A Stormy Spanish Summer(32)

She must not let the pain of what he was saying touch her. If she did—if she let it into her heart—then it would surely destroy her. It proved how vulnerable she already was that she should actually feel herself aching to tell him that he was wrong, and demand that he listen to the truth. Vidal would never listen to the truth because he didn’t want to hear it. He wanted to think the worst of her—just as he had wanted to prevent her from making contact with her father. To him she was someone who just wasn’t good enough to be treated with compassion and understanding.

‘You can’t stop me taking a lover if I want to, Vidal.’ It was the truth, after all.

Without looking at her, Vidal replied grimly, ‘Ramón is married, with two young children. Unfortunately his marriage is going through a difficult time at the moment. Ramón is known to have an eye for pretty girls, and his wife is not at all happy about his behaviour. I have no wish to see their marriage fall apart and their children left without a father, and I promise you, Felicity, that I will do whatever it takes to make sure that does not happen.’

Vidal had turned off the main drive and onto a narrow, less well-maintained track, at the end of which, rising above the heavily laden orange and lemon trees, Fliss could see the top storey and attic windows of a red-roofed house. It gave her the perfect, much-needed excuse not to respond to Vidal’s crushing comment, but instead to retreat into what she hoped was a dignified silence—whilst her heart thumped jerkily against her chest wall in a mixture of anger and chagrin.

In that silence Vidal drove them through what felt like a tunnel of spreading branches. Sunlight dappled through them to create an almost camouflage effect on the bark of the trees, and the crops in the close-mown grass below them. And then Fliss got her first proper glimpse of the house. Her breath caught in her throat, her heart flipping dizzily with emotion. If it was possible to fall in love with a house then she just had, she recognised.

Three storeys high, whitewashed, it filled her with delight. There was delicate detail in its iron-grille-surrounded balconies, and there were bright slashes of colour from the geraniums tumbling from pots outside the house and the bougainvillea blossom against the lower walls of the house. Oddly, there was something almost Queen Anne about the architectural style of the building, so that there was a familiarity about it—as though somehow it was welcoming her, Fliss thought emotionally as Vidal brought the car to a halt outside a pair of wooden double doors.

‘It’s beautiful.’ The words were said before she could call them back.

‘It was originally built for the captive mistress of one of my ancestors—an Englishwoman seized in a fight at sea between my ancestor’s ship and an English vessel in the days when the countries were at war with one another.’

‘It was a prison?’ Fliss couldn’t hold back her distaste.

‘‘If you want to see if that way. But what I would say is that it was their love for one another that imprisoned them. My ancestor protected his mistress by housing her here away from the judgement of society, and she protected the heart he had given her by remaining true to him and accepting that his duty to his wife meant that they could never officially be together.’

After what Vidal had told her, Fliss had expected the house to wear an air of sadness and disillusionment, but instead the first impression she had when she stepped into the cool white-painted hallway with its tiled floor was that the house was holding itself still, as though in expectation of something—or someone. Her father?

The air smelled soft and warm, as though the house was regularly aired, but Fliss thought that beneath that scent she could still smell a hint of male cologne. An ache of unexpected longing and sadness swept through her, catching her off-guard, so that she had to blink away her betraying emotion. She had genuinely thought that she had wept all the tears she had to weep for the father she had never known many, many years ago.

‘Did my … did my father live here alone?’ she asked Vidal—more to break the silence between them than anything else.

‘Apart from Ana, who was his housekeeper. She has now retired and gone to live in the village with her daughter. Come—I shall show you the house, and then once you have satisfied your curiosity I shall return you to the castillo.’

Fliss could sense that Vidal was holding both his impatience and his dislike of her on a very short rein.

‘You didn’t want me to come here, did you? Even though my father left the house to me?’ she accused him.

‘No, I didn’t,’ Vidal agreed. ‘I didn’t and don’t see the point.’