Love In Torment

‘And did you love him?’

‘Yes,’ her mother had insisted quickly, and then sighed. ‘Of course I loved him, we’d been friends for a long time, but not like——’

‘Not like my real father?’ Gemma had finished for her, furiously swinging her long black hair away from her face. Her moods had been lurching dangerously from anger to sadness as her mother talked. Some of the time she’d understood, sometimes she just hadn’t.

‘My love for Agustªn was quite different, Gemma,’ Isobel had said softly. ‘A once-in-a-lifetime love, never to be repeated at such a depth. The day he went back to South America was the worst of my life. He said he would send for me, but he didn’t.’

‘And yet you let him go, you just let him walk out of your life!’ Gemma had protested hotly. ‘You were pregnant with me and you didn’t even put up a fight for him? He didn’t even know you were carrying his child?’

Even as the words had spurted angrily from her mouth she’d known why her mother hadn’t fought for the man she loved. Hadn’t she done the very same thing herself? Let Felipe go because pride and confusion and the sting of betrayal had bitten so deeply into her soul, scarring her so deeply that grovelling was out of the question.

Pride. She was as deeply imbued with it as her mother. Felipe had been there one day, gone the next, Bianca, his stunning cousin, along with him. A week later he’d left a message on her answerphone, to contact him on a New York phone number. She hadn’t, of course. He’d walked out and left her, taken Bianca with him, hadn’t he? All she had was a recorded message, cryptic and to the point, no words of love or missing her, no inflexion of caring in the tone of his voice. God knew, she’d played it back enough times, each time hoping to find what she was seeking, some small hint of their past love, their week of love and passion. She had found nothing.

‘How long did your affair last?’ she had asked her mother.

‘Six months. The most wonderful months of my life.’

That was the subtle difference, Gemma dismally thought as she went back into her hotel room now to shower away the stickiness of the tropical heat. Her affair with Felipe was a drop in the ocean compared to her mother’s and Agustªn’s. Six months was long enough to form a deep, lasting relationship, for all the good it had done her mother, but a solitary week barely touched the perimeters of real love; so the agony aunts would have you believe.

Gemma knew better. She had given Felipe her heart and soul. She’d not led a sheltered life; her mother’s career alone had seen to that. There had been social gatherings at Whitegates that had broadened her mind, packed full as they were with the so-called beautiful people. Her father’s friends too, academics from the university, writers, poets, philosophers. And her own career had hardly been without event. Her first one-woman exhibition in the much acclaimed Portia Gallery in Paris had set the ball rolling. Nepotism, one cruel art critic had pronounced in a Sunday paper known for its hardline tactics with new artists, but nepotism had nothing to do with the commissions that poured in. Gemma was mature and wise enough to know she had talent. A pity that wisdom and maturity didn’t follow through in her personal life. Yes, she’d seen life, but it hadn’t helped her where Felipe was concerned.

Gemma towel-dried her hair and combed it through in front of the dressing-table mirror. It had grown long since that week with Felipe in London, and now hung like a sable curtain beyond her shoulders. Straight like her mother’s, thick and glossy too, but there the likeness ended. Her mother’s beauty was classical whereas Gemma’s was softer. Her lips fuller, not nearly so well defined, and her large brown eyes more limpid and fawn-like than Isobel’s. Vulnerability—did that have something to do with the difference in their looks? Whatever, they weren’t alike and in the circumstances it was a blessing. Agustªn would never associate her with his mistress of the past.

Gemma peered at herself more closely. She was vulnerable, but hadn’t been before Felipe. Once she had handled her associations with men with detached aplomb. Felipe had changed all that with a single glance across a crowded gallery floor on the opening night of her London exhibition. Their eyes had met and Gemma, who had never believed in such a thing as love at first sight, had fallen as if she had been flung from Westminster Bridge with lead weights round her ankles.

‘I like your work,’ he’d said after battling his way through the crowds to reach her. His dark, nocturnal eyes held hers and everyone and everything around them faded away into nonentity.

‘Thank you,’ she’d murmured, and he’d smiled.

‘Can I do us both a favour and whisk us away from all this? I want to make love to you,’ he’d husked softly.

She hadn’t even been surprised at his outspokenness, it had just seemed so right. He’d taken over her life in a brief, blatantly honest exchange of words and taken her elbow and guided her out into the cold, wintry London night.

There was no pre-nuptial dinner to melt her reserves, no voyage into pasts to get to know each other better, nothing but the feeling that it was right and beautiful and so very exciting. He held her hand in the back of the taxi, this tall, dark, enigmatic stranger. Her experienced artist’s eye registered beauty beyond compare, deep-set sultry eyes that hinted of Hispanic descent, an aquiline nose so perfectly proportioned above a mouth that was strong yet sensuous. His hair was as black as a moonless night and she knew that when she touched it the tight curls under the tips of her fingers would spring like coils of eastern silk.

