A Stormy Spanish Summer(45)

Fliss couldn’t say any more. She simply couldn’t trust herself to speak. Shaking her head, she got up from the table and almost ran into the house in her desperation to escape from Vidal’s presence before she broke down completely.

Only when she had reached the safety and privacy of her bedroom did she let her feelings get the better of her.

And then her bedroom door opened, and she froze with disbelief as Vidal strode in.

This time he hadn’t bothered knocking. This time he’d simply flung the door open and marched in, slamming the door behind him.

He was angry—furiously, savagely, passionately angry. Fliss could see it and something within her leapt to match those feelings—a wild, tempestuous intensity of emotion that had her facing him defiantly.

‘I don’t know what you want, Vidal—’

He didn’t let her get any further. ‘Don’t you? Then let me show you.’

He had closed the distance between them before she knew it, reaching for her, with a man’s passion, a man’s need, she recognised dizzily.

‘This is what I want, Felicity, and you want it too. So don’t even bother trying to pretend that you don’t. I felt it, saw it, tasted it in you, and it’s still there now. Didn’t it ever occur to you that in giving yourself to me you might have unleashed something that neither of us can control? Something for which we will both have to pay a price? No, of course it didn’t. Just as it obviously never occurred to you that a man who is aroused to possessive jealousy at the sight of the sixteen-year-old girl he wants but has denied himself, out of the moral belief that she is too young, might just leap to the wrong judgement when he finds her in bed with someone else.’

What was he doing? He shouldn’t be in here, saying things like this. He should be keeping as much distance between Felicity and himself as he could. It had been those words she had thrown at him about wanting to keep her father’s house for her children that had done it—the anguish of the thought of her with another man’s child, conceiving that child, bearing it, loving it as she loved the man who had given it to her, had been more than he could bear. The voice within him that was urging him to stop, to leave now whilst he still could, was being drowned out by the pain of his longing for her.

‘I wasn’t in bed with Rory,’ was the only protest Fliss could manage to make, and even that was a whispered flurry of words whilst her mind, her body, her senses grappled with exactly what Vidal had just said to her.

Vidal wanted her, desired her? Had been jealous at the thought of her with someone else?

‘I promised myself I wouldn’t do this,’ Vidal was saying angrily. ‘I told myself that it demeans me as a man to use the sexual desire we feel for one another for such a purpose. But you leave me with no other choice.’

‘I leave you with no other choice?’

She wasn’t going to let herself think about what he had just said—about them sharing a sexual desire for one another—and she certainly wasn’t going to think about the effervescent surge of joyous delight his words had given her. Instead she would focus on the practical and the logical, on the sheer arrogance of his belief that he could walk in here and expect. What exactly did he expect?

Her body had started to overheat, and her thoughts were spinning out of control, wild, sensual, erotic and very dangerous thoughts that wanted to send her into his arms, into his possession.

‘Not when you throw in my face your plans for the future. A future that includes taking a lover who will give you his children. He may give you that, but first I shall give you this, and you will give me the passion you promised all those years ago. Don’t bother trying to deny it. You have already shown that you want me.’

‘Any woman worth her salt can fake an org … sexual pleasure,’ Fliss corrected herself frantically.

‘Anyone male or female can say the words and act out a fiction of sexual delight, but the human body does not lie. And your body wanted me. It welcomed me, it ached and yearned for me, and when the moment came it showed me that I had given it pleasure. As I shall do again now. And you will not stop me, because you will not wish to stop me, even though you might try to tell yourself that you do.’

Fliss made a small mewling sound in her throat, but it was too late to protest more strongly because Vidal was kissing her, fiercely and passionately, and she was kissing him back with equal hunger and need.

Vidal’s hand cupped her breast, his fingers finding her already erect nipple.

This was the last thing she had expected—and yet the first thing she had wanted. She couldn’t deny it. She still tried to, though, but the words didn’t come. Her body, her senses, her emotions were already saying yes.