‘In your judgement? Who were you to make judgements and decisions that involved me?’ Fliss demanded bitterly.
‘I was and am the head of this family. It is my duty to do what I think right for that family.’
‘And preventing me from seeing my father, from knowing him, was what you thought “right”, was it?’
‘My family is also your family. When I make decisions concerning it I make them with due regard to all those who are part of it. Now, if you can manage to cease indulging in this welter of infantile emotionalism, I would like to get back to the castillo.’
‘To see the engineer—because watering your crops is more important than considering the harm you have done and owning up to it.’ Fliss gave a bitter laugh. ‘Of course I should have realised that you are far too arrogant and cold-hearted to ever think of doing anything like that.’
Without waiting for him to reply, she headed for the door.
Fliss looked down at the food on her plate with a heavy heart, her hand going to her throat, where her mother’s chain should have been. She could still feel the cold shaft of dismay she had felt when she had looked in her bedroom mirror and realised that it wasn’t there.
At first she’d hoped that it had simply come loose and slipped down inside her top, but when several careful searches of the clothes she had removed and then the entire bedroom floor had not revealed the precious memento of her mother, she had been forced to recognise the truth. She had lost the chain and locket that had been such a treasured link not just with her mother but also her father—because he had given the jewellery to her mother in the first place.
Her distress went too deep for the relief of tears, and so, dry-eyed and heavy-hearted, she had forced herself to change for dinner into her black dress—just as she was—trying desperately to force herself make polite conversation with Ramón’s wife, Bianca.
The estate manager and his wife had been invited to join them for dinner—as a way of underlining the warning Vidal had given her earlier with regard to Ramón himself? Fliss wondered a little grimly. If so, there had been no need. Even without his wife she would not have felt inclined to encourage Ramón’s lunchtime would-be flirtation with her. Charming though the estate manager was, his presence did not provoke any kind of desirous feeling within her, never mind create those feelings to the self-control-obliterating extent that Vidal’s presence did.
Fliss’s fork clattered down onto her plate as she fought to deny what she had just admitted to herself. By what cruel trick of nature could it have happened that she was so intensely and physically aware of and responsive to the one man above all others she should have been safe from finding in any way attractive?
Picking up her fork, she turned her attention to Bianca in an attempt to distract herself. Ramón’s wife was an attractive, if rather remote-looking woman in her early thirties, with classically Spanish good looks. Given what Vidal had told her about Ramón, it was perhaps not surprising that Bianca’s manner towards her should betray some reticence Fliss acknowledged, and she herself was hardly in the right mood to set about reassuring the other woman and drawing her out—although the good manners her grandparents and mother had insisted upon were urging her to do her best.
There were several times, though, when she wasn’t able to prevent her hand from creeping up to her throat in search of the missing chain, and a shadow clouded her eyes when she was forced to accept its absence.
A white wine from the vineyard in Chile in which Vidal had a financial interest was served with their meal of fish, caught locally on the coast, and then a sweeter wine was poured by Vidal when the dessert arrived—an almond dish made from the estate’s own almonds.
It was when he was filling her glass that he said unexpectedly to Fliss, ‘You aren’t wearing your chain.’
The fact that he had noticed it in the first place was enough to catch Fliss off-guard, even without the emotional pain of having to acknowledge its loss, but somehow she managed to control her reaction and admit huskily, ‘No. I seem to have lost it.’
Was she imagining the way in which Vidal’s gaze lingered on her throat before he moved on to fill first Ramón’s and then his own glass? Her vulnerable flesh was certainly burning as though it had.
Desperate not to either think about her lost chain and locket or her contradictory reactions to Vidal, Fliss focused her attention again on Bianca, asking her about her children. She was rewarded with the first genuine smile the other woman had given her all evening, and Bianca launched into a catalogue of the wonderfulness of their two young sons.