe I don’t care about inciting danger when it comes to speaking the truth,’ Fliss answered, giving a small shrug as she added, ‘After all, what more harm could you possibly do to me than the harm you have already done?’

That was as close as she dared allow herself to get to letting the pain inside her show. To say more would be too dangerous. She couldn’t say any more without risking letting him see the scars he had inflicted so deep into everything that she was that she would bear them for ever. They—he—had changed her life for ever. Had deprived her of her right to love and be loved—not just as a daughter, but as a woman. But now was not the time to think of the damage that had been done to her, both to her emotions and her sensuality. She would never give Vidal the satisfaction of knowing just what he had done to her.

Vidal fought against the threat to his self-control. ‘Let me assure you of one thing,’ he announced grimly, each word carefully measured. ‘When it comes to my marriage, the woman who becomes my wife will not be someone—’

‘Like me?’ Fliss supplied tauntingly for him.

‘No man, if he is honest, wants as his wife someone whose sexual morals are those of the gutter. It is in the nature of the male to be protective of his chosen mate’s virtue, to want the intimacy he shares with that mate to be exclusive. A man can never know for sure that any child his mate carries is truly his, therefore he instinctively seeks a mate whom he believes he can trust to be sexually loyal to him. When I marry my wife will know that she will have my commitment to her for our lifetime, and I will expect the same commitment from her.’

He was angry. Fliss could see that. But instead of intimidating her his anger exhilarated her. Exhilarated her and excited her, driving her to push him even harder, and to go on pushing him until she had pushed him beyond the boundary of his self-control. A frisson of unfamiliar emotion shivered down her spine. Vidal was a man of strong passions who kept those passions tightly leashed. The woman who could arouse them—and him—would have to be equally passionate, or risk being consumed in their fiery heat. In bed he would be…

Shocked, Fliss veered away from pursuing her own thoughts, her face starting to burn. What was happening to her? She felt as though she had been struck by a thunderbolt, the aftershock leaving her feeling sick and shaky. How could she have allowed herself to think like that about Vidal?

‘You shouldn’t have come here to Spain, Felicity.’

‘You mean you didn’t want me to come,’ Fliss responded at Vidal’s coldly delivered words. ‘Well, I’ve got news for you, Vidal. I’m not sixteen any more, and you can’t tell me what to do. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I would like to go and check in to my hotel. There was no need for you to come here to the airport,’ she told him, intent on dismissing him. ‘We don’t have anything to say to one another that can’t be said tomorrow, at our meeting with my late father’s attorney.’

She made to step past him, but as she did so his hand shot out, his long tanned fingers curling round her arm and restraining her. It seemed odd that such an elegant hand with such fastidiously well-cared-for nails could possess such feral male power, but it did, Fliss recognised as her flesh pulsed hotly beneath his hold. Her blood was beating with unfamiliar speed, as though responding to his command and not the command of her own body.

Her sharp, ‘Let me go,’ was met with a dark look.

‘There is nothing I would like to do more, I assure you. But since my mother is expecting you to stay with us, and will be awaiting our arrival, I’m afraid that that is not possible.’

‘Your mother?’

‘Yes. She has come especially from her home in the mountains to our townhouse, here in the city, so that she can welcome you into the family.’

‘Welcome me into the family?’ Fliss shot him a derisory look. ‘Do you think I want that after the way “the family” treated my mother—the au pair not good enough to marry my father? The way they refused to acknowledge my existence?’

Ignoring Fliss’s angry outburst as though she hadn’t spoken, Vidal continued coldly, ‘You should have thought of the consequences of coming here before you decided to do so—but then you are not someone who thinks it important to think of the consequences of your behaviour, are you, Felicity? Neither the consequences nor their effect on others.’

Fliss couldn’t bring herself to look at him. Of course he would throw that at her. Of course he would.

‘I have no wish to meet your mother. My hotel booking—’

‘Has been cancelled.’

No, she couldn’t. She wouldn’t. Panic hit her. Fliss opened her mouth to protest, but it was too late. She was already being propelled firmly towards the car park. A sudden movement of the crowd pushed her closer to Vidal’s side, and her own flesh was immediately aware of the male strength and heat of his body as her thigh came into brief contact with his, hard with muscle beneath the expensive fabric of his clothes. She recoiled, her mouth dry, her heart thudding, as memories she couldn’t bear to relive mocked her attempts to deny them.

They moved swiftly along in the full glare and heat of the high summer sun—which was surely why her body had started to burn so hotly that she could feel the beat of her own blood in her face.

