A Stormy Spanish Summer

‘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.