Felipe Santos was the most perfect of lovers. Only one small doubt wavered hesitantly within Gemma when they reached his mews house in St John’s Wood. Never in her life had she done this, given herself to a man without thought to the consequences. But it was a passing hesitation, as swift as a cloud powered away by the wind of change.

He took her in his arms as soon as he had shut the door behind them. His mouth was warm and tender, no hint yet of the power of his passion, the near violence of his lovemaking.

‘You’re the most beautiful animal I have ever seen,’ he grated at her throat, and Gemma smiled. No man had ever compared her to an animal before, and her excitement mounted.

He led her up to his sumptuous bedroom, which was thickly carpeted and furnished with swags of silk hung at the windows. There were warm antiques and the bed was huge, soft and inviting, draped in heavily embroidered blue silk. A lover’s bedroom.

Felipe undressed her, stripping the black silk lace from her trembling body, the act almost a ritual with softly spoken words of adoration for her creamy skin, and the perfection of her firm round breasts.

‘I will make love to you every day of my life,’ he murmured throatily. ‘Whether we are together or apart, in the flesh or in my mind, but every day I will possess you.’

No man could compare to this one. He was unique, charismatic, hedonistic in his approach to sexuality.

She watched in awe as he removed his own clothes, peeling off his evening suit and shirt to reveal a body as perfect and faultless as any Rodin sculpture. Smooth bronzed skin, dark curly hair that massed his chest, narrowing down his stomach in a column of hazy blackness to his groin. The need to touch was overpowering but part of his ritual was to wait, to suspend the feeling-need till the moment was right.

Eventually he stretched his hands out to her and she took them and slowly he drew her into his arms, drawing her into his power, into the heady realms of a world she had never known before.

He carried her to the sensual bed, and laid her down. His tongue explored, lightly at first, and then his urgency powered them both to a fierce eroticism that swam them into a haze of white-hot passion.

Her breasts ached with her need, her heart pounded fiercely with the depth of that need. Her body wasn’t her own. It floated mystically under his touch then rose in flames of desire as he entered her for the first time, driving hard into her, groaning her name over and over till it became a primeval incantation deep in his throat.

Their need for each other was insatiable that first night. They made love till dawn then made love again. They slept and murmured words of love to each other, lay in each other’s arms wondering at all that was happening to them. Later, they rose, showered, drank sweet thick Turkish coffee, talked quietly, made love on the soft leather sofa downstairs in the lounge.

The hours ran into days and Gemma forgot work and all that passed for her life before Felipe. They were both cocooned in their ethereal, perfumed lovenest, oblivious to outside intervention. Then Bianca arrived. Rich, angry and beautiful Bianca.

‘You were supposed to pick me up from the airport, Felipe!’ she cried when Felipe answered the door to her one morning. ‘Pay the taxi, will you?’ she ordered, thrusting her way into the house.

Gemma stood at the top of the elegant spiral staircase watching this scene below, too afraid to move, her heart racing. It didn’t stop racing when Felipe urged her down to meet his cousin who had just flown in from New York.

Cousin—it didn’t help somehow. Bianca was exotically beautiful, so was Felipe, and, cousins or not, the look Bianca gave Felipe was one of raw anger, and it had little to do with arriving at Heathrow and having to hail a taxi to St John’s Wood.

Felipe was unaware of his cousin’s hostility to Gemma; men often didn’t see what was obvious to another woman. But Gemma registered every look, every adverse vibration the girl gave off. She was younger than Gemma but exuded that mature air common to women who were beautiful, rich and spoilt.

‘So this is your excuse for not meeting me, is it?’ She flicked her eyes frostily over Gemma and slid out of her feather-weight cashmere coat, letting it fall carelessly over the sofa. ‘I might have known. No thought of me sweating it out at the airport, hanging around waiting——’

‘I forgot,’ Felipe interjected with a tolerant smile.

‘Well, damn you! I need sleep. I’m exhausted. Don’t wake me.’ With that she swept upstairs, slamming the door of the guest bedroom behind her.

‘I’d better go,’ Gemma murmured uncomfortably.

‘Like hell you will!’ Felipe grated, pulling her into his arms.

‘Don’t, Felipe, not with——’

‘Not with Bianca in the house? Why so suddenly prudish?’

‘I’m not!’

‘Forget her, then…’

‘As you forgot to pick her up from the airport?’

‘Is it any wonder?’ He grinned down at her. ‘Since you, I’ve forgotten there was a life before.’

His kiss melted away her doubts and she stayed, for a while.

Suddenly they were a threesome. Felipe took them both out to dinner that night and was charming and sweet, secretly squeezing Gemma’s hand yet dividing his conversation equally between the two women.

Gemma didn’t return to the mews house with them but diplomatically insisted on getting a taxi to her home and studio in Maida Vale.

‘I’ll call you first thing in the morning,’ Felipe told her outside the restaurant, not arguing with her but kissing her tenderly. Somehow that kiss had seemed so final.