‘You should be wearing a hat,’ Vidal rebuked her, his critical gaze raking her hot face. ‘You are too pale-skinned to be exposed to the full heat of our sun.’

It wasn’t the sun that was the cause of the heat burning her, Fliss knew. But thankfully only she knew that.

‘I have a hat in my case,’ she told him. ‘But since I expected to go straight to my hotel from the airport by taxi, rather than being virtually kidnapped and forced to stand in the sun’s full glare, I didn’t think it necessary.’

‘The only reason you were standing anywhere was because you chose to create an argument. My car is over here,’ Vidal told her. His arrogance caused Fliss to grit her teeth. How typical it was of everything she knew about him that he made no attempt to apologise and instead tried to put her in the wrong. He had lifted his hand, as though to place it against the small of her back and no doubt propel her in the direction of the waiting vehicle, but her immediate reaction was to step hurriedly away from him. She could not bear him to touch her. To do so would be a form of self-betrayal she could not endure. And besides, he was too… Too what? Too male?

He had seen her hasty movement, of course, and now he was looking at her in a way that locked her stomach muscles against the biting contempt of that look.

‘It’s too late for you to put on the “shrinking virgin, fearful of a man’s touch” act for me,’ he warned her

She wasn’t going to let him speak to her like that. She couldn’t.

‘I’m not acting,’ she told him. ‘And it wasn’t fear. It was revulsion.’

‘You lost the right to that kind of chaste reaction a long time ago, and we both know it,’ Vidal taunted.

Anger and something else—something aching and sad and lost—tightened painfully in her chest.

Once—also a long time ago, or so it seemed now—she had been a young girl trembling on the brink of her first emotional and sensual crush on a real-life adult man, seeing in him everything her romantic heart craved, and sensing in him the potential to fulfil every innocent sensual fantasy her emerging sexuality had had aching inside her. A sensation, lightning swift and electrifying, raced down her spine, sensitising her flesh and raising the tiny hairs at the nape of her neck.

A new shudder gripped her body. Fresh panic seized her. It must be the heat that was doing this to her. It couldn’t be Vidal himself. It could not, must not be Vidal who was responsible for the sudden unnerving and wholly unwanted tremor of physical sensation that had traced a line of shockingly sensual fire down her spine. It was some kind of physical aberration, that was all—an indirect manifestation of how much she loathed him. A shudder of that loathing, surely, and not a shiver of female longing for the touch of a man who epitomised everything that it meant to be a man who could master and command a woman’s response whenever he chose to do so. After all, there was no way that she could ever want Vidal. No way at all.

The recognition that her pulse was racing and her heart hammering—with righteous anger, of course—had Fliss pausing to take a calming breath, her hostility towards Vidal momentarily forgotten as she breathed in the magical air of the city. It held her spellbound and entranced. Yes, she could smell petrol and diesel fumes, but more importantly she could also smell air heated by the sun, and infused with something of the historic scents of the East and its once all-powerful Moorish rulers: rich subtle perfumes, aromatic spices. If she closed her eyes Fliss was sure she would be able to hear the musical sound of running water—so beloved of the Moors—and see the rich shimmer of the fabrics that had travelled along the Silk Route to reach Granada.

The historic past of the city seemed to reach out and embrace her—a sigh of sweetly scented breath, a waft of richly erotic perfumes, the sensual touch of silk as fine as the lightest caress.

‘This is my car.’

The shock of Vidal’s voice intruding on her private thoughts jolted her back to reality, but not quickly enough for her to avoid the hard male hand against her back from which she had already fled. Its heat seemed to sear her skin through her clothes. So might a man such as this one impose his stamp of possession, his mark of ownership on a woman’s flesh, imprinting her with that mark for all time. Inside her head an image formed—the image of a male hand caressing the curve of a naked female back. Deliberately and erotically that male hand moved downwards to cup the soft curve of the woman’s bottom, turning her to him, his flesh dark against the moonlight paleness of hers, her breathing ragged whilst his deepened into the stalking deliberation of a hunter intent on securing its prey.

No! Her head and her heart were both pounding now as conflicting emotions seized her. She must concentrate on reality. Even knowing that, it still took her a supreme effort of will to do so.

The car he had indicated was very large, very highly polished and black—the kind of car she was used to seeing the rich and powerful being driven around in in London.

‘So you aren’t a supporter of green issues, then?’ Fliss couldn’t resist taunting Vidal as he held open the front passenger door of the car for her, taking her small case from her and putting it on the back seat.

