A Stormy Spanish Summer(26)

Upstairs in her bedroom Fliss noticed appreciatively that the bed had been turned down invitingly for her, and that it had been made up with fresh sheets at some stage. It would be pure luxury to sleep in such beautiful sheets—Egyptian cotton, with an obviously high thread count, and smelling ever so faintly of lavender.

Her mother had always loved good-quality bedlinen. Had she developed that appreciation of it whilst she was in Spain?

Fliss sighed as she removed her dress.

Tomorrow she would see her father’s house—his home—the home he had left to her, finally acknowledging her. Under the safe privacy of the shower she let her eyes fill with emotional tears. She would have willingly traded a hundred houses for a few precious weeks with her father and really getting to know him, she admitted stepping out of the shower and reaching for a towel, drying her damp body.

Wrapping a fresh towel round herself, she went into the bedroom to remove her sleep shorts and top from the drawer where she had placed them, hesitating when she looked towards the bed and imagined the cool smoothness of the luxurious sheets against her bare skin. Such a sensual pleasure—a small, private self-indulgence.

Smiling to herself, Fliss removed the towel and slid between the waiting sheets, breathing in blissfully as she did so. Their touch against her skin was even more heavenly than she had imagined, subtly easing the tension of the day from her body. She would sleep well tonight, and that sleep would equip her to face tomorrow—and Vidal.

Tiredly, Fliss switched off the bedroom lights.


In the silent garden below Fliss’s closed bedroom windows, with only the stars to see him, Vidal frowned up at those windows. Right now, instead of standing here, dwelling with irritation on Fliss’s behaviour and her insistence on seeing her father’s house for herself, he should have been enjoying the charms of the elegant Italian divorcée who had obviously been invited to his friends’ dinner party as a dining partner for him. She had made her enjoyment of his company plain enough, discreetly suggesting that they conclude the evening à deux at her hotel. She’d been dark-haired, very attractive, and a good conversationalist. There would have been a time when he would have had no hesitation in accepting her offer, but tonight …

But tonight what? Why was he here, his mind filled with the irritation that Fliss was causing him, instead of in bed with Mariella? The reality was that, much as he’d enjoyed the company of his old friends, excellent though the meal had been, he had found his thoughts preoccupied with Fliss. Because of the problems she was causing him—that was why. There was no other reason. Was there?

His body was already reminding him of that unwanted ache of angry and unexpected desire she had aroused in it. He could still smell the scent of her body, still remember the taste of her. The taste and the feel.

Determinedly he suppressed the unwanted clamour of his senses. What he had felt was a momentary lapse, he assured himself, caused by his body’s memory of a girl it had once desired. Nothing more than that. It was an aberration which was best ignored instead of focused on and thus allowed to grow beyond its real importance. It meant nothing. It was his problem and his misfortune—a misfortune that could never be revealed to anyone else—if he had come to realise there was a flaw in his nature that cleaved to an idealistic belief in a once-in-a-lifetime love, a flame that no other love could match.

In his case that flame had had to be extinguished.

Vidal knew himself. He knew that for him the woman he loved must be a woman he could trust absolutely to be loyal to their love in every single way. Felicity could never be that woman. Her own history had already proved that.

The woman he loved? Just because as a young man he had been foolish enough to look at a sixteen-year-old girl and create inside himself a private image of that girl as a woman it did not mean anything other than that he had been a fool. The innocence he had thought he had seen in Felicity—the innocence he had fought against his desire for her to protect—had been as non-existent as the woman created by his imagination. That was what he needed to remember—not the feelings she had aroused in him. There was no point in looking backwards to what might have been. The present and his future were what they were.

Grimly Vidal turned away from the window to walk back into the house.


‘How long does it take to get to the castillo?’

Fliss’s question was delivered through firmly controlled lips as she stared straight ahead through the windscreen of an imposingly luxurious limousine. She was seated in the passenger seat whilst Vidal pulled away from the family townhouse and into the busy morning traffic.