A Stormy Spanish Summer. PENNY JORDAN
against the biting contempt of that look.
‘It’s too late for you to put on the “shrinking virgin, fearful of a man’s touch” act for me,’ he warned her
She wasn’t going to let him speak to her like that. She couldn’t.
‘I’m not acting,’ she told him. ‘And it wasn’t fear. It was revulsion.’
‘You lost the right to that kind of chaste reaction a long time ago, and we both know it,’ Vidal taunted.
Anger and something else—something aching and sad and lost—tightened painfully in her chest.
Once—also a long time ago, or so it seemed now—she had been a young girl trembling on the brink of her first emotional and sensual crush on a real-life adult man, seeing in him everything her romantic heart craved, and sensing in him the potential to fulfil every innocent sensual fantasy her emerging sexuality had had aching inside her. A sensation, lightning swift and electrifying, raced down her spine, sensitising her flesh and raising the tiny hairs at the nape of her neck.
A new shudder gripped her body. Fresh panic seized her. It must be the heat that was doing this to her. It couldn’t be Vidal himself. It could not, must not be Vidal who was responsible for the sudden unnerving and wholly unwanted tremor of physical sensation that had traced a line of shockingly sensual fire down her spine. It was some kind of physical aberration, that was all—an indirect manifestation of how much she loathed him. A shudder of that loathing, surely, and not a shiver of female longing for the touch of a man who epitomised everything that it meant to be a man who could master and command a woman’s response whenever he chose to do so. After all, there was no way that she could ever want Vidal. No way at all.
The recognition that her pulse was racing and her heart hammering—with righteous anger, of course—had Fliss pausing to take a calming breath, her hostility towards Vidal momentarily forgotten as she breathed in the magical air of the city. It held her spellbound and entranced. Yes, she could smell petrol and diesel fumes, but more importantly she could also smell air heated by the sun, and infused with something of the historic scents of the East and its once all-powerful Moorish rulers: rich subtle perfumes, aromatic spices. If she closed her eyes Fliss was sure she would be able to hear the musical sound of running water—so beloved of the Moors—and see the rich shimmer of the fabrics that had travelled along the Silk Route to reach Granada.
The historic past of the city seemed to reach out and embrace her—a sigh of sweetly scented breath, a waft of richly erotic perfumes, the sensual touch of silk as fine as the lightest caress.
‘This is my car.’
The shock of Vidal’s voice intruding on her private thoughts jolted her back to reality, but not quickly enough for her to avoid the hard male hand against her back from which she had already fled. Its heat seemed to sear her skin through her clothes. So might a man such as this one impose his stamp of possession, his mark of ownership on a woman’s flesh, imprinting her with that mark for all time. Inside her head an image formed—the image of a male hand caressing the curve of a naked female back. Deliberately and erotically that male hand moved downwards to cup the soft curve of the woman’s bottom, turning her to him, his flesh dark against the moonlight paleness of hers, her breathing ragged whilst his deepened into the stalking deliberation of a hunter intent on securing its prey.
No! Her head and her heart were both pounding now as conflicting emotions seized her. She must concentrate on reality. Even knowing that, it still took her a supreme effort of will to do so.
The car he had indicated was very large, very highly polished and black—the kind of car she was used to seeing the rich and powerful being driven around in in London.
‘So you aren’t a supporter of green issues, then?’ Fliss couldn’t resist taunting Vidal as he held open the front passenger door of the car for her, taking her small case from her and putting it on the back seat.
The clunk of the door closing was the only response he gave her, before going round to the driver’s door and getting into the car himself.
Did his silence mean that she had annoyed and angered him? Fliss hoped so. She wanted to get under his skin. She wanted to be a thorn in his side—a reminder to him of what he had done to her, and a reminder to herself.
He hadn’t wanted her to come here. She knew that. He had wanted her to simply allow the lawyers to deal with everything. But she had been determined to come. To spite Vidal? No! It was her heritage she sought, not retribution.
The essence of this country ran in her own blood, after all.
Granada—home to the last of the Moorish rulers of the Emirate of Granada and home to the Alhambra, the red fortress, a complex of such great beauty that her mother’s face had shone with happiness when she had talked to Fliss about it—was part of her heritage.
‘Did my father go there with you?’ she had asked her mother.
She had only been seven or so at the time, but she had never referred to the man who had fathered her as ‘Daddy’. Daddies were men who played with their children and who loved them—not strangers in a far-off country.
‘Yes,’ her mother had responded. ‘I once took Vidal there, and your father joined us. We had the most lovely day. One day you and I will go there together, Fliss,’ her mother had promised. But somehow that day had never come, so now she was here on her own.
Through the tinted windows of the car she could see the city up ahead of them, its ancient Moorish quarter of Albaicín climbing the hillside that faced the Alhambra. Close to it was the equally historical medieval Jewish quarter of the city, but Fliss wasn’t in the least bit surprised, once they were in the city, to find Vidal turning into a street lined with imposing sixteenth-century buildings erected after the city’s capture by the Catholic rulers Isabella and Ferdinand. Here on this street the tall Renaissance-style buildings spoke of wealth and privilege, their bulk blotting out the rays of the sun and casting heavy, authoritative shadows.
She might have been surprised to discover that Vidal drove his own car, but she was not surprised when he slowed the car down and then turned in towards a huge pair of imposing double-height studded wooden doors. This area of the city, with its air of arrogance and wealth, was perfectly suited to the man who matched its hauteur—and its visually perfect sculptured classical magnificence.
Fliss was relieved to be distracted from that particular thought by the sight of the sunny courtyard they had just entered, its lines perfectly symmetrical, and even the sound of the water splashing down into the ornate stone fountain in its centre somehow evenly timed.
The house—more a palace, surely, than merely a house—enclosed the courtyard on all four sides, with the main entrance facing the way they had come in. On the wall to their right a two-storey archway led into what had looked like formal gardens from the glimpse Fliss had seen before Vidal had brought the car to a halt alongside a flight of stone steps. The steps led up to a wooden studded door that matched the style of the doors they had just driven through. Around the middle floor of the three-storey building ran what looked like a sort of cloistered, semi-enclosed walkway, whilst the windows looking onto the courtyard were shuttered against the late-afternoon sunlight. On the stonework above the windows Fliss could see the emblem of Granada itself—the pomegranate—whilst above the main doorway were carved what she knew to be the family’s arms, along with an inscription which translated as ‘What we take we hold’.
It wasn’t just the way her job had encouraged her to look at new areas with an eye to their tourism potential that caused her to note these things, Fliss admitted. She had made it her business as she grew up to read as much as she could about the history of Vidal’s family—and of course that of her own father.
‘Does it ever concern you that this house was built with money stolen from the high-ranking Muslim prince your ancestor murdered?’ she challenged Vidal now, determined not to let the beauty and the magnificence of the building undermine her awareness of how the fortune that had bought it had been made.
‘There is a saying—to