The clunk of the door closing was the only response he gave her, before going round to the driver’s door and getting into the car himself.

Did his silence mean that she had annoyed and angered him? Fliss hoped so. She wanted to get under his skin. She wanted to be a thorn in his side—a reminder to him of what he had done to her, and a reminder to herself.

He hadn’t wanted her to come here. She knew that. He had wanted her to simply allow the lawyers to deal with everything. But she had been determined to come. To spite Vidal? No! It was her heritage she sought, not retribution.

The essence of this country ran in her own blood, after all.

Granada—home to the last of the Moorish rulers of the Emirate of Granada and home to the Alhambra, the red fortress, a complex of such great beauty that her mother’s face had shone with happiness when she had talked to Fliss about it—was part of her heritage.

‘Did my father go there with you?’ she had asked her mother.

She had only been seven or so at the time, but she had never referred to the man who had fathered her as ‘Daddy’. Daddies were men who played with their children and who loved them—not strangers in a far-off country.

‘Yes,’ her mother had responded. ‘I once took Vidal there, and your father joined us. We had the most lovely day. One day you and I will go there together, Fliss,’ her mother had promised. But somehow that day had never come, so now she was here on her own.

Through the tinted windows of the car she could see the city up ahead of them, its ancient Moorish quarter of Albaicín climbing the hillside that faced the Alhambra. Close to it was the equally historical medieval Jewish quarter of the city, but Fliss wasn’t in the least bit surprised, once they were in the city, to find Vidal turning into a street lined with imposing sixteenth-century buildings erected after the city’s capture by the Catholic rulers Isabella and Ferdinand. Here on this street the tall Renaissance-style buildings spoke of wealth and privilege, their bulk blotting out the rays of the sun and casting heavy, authoritative shadows.

She might have been surprised to discover that Vidal drove his own car, but she was not surprised when he slowed the car down and then turned in towards a huge pair of imposing double-height studded wooden doors. This area of the city, with its air of arrogance and wealth, was perfectly suited to the man who matched its hauteur—and its visually perfect sculptured classical magnificence.

Fliss was relieved to be distracted from that particular thought by the sight of the sunny courtyard they had just entered, its lines perfectly symmetrical, and even the sound of the water splashing down into the ornate stone fountain in its centre somehow evenly timed.

The house—more a palace, surely, than merely a house—enclosed the courtyard on all four sides, with the main entrance facing the way they had come in. On the wall to their right a two-storey archway led into what had looked like formal gardens from the glimpse Fliss had seen before Vidal had brought the car to a halt alongside a flight of stone steps. The steps led up to a wooden studded door that matched the style of the doors they had just driven through. Around the middle floor of the three-storey building ran what looked like a sort of cloistered, semi-enclosed walkway, whilst the windows looking onto the courtyard were shuttered against the late-afternoon sunlight. On the stonework above the windows Fliss could see the emblem of Granada itself—the pomegranate—whilst above the main doorway were carved what she knew to be the family’s arms, along with an inscription which translated as ‘What we take we hold’.

It wasn’t just the way her job had encouraged her to look at new areas with an eye to their tourism potential that caused her to note these things, Fliss admitted. She had made it her business as she grew up to read as much as she could about the history of Vidal’s family—and of course that of her own father.

‘Does it ever concern you that this house was built with money stolen from the high-ranking Muslim prince your ancestor murdered?’ she challenged Vidal now, determined not to let the beauty and the magnificence of the building undermine her awareness of how the fortune that had bought it had been made.

‘There is a saying—to the victor the spoils. My ancestor was one of many Castilians who won the battle against Boabdil—Muhammad XII—for Ferdinand and Isabella. The money to build this palacio was given to him by Isabella, and far from allowing the murder of anyone, the Alhambra Decree treaty gave religious freedome to the city’s Muslims.’

‘A treaty which was later broken,’ Fliss reminded Vidal sharply. ‘Just as your ancestor broke the promise he made to the Muslim princess he stole away from her family.’

‘My advice to you is that you spend more time checking your supposed facts and rather less repeating them without having done so.’

Without allowing her time to retaliate, Vidal got out of the car, striding so quickly round to the passenger door that Fliss did not have time to open it. Ignoring his outstretched hand, Fliss manoeuvred herself out of the car, determined not to let herself be overwhelmed by her surroundings and instead to think of her mother. Had she felt intimidated by the arrogance and the disdain with which this building frowned down upon those who did not belong to it but who were rash enough to enter? Her mother had loved her time in Spain, despite the unhappiness it had eventually brought her. She had been hired by Vidal’s parents as an au pair, to help Vidal with his English during the school summer holidays, and she had always made it plain to Fliss just how much she had liked the little boy who had been her charge.

