A swift curl of mascara and a slick of lipstick and she was ready. And just in time, she reflected as she heard another knock on her bedroom door—a rather more confident one this time. When she opened the bedroom door it was to find Rosa standing outside, her expression as wary and disapproving as it had been the previous evening.
‘You are to go down to the library. I will show you the way,’ she announced in Spanish, her button-shiny, sharp dark eyes assessing Fliss in a way that made Fliss feel her appearance had been found wanting when compared with the elegance no doubt adopted by the kind of women a man like Vidal preferred. Soignée, sophisticated, designer-clad women with that air of cool hauteur and reserve her mother had told her that highborn Spanish women wore like the all-covering muslin robes once worn by the Moors who had preceded them.
So what? She was here to speak with her father’s lawyers, not to dress to impress a man who filled her with dislike and contempt, Fliss reminded herself.
No sound other than that made by their feet on the stairs broke the heavy silence of the house’s dark interior as Rosa escorted her down to the library, opening the door for her and telling her briskly that she was to wait inside for Vidal.
Normally Fliss would have been unable to resist looking at the titles of the books filling the double-height shelves that ran round the whole room, but for some reason she felt too on edge to do anything other than wish that the coming meeting was safely over.
Safely over? Why should she feel unsafe and on edge? She already knew the contents of her father’s will so far as they concerned her. He had left Fliss the house he himself had inherited from Vidal’s grandmother, on the ducal estate in the Lecrin Valley, along with a small sum of money, whilst the agricultural land that surrounded it had been returned to the main estate.
Was she wrong to feel that there was a message for her in this bequest? Was it just her own longing that made her hope it was the loving touch of a father filled with regret for a relationship never allowed to exist? Was it foolish of her to yearn somehow to find something of what might have been? Some shadowy ghost of regret to warm her heart, waiting for her in the home her father had left her?
Fliss knew that if Vidal were to guess what she was thinking he would destroy her fragile hopes and leave her with nothing to soften the rejection of her childhood years. Which was why he must not know why she had come here, instead of staying in England as he instructed her to do. In the house where her father had lived she might finally find something to ease the pain she had grown up with. After all, her father must have intended something by leaving her his home. An act like that was in its own way an act of love, and she longed so much to have that love.
Not that she couldn’t help wishing the house was somewhere other than so close to Vidal’s family castillo.
As grand as this townhouse was, Fliss knew from her mother that it couldn’t compare with the magnificence of the ducal castillo, in the idyllically beautiful Lecrin Valley to the south of Granada.
Set on the south-westerly slopes of the Sierra Nevada, and running down to the coast with its sub-tropical climate, the valley had been much loved by the Moors, who had spoken of the area as the Valley of Happiness. Her mother’s voice had been soft with emotion when she had told Fliss that in spring the air was filled with the scent of the blossom from the orchards that surrounded the castle.
Olives, almonds, cherries, and wine from the vines that covered many acres of its land were produced in abundance by the ducal estate, and the house owned by her father was, Fliss knew, called House of Almond Blossom because it was set amongst an orchard of those trees.
Was Vidal trying to undermine her in having her brought to this so openly male-orientated room and then left here alone, virtually imprisoned in its austere and unwelcoming maleness? she questioned, her thoughts returning to the present. Why couldn’t Rosa have simply called her down when Vidal himself was ready to leave for the lawyer’s office? Why had she been made to wait here, in this room that spoke so forcefully of male power and male arrogance?
As though her hostile thoughts had somehow conjured him up, the door swung open and Vidal stepped into the room—just as she was in angry, agitated mid-pace, her eyes flashing telltale signs of what she was feeling as she looked towards him.
He was dressed in a pair of narrow black chinos that hugged the litheness of his hips and stretched with the movement of his thighs, drawing her treacherous gaze to the obvious strength and power of the male muscles there. As though having already been accused and found guilty of treachery, and deciding that it now had nothing left to lose, her gaze moved boldly upwards, its awareness of him unhampered by the white shirt covering the physical reality of his torso.