Listening to her, Fliss couldn’t help wondering what it must feel like to have a child and be a mother—to feel that sense of joy and fierce maternal pride she could see so clearly in Bianca’s response. Bianca had produced a photograph of their sons. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, with warm olive skin, they looked like miniature images of their father.
Against her will, Fliss’s gaze was drawn to Vidal, who was now deep in conversation with Ramón about the engineer’s recommendations for fixing the problem with the water. Of course, she had no need to try to imagine what Vidal’s sons would look like. After all, she had a photograph of Vidal himself as a boy. She had grown up with that image and it was surely imprinted within her for ever. His sons’ mother would contribute to their gene pool, too, though, and she would be …
She would be everything that she herself was not, Fliss reminded herself, her hand trembling as she held her wine glass. Why on earth should she care who Vidal married, what his sons would look like, or even if he had any? Why, indeed? And equally, why did she have that curious ache of mixed longing and loss deep inside her body, right where her womb was?
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE evening was over, and Fliss was back in her bedroom. The bareness of her neck against the snowy backdrop of the towelling robe she had pulled on after her shower reminded her of what she had lost and filled her with fresh guilt.
Her mother had always worn, treasured, and guarded her locket. Fliss didn’t have a single visual childhood memory in which she could not see it round her mother’s neck, and now she had lost it through her own carelessness. Somehow in its own way that hurt as deeply and painfully as the loss of her mother herself, and brought back for her the confused and unhappy feelings she had had as a young child, questioning why she did not have a father. That chain and its locket had bound her parents together, and through that bonding it had bound them to her as well. It had been her only material connection that was shared by them both, and now it was gone. That precious link had been broken.
But she still had another link with her father, Fliss reminded herself. She still had the house that he had left her.
Only for now, she reminded herself. Vidal had made it clear that he both expected and wanted her to sell it to him.
Fliss was just on the point of slipping out of the bathrobe and getting into bed when a knock on her door came. Hastily pulling the robe back onto her shoulders and clasping it closed in front of her, she went to answer the knock, assuming that it must be one of the maids.
Only it wasn’t one of the maids. It was Vidal, and now he was inside the room and closing the door behind him.
‘What do you want?’ Would he hear the anxiety in her voice and guess that it came from an awareness of her own vulnerability to him? Fliss hoped not as she watched his mouth twist in cynical contempt.
‘Not you, if that is what you are hoping for. A man—any man to satisfy the desire you probably hoped to extinguish with Ramón? Is that what you hoped I might be, Felicity?’
‘No!’ The denial was torn from her throat.
Make-up-free, her hair tousled and her feet bare, not to mention the fact that her body was equally bare beneath the enveloping robe, Fliss was acutely conscious of feeling at a disadvantage compared with Vidal, who was naturally still wearing the light wool suit and the pale blue shirt he had worn during dinner.
But it was her emotional vulnerability to him that disadvantaged her more, she told herself as Vidal dismissed her denial with a savage, ‘Liar. I know you, remember?’
‘No, you don’t. You don’t know me at all. And if you’ve come here just to insult me—’
‘Is it possible to insult a woman like you? I should have thought you were beyond that—a woman who gives herself to all and sundry in a tawdry mockery of what man-to-woman intimacy should really be.’
The words he spoke, each insult he made, felt like a knife wound to her heart and her pride.
‘I’ve brought you this,’ Vidal told her curtly, changing the subject, and opening his hand to reveal her chain and locket nestling in his palm
The sight of it robbed Fliss of the ability to speak. She had to blink and look again to make sure that she wasn’t seeing things.
‘My locket,’ she said, and she shook her head in disbelief as she switched her gaze to his face to demand disjointedly, ‘How …? Where …?’
Vidal’s shrug was dismissive, almost bored, Fliss felt, as he told her, ‘I remembered that you were wearing it when we went into the house, so it seemed logical that you might have lost it there. After I had said goodnight to Bianca and Ramón, I drove over there. I recalled that you were playing with the chain when we were in Felipe’s office, so I started my search there, and as luck would have it that was where I found it—on the floor next to the desk.’