Was it perhaps here in this house that she had first seen and fallen in love with Vidal’s adopted uncle—the man who had been her own father? Fliss wondered now. Perhaps she had seen the handsome Spaniard for the first time here in this very courtyard? Handsome, maybe—but not strong enough to stand by her mother and the love he had sworn he felt for her, Fliss reminded herself starkly, lest she get carried away by the romantic imagery created by her surroundings.

She knew that her mother had only visited the family’s house here in Granada very briefly, as most of her time in Spain had been spent at the castillo on the ducal country estate, which had been Vidal’s parents’ main home.

The thought of what her mother must have suffered caused a sensation inside Fliss’s chest rather as though iron-hard fingers had closed round her heart and squeezed it—fingers as long and strong as those of Vidal He had played his own part in her mother’s humiliation and suffering, Fliss thought bitterly, and she turned quickly away from him—only to give a startled gasp as her foot slipped on one of the cobbles, causing her to turn her ankle and lose her balance.

Immediately the bright sunlight that had been dazzling her was shut out as Vidal stepped towards her, his hands locking round her upper arms as he steadied her and held her upright. Her every instinct was to reject his hold on her, and show him how unwelcome it was. He moved fast, though, releasing her with a look of distaste, as though somehow touching her soiled him. Anger and humiliation burned inside her, but there was nothing she could do other than turn her back on him. She was trapped—and not just here in a place she did not want to be. She was also trapped by her own past and the role Vidal had played in it. Like the fortress walls with which the Moors had surrounded their cities and their homes, Vidal’s contempt for her was a prison from which there was no escape.

Walking past him, Fliss stepped into the building, standing in a cool hallway with a magnificent carved and polished dark wood staircase, to take in the austere and sombre magnificence of her surroundings.

Portraits hung from the white painted walls—stern, uniformed or court-finery-dressed Spanish aristocrats, looking down at her from their heavily gilded frames. Not a single one of them was smiling, Fliss noticed. Rather, they were looking out at the world with expressions of arrogance and disdain. Just as Vidal, their descendant, looked out on the world now.

A door opened to admit a small, plump middle-aged woman with snapping brown eyes that swiftly assessed her. Although she was simply dressed, and not what Fliss had been expecting in Vidal’s mother, there was no mistaking her upright bearing and general demeanour of calm confidence.

She realised her assumption was wrong when Vidal announced, ‘Let me introduce you to Rosa, who is in charge of the household here. She will show you to your room.’

The housekeeper advanced towards Fliss, her gaze still searching and assessing, and then, ignoring Fliss, she turned back to Vidal. Speaking in Spanish, she told him, ‘Where her mother was a dove, this one has the look of a wild falcon not yet tamed to the lure.’

Fresh anger flashed in Fliss’s own eyes.

‘I speak Spanish,’ she told them both. She was almost shaking with the force of her anger. ‘And there is no lure that would ever tempt me down into the grasp of anyone in this household.’

She just had time to see the answering flash of hostility burn through the look Vidal gave her before she turned on her heel to head towards the stairs, leaving Rosa to come after her.

CHAPTER TWO

ON THE first floor landing Rosa broke the stiff silence between them by saying in a sharp voice, ‘So you speak Spanish?’

‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Fliss challenged her. ‘No matter what Vidal might want to think, he does not have the power to prevent me from speaking the language that was, after all, my father’s native tongue.’

She certainly wasn’t going to admit to Rosa, or any one else here, her early teenage dream of one day meeting her father, which had led to her secretly saving some of her paper-round money to pay for Spanish lessons she’d suspected her mother would not want her to have. Fliss had come to recognise well before she had reached her teens that her mother was almost fearful of Fliss doing anything to recognise the Spanish side of her inheritance. So, rather than risk upsetting her, Fliss had tried not to let her see how much she had longed to know more about not just her father but his country. Her mother had been a gentle person who had hated confrontations and arguments, and Fliss had loved her far too much to ever want to hurt her.

‘Well, you certainly haven’t got your spirit from either of your parents,’ Rosa told her forthrightly. ‘Though I would warn you against trying to cross swords with Vidal.’

Fliss stopped walking, her foot on the first step of the next set of stairs as she turned towards the housekeeper. Her body had immediately tensed with rejection of the thought that she should in any way allow Vidal to control any aspect of her life.

‘Vidal has no authority over me,’ she told the housekeeper vehemently. ‘And he never will have.’

A movement in the hallway below her caught her attention. She looked back down the stairs and saw that Vidal was still standing there. He must have heard her—which was no doubt the reason for the grim look he was giving her. He probably wished he did have some authority over her. If he had he may have prevented her from coming to Spain—just as years ago he had prevented her from making contact with her father.

In her mind’s eye she could see him now, standing in her bedroom—the room that should have been her private haven—holding the letter she had sent to her father weeks earlier. A letter which he had intercepted. A letter written from the depths of her sixteen-year-old heart to a father she had longed to know.

Every one of the tenderly burgeoning sensual and emotional feelings she had begun to feel for Vidal had been crushed in that moment. Crushed and turned into bitterness and anger.

‘Fliss, darling, you must promise me that you will not attempt to make contact with your father again,’ her mother had warned her with tears in her eyes, after Vidal had returned to Spain and it had been just the two of them again.

Of course she had given her that promise. She had loved her mother too much to want to upset her—especially when…

No! She would not allow Vidal to drag her back there, to that searingly shameful place that was burned into her pride for life. Her mother had understood what had happened. She had known Fliss was not to blame.

Maturity had brought her the awareness that, since her father had always known where she was, he could quite easily have made contact with her if he’d wished to do so. The fact that he had never done it told its own story. She was not, after all, the only child to grow up not wanted by its father. With her mother’s death she had told herself that it was time to move on. Time to celebrate and cherish the childhood and the loving mother she had had, and to forget the father who had rejected her.

She would never know now just what it was that had changed her father’s mind. She would never know whether it had been guilt or regret for lost opportunities that had led him to mentioning her in his will. But she did know that this time she was not going to allow Vidal to dictate to her what she could and could not do.

In the hallway below, Vidal watched as Fliss turned on her heel and followed Rosa along the landing to the next flight of stairs. If there was one thing that Vidal prided himself about—one characteristic he had worked on and honed—it was mastery of his own emotions and reactions. But for some reason his gaze—normally so obedient to his command—was finding it necessary to linger on the slender silken length of Fliss’s legs as she walked away from him.

At sixteen those legs had been coltishly slender. She had been a child turning into a woman, with pert small breasts that pushed against the thin tee shirts she’d always seemed to wear. She might have behaved towards him with a calculated mock innocence that had involved stolen blushing half-looks, and a wide-eyed pretended inability to lift her supposedly fascinated and awed gaze from the bare expanse of his torso when she had walked into the bathroom whilst he was shaving, but he had witnessed the coarse reality of what she was: promiscuous, and without morals or pride. By nature? Or because she had been deprived of a father?

The guilt he could never escape wrenched at his conscience. How many times over the years had he wished unsaid those innocent words that had led ultimately to the forced ending of the relationship between his uncle and his au pair? A simple mention to his grandmother that Felipe had joined them on an expedition to the Alhambra here in Granada had been their undoing—and his.

There had been no way that the Dowager Duchess would ever have allowed Felipe to marry anyone other than a woman of her choice. Nor would she ever have chosen a mere au pair as a bride for a man whose blood was as aristocratic as that of his adoptive family.

As a child of seven Vidal had not understood that, but he had quickly realised the consequences of his innocent actions when he had been told that the gentle English au pair of whom he had become so fond was being dismissed and sent home. Neither Fliss’s mother nor Felipe had had natures strong enough to challenge his grandmother’s authority. Neither of them had known when they were forced to part that there would be consequences to their love in the form of the child Fliss’s mother had conceived. A child whose name and very existence his grandmother had ruled was never to be mentioned—unless she herself did so, in order to remind his uncle of the shame he had brought on his adoptive family by lowering himself to conceive that child with a mere au pair.

How justified his grandmother would have believed her ruling to be had she lived long enough to know what Felipe’s daughter had become.

Vidal had felt for Felicity’s mother when the two of them had returned early from a visit to London to discuss various private matters to find that not only was Felicity having an illicit teenage party that had got badly out of hand, but also that Felicity herself was upstairs in her mother’s bedroom with a drunken, ignorant lout of a youth.

Vidal closed his eyes and then opened them again. There were some memories he preferred not to revisit. The realisation that he had inadvertently betrayed his au pair’s love affair. The night his mother had come into his room to tell him that the plane his father had been in had crashed in South America without any survivors. The evening he had looked at Felicity sprawled on her mother’s bed, her gold and honey-streaked blonde hair wrapped round the hand of the youth leaning over her, whilst she stared up at him with brazen disregard for what she had done.

Brazen disregard for him.

Vidal’s chest lifted under the demanding pressure of his lungs for oxygen. He had been twenty-three—a man, not a boy—and appalled by the effect Felicity was having on him. Revolted by the desire he felt for her, tormented by both it and his own moral code—a code that said that a girl of sixteen was just that—a girl—and a man of twenty-three was also exactly that—a man. The seven-year age gap between them was a gap that separated childhood from adulthood, and represented a chasm that must not be violated. Just as a sixteen-year-old’s innocence must not be violated.

Even now, seven years later, he could still taste the anger that had soured his heart and seared his soul. A bleak black burning anger that Felicity’s presence here was re-igniting.

Vidal flexed the tense muscles of his shoulders. The sooner this whole business was over and done with and Felicity was on a plane on her way back to the UK the better.

When Felipe had been dying, and had told him how badly he felt about the past, Vidal had encouraged him to make reparation via his will to the child he had fathered and then been forced to abandon. He had done that for his uncle’s sake, though—not for Felicity’s.

Upstairs in the room Rosa had shown her into, before telling her that refreshments would be sent up for her and then leaving, Fliss studied her surroundings. The room was vast, with a high ceiling, and furnished with heavy and ornate dark wood furniture of a type that Fliss knew from her mother’s descriptions was typical in expensive antique Spanish furniture. Beautifully polished, and without a speck of dust, the wood glowed warmly in the light pouring in through the room’s tall French windows. Stepping up to them, Fliss saw that they opened out onto a small balcony, decorated with waist-high beautifully intricate metalwork, its design classically Arabic rather than European. Try as she might, Fliss could not spot the deliberate flaw that was always said to be made in such work, because only Allah himself could create perfection.

The balcony looked down on an equally classical Moorish courtyard garden, bisected by the straight lines of the rill of water that flowed through it from a fall spilling out of some concealed source at the far end of the courtyard. Either side of the narrow canal were covered walkways smothered in soft pink climbing roses, their scent rising up to the balcony. On the ground alongside them were white lilies. The pathways themselves were made from subtle blue and white tiles, whilst what looked like espaliered fruit trees lined the walls of the courtyard. In the four small square formal gardens on the opposite side of the rose walkways, white geraniums tumbled from Ali Baba–sized terracotta jars, whilst directly below the balcony, partly shaded from the sun by a sort of cloistered, semi-enclosed area, there was a patio complete with elegant garden furniture.

Fliss closed her eyes. She knew this garden so well. Her mother had described it to her, sketched it for her, shown her photographs of it. She had told her that it was a garden originally designed for the exclusive use of the women of the Moorish family for whom the house had been built. It was obviously an act of deliberate cruelty on the part of Vidal to have given her this room, overlooking the garden he knew her mother had loved so much. Had he given her the room her mother had slept in? Fliss suspected that he hadn’t. Her mother had told her that she and Vidal had occupied the top storey—the nursery quarters—when they had come to stay with Vidal’s grandmother, who in those days had owned the house, even though Vidal had been seven years old at the time.

Fliss turned back into the room. Heavily embossed with a raised self-coloured pattern, a rich deep blue brocade fabric hung at the windows and covered the straight-backed chairs placed at either side of the room’s marble fireplace. The cream bedspread was piped in the same blue, with tasselled blue brocade cushions ornamenting its immaculate cream width. The dark wooden floorboards shone, and the antique-looking blue-and-cream rug that covered most of the floor was so plush that Fliss felt she hardly dared walk on it.

It was all a far cry from her minimalist apartment back at home. But this decor just as much as the decor she had chosen for herself was a part of her genetic inheritance through her father. Had he not rejected her mother, had he not denied them both, she would have grown up familiar with this house and its history, taking it for granted. Just as Vidal himself did.

Vidal. How she loathed him. Her feelings towards him were far more bitter and filled with contempt than her feelings towards her father. Her father, after all, had had no voice. As her mother had explained to her, he had been forced to give them up and to turn his back on them. He had not opened her letter pleading to be given a chance to get to know him and then told her that she must never ever try to contact him again. Vidal had done that. He had never known her personally and looked at her with a gaze of cold contempt, then rejected her and walked away from her, as Vidal had done. He had never scorched her pride and burned a wound deep into her heart with his misjudgement of her. Vidal had.

It was here in this house that decisions had been made. They had impacted on her and on her parents in the most cruel way. It was from here that her mother had been dismissed. It was here that she had been told that the man she loved was promised in marriage to another—a girl chosen for him by his adoptive family, who was in her final year at an exclusive school that groomed highly born girls for their marriages. A girl, as her mother had told Fliss, Felipe had sworn to her he did not love and certainly did not want to marry.

It hadn’t mattered what Felipe wanted, though. All his promises to Fliss’s mother, all his protestations of love, had been as beads of light caused by the sun’s rays touching the drops of water as they fell from a fountain. So beautiful and entrancing that they stopped the heart, but ephemeral and insubstantial when it came to reality.

There had only been time for the two of them to snatch a final goodbye embrace and share the fevered illicit intimacy that had led to her own conception before they had been torn apart—her mother sent back to England and Felipe instructed to do his duty and propose to the girl who had been chosen for him.

‘He swore to me that he loved me, but he loved his adoptive family too and he could not disobey them,’ her mother had told her gently, when she had asked as a girl why he had not come after her.

Her poor mother. She had made the mistake of falling in love with a man who had not been strong enough to protect their love, and she had paid the price for that. Fliss would never let the same thing happen to her. She would never allow herself to fall in love and be vulnerable. After all, she had already had a taste of how that felt—even if her feelings for Vidal had merely been those of an inexperienced sixteen-year-old.

Shaking herself free of her painful thoughts, she looked at her small case. Her mother had told her about the traditional way of life of this aristocratic, autocratic Spanish family that Vidal now headed. Vidal had said that his mother had insisted she stay here. Did that mean she could expect to be formally received by her? Perhaps over dinner? She hadn’t brought any formal clothes with her—just a few changes of underwear, a pair of tailored shorts, some fresh tops, and one very simple slip of a dress: a handful of non-crushable matt black jersey that she had fallen in love with on a trip to London.

She was just about to lift the dress from her case and shake it out when the door opened and Rosa came in, carrying a tray containing a glass of wine and a serving of tapas.

After thanking her, Fliss asked, ‘What time is dinner served?’

‘There will be no dinner. Vidal does not wish it. He is too busy,’ Rosa answered haughtily in Spanish. ‘A meal will be brought for you if you wish.’

Fliss could feel her face beginning to burn. Rosa’s rudeness was unforgivable—but no doubt she was taking her cue from Vidal.

‘I have no more wish to eat with Vidal than he does with me,’ she told Rosa spiritedly. ‘But since Vidal told me specifically that it was his mother’s wish that I stay here, instead of in the hotel I had booked, I assumed I would be expected to have dinner with her.’

‘The Duchess is not here,’ Rosa informed her curtly, putting down the tray and turning grim-lipped to the door. She had disappeared through it before Fliss could ask her any more questions.

Vidal had lied to her about his mother’s presence here in the house and about her wish to see her. Why? Why would he want to have her here beneath his own roof?

Just for a moment she wished she was back at home—and more than that she wished that her mother was still alive. Filled with the sadness of her emotions, Fliss sat down on the edge of the bed.

Her mother had given her the best childhood ever. A wonderfully generous bequest of an elderly relative Fliss herself had never even known had enabled her mother to buy them a lovely home in a quiet country village—large enough for Fliss’s grandparents to move in with them—as well as providing an income which had meant her mother had been able to be at home with her. Her mother had talked openly to her about her father, referring to him with love in her voice and her eyes, and no resentment or bitterness. She had only clammed up when Fliss had begged her to bring her to Spain so that she could see the country for herself. She had refused to criticise Vidal when Fliss, with a seven-year-old’s sharpness of mind, had worked out that he must have been the one to betray her parents.

‘You mustn’t blame Vidal, darling,’ her mother had told her gently. ‘It truly wasn’t his fault. He was only a little boy—the same age as you are now. He was not to know what would happen.’

Her gentle, loving mother—always so ready to understand and forgive those who hurt her.

Initially Felicity—named for ‘happiness’, according to her mother—had accepted this defence of Vidal. But then he had come to visit them, and after initially behaving towards her with kindness he had started to treat her with disdain, putting as much distance between them as he could, and making it plain that he disliked her. How her vulnerable teenage heart had ached over that unkindness.

From the minute she had first seen him, stepping out of the expensive car he had driven from London to their house, Fliss had been smitten, developing a huge crush on him. She could vividly remember the day she had inadvertently walked into the bathroom when he had been shaving. Her besotted gaze had been glued to his naked torso. Of course that kind of intimacy had sent her febrile teenage longings surging out of control. Theirs had normally been a mostly female household, so the sight of any bare male chest would have had her studying it in secret curiosity, but when that bare chest belonged to Vidal…

She had felt almost sick with excitement and longing when she had finally managed to step back out of the bathroom, her imagination working overtime and conjuring up various scenarios in which she had not merely looked at it but even more breathtakingly excitingly been held close to it. It was all very well to mock her sixteen-year-old naivety now, but wasn’t it the truth that she was still every bit as personally unfamiliar with the actual reality of sexual intimacy, bare skin to bare skin, now as she had been then?

Clumsily Fliss turned round, as though in flight from her own knowledge of herself. But the fact was that there was nowhere to run to from the reality of her virgin state. No matter how many defensive barricades she had built around herself, no matter how strong an aura of adult womanly confidence she had taught herself to manifest, and no matter how closely she guarded the secret of her past-its-sell-by-date virginity, she could not escape from the truth.

What was the matter with her? she challenged herself. She had lived with being sexually inactive for years. It had been her own decision to make and to keep. It was just one of those things. The pace of modern life, the need to establish her career, had somehow prevented her from meeting a man she wanted enough to let go of the past.

It would be pure self-indulgence for her to start feeling sorry for herself. By many people’s standards Fliss knew that her childhood had been a privileged one. She still considered herself to be privileged now—and not just because she had had such a wonderful mother.

With her grandparents and her mother dead, the big house had seemed so empty—and yet at the same time filled with painful memories. At the height of the property market, before it crashed, Fliss had been approached by a builder who had offered her an unexpectedly large sum of money for the house and its land. After trying to work out what her mother would have wanted her to do she had gone ahead and sold the house to him, and bought herself the flat in the converted Georgian townhouse. Her work in the Tourism Department of the very pretty market town in which she lived kept her busy, and she had plenty of friends—although many of her schoolfriends were now pairing off and making ‘nesting’ plans, and her three closest friends from school and university, whilst single like her, now lived and worked overseas.

A brief rap on her bedroom door had her getting up off the bed and tensing as she waited for the door to open and Rosa to appear—no doubt radiating further disapproval.

However, it wasn’t Rosa who stepped or rather strode into the room, but Vidal himself. He had changed from his business suit into a more casual shirt and a pair of chinos, and had also had a shower, to judge from the still-damp appearance of his slicked-back hair. Her heart turned over inside her chest cavity in slow painful motion, her breath seizing in her lungs. Her awareness of the intimacy of him being in her bedroom brought back too many memories of the past for her to feel comfortable even before the door had closed and locked.

Once before Vidal had come into her bedroom…

No! She would not allow herself to be dragged into the dark agony of that dreadful place where those memories were stored. It was the present she needed to focus on—not the past. It was she who must challenge and criticise Vidal—not the other way around.

Summoning her strength, she demanded, ‘Why did you tell me that your mother would be here when that was a lie?’

The sudden surge of blood creeping up along his jaw betrayed his real reaction to her challenge, even if he was trying to deny it by giving her a coolly dismissive look.

‘My mother has been called away to visit a friend who is unwell. I was not aware of her absence myself until Rosa informed me of it.’

‘Rosa had to tell you where your mother is? How typical of the kind of man you are that you need a servant to tell you the whereabouts of your own mother.’

The hot, angry red blood surged over the sharp thrust of his jawline like an unstoppable tide.

‘For your information, Rosa is not a servant. And as for my relationship with my mother—that is not a subject I intend to discuss with you.’

‘No, I’m sure you don’t,’ Fliss answered him grimly. ‘After all, it is in no small part because of you that I never got to have a relationship with my father. You were the one who intercepted my private letter to him. And you were the one who came all the way to England to bully my mother into pleading with me not to try to contact him again.’

‘Your mother believed it would not have been in your best interests for you to continue to write to Felipe.’

‘Oh, so it was for my sake that you stopped me communicating with him, was it?’ Fliss’s voice was icy with sarcasm as the memory of all the anguish and humiliation Vidal had caused flooded past her defences. He was cruel and arrogant. Willing to destroy others without compunction so that he could have his own way. ‘You had no right to stop me knowing my father, or denying me the right to at least see if he could love me. But then we know that love for another person isn’t a concept someone like you understands, is it, Vidal?’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.