A Stormy Spanish Summer

Fliss closed her eyes. She knew this garden so well. Her mother had described it to her, sketched it for her, shown her photographs of it. She had told her that it was a garden originally designed for the exclusive use of the women of the Moorish family for whom the house had been built. It was obviously an act of deliberate cruelty on the part of Vidal to have given her this room, overlooking the garden he knew her mother had loved so much. Had he given her the room her mother had slept in? Fliss suspected that he hadn’t. Her mother had told her that she and Vidal had occupied the top storey—the nursery quarters—when they had come to stay with Vidal’s grandmother, who in those days had owned the house, even though Vidal had been seven years old at the time.

Fliss turned back into the room. Heavily embossed with a raised self-coloured pattern, a rich deep blue brocade fabric hung at the windows and covered the straight-backed chairs placed at either side of the room’s marble fireplace. The cream bedspread was piped in the same blue, with tasselled blue brocade cushions ornamenting its immaculate cream width. The dark wooden floorboards shone, and the antique-looking blue-and-cream rug that covered most of the floor was so plush that Fliss felt she hardly dared walk on it.

It was all a far cry from her minimalist apartment back at home. But this decor just as much as the decor she had chosen for herself was a part of her genetic inheritance through her father. Had he not rejected her mother, had he not denied them both, she would have grown up familiar with this house and its history, taking it for granted. Just as Vidal himself did.

Vidal. How she loathed him. Her feelings towards him were far more bitter and filled with contempt than her feelings towards her father. Her father, after all, had had no voice. As her mother had explained to her, he had been forced to give them up and to turn his back on them. He had not opened her letter pleading to be given a chance to get to know him and then told her that she must never ever try to contact him again. Vidal had done that. He had never known her personally and looked at her with a gaze of cold contempt, then rejected her and walked away from her, as Vidal had done. He had never scorched her pride and burned a wound deep into her heart with his misjudgement of her. Vidal had.

It was here in this house that decisions had been made. They had impacted on her and on her parents in the most cruel way. It was from here that her mother had been dismissed. It was here that she had been told that the man she loved was promised in marriage to another—a girl chosen for him by his adoptive family, who was in her final year at an exclusive school that groomed highly born girls for their marriages. A girl, as her mother had told Fliss, Felipe had sworn to her he did not love and certainly did not want to marry.

It hadn’t mattered what Felipe wanted, though. All his promises to Fliss’s mother, all his protestations of love, had been as beads of light caused by the sun’s rays touching the drops of water as they fell from a fountain. So beautiful and entrancing that they stopped the heart, but ephemeral and insubstantial when it came to reality.

There had only been time for the two of them to snatch a final goodbye embrace and share the fevered illicit intimacy that had led to her own conception before they had been torn apart—her mother sent back to England and Felipe instructed to do his duty and propose to the girl who had been chosen for him.

‘He swore to me that he loved me, but he loved his adoptive family too and he could not disobey them,’ her mother had told her gently, when she had asked as a girl why he had not come after her.

Her poor mother. She had made the mistake of falling in love with a man who had not been strong enough to protect their love, and she had paid the price for that. Fliss would never let the same thing happen to her. She would never allow herself to fall in love and be vulnerable. After all, she had already had a taste of how that felt—even if her feelings for Vidal had merely been those of an inexperienced sixteen-year-old.

Shaking herself free of her painful thoughts, she looked at her small case. Her mother had told her about the traditional way of life of this aristocratic, autocratic Spanish family that Vidal now headed. Vidal had said that his mother had insisted she stay here. Did that mean she could expect to be formally received by her? Perhaps over dinner? She hadn’t brought any formal clothes with her—just a few changes of underwear, a pair of tailored shorts, some fresh tops, and one very simple slip of a dress: a handful of non-crushable matt black jersey that she had fallen in love with on a trip to London.

She was just about to lift the dress from her case and shake it out when the door opened and Rosa came in, carrying a tray containing a glass of wine and a serving of tapas.

After thanking her, Fliss asked, ‘What time is dinner served?’

‘There will be no dinner. Vidal does not wish it. He is too busy,’ Rosa answered haughtily in Spanish. ‘A meal will be brought for you if you wish.’

Fliss could feel her face beginning to burn. Rosa’s rudeness was unforgivable—but no doubt she was taking her cue from Vidal.

‘I have no more wish to eat with Vidal than he does with me,’ she told Rosa spiritedly. ‘But since Vidal told me specifically that it was his mother’s wish that I stay here, instead of in the hotel I had booked, I assumed I would be expected to have dinner with her.’

‘The Duchess is not here,’ Rosa informed her curtly, putting down the tray and turning grim-lipped to the door. She had disappeared through it before Fliss could ask her any more questions.

Vidal had lied to her about his mother’s presence here in the house and about her wish to see her. Why? Why would he want to have her here beneath his own roof?

Just for a moment she wished she was back at home—and more than that she wished that her mother was still alive. Filled with the sadness of her emotions, Fliss sat down on the edge of the bed.

Her mother had given her the best childhood ever. A wonderfully generous bequest of an elderly relative Fliss herself had never even known had enabled her mother to buy them a lovely home in a quiet country village—large enough for Fliss’s grandparents to move in with them—as well as providing an income which had meant her mother had been able to be at home with her. Her mother had talked openly to her about her father, referring to him with love in her voice and her eyes, and no resentment or bitterness. She had only clammed up when Fliss had begged her to bring her to Spain so that she could see the country for herself. She had refused to criticise Vidal when Fliss, with a seven-year-old’s sharpness of mind, had worked out that he must have been the one to betray her parents.

‘You mustn’t blame Vidal, darling,’ her mother had told her gently. ‘It truly wasn’t his fault. He was only a little boy—the same age as you are now. He was not to know what would happen.’

Her gentle, loving mother—always so ready to understand and forgive those who hurt her.

Initially Felicity—named for ‘happiness’, according to her mother—had accepted this defence of Vidal. But then he had come to visit them, and after initially behaving towards her with kindness he had started to treat her with disdain, putting as much distance between them as he could, and making it plain that he disliked her. How her vulnerable teenage heart had ached over that unkindness.

From the minute she had first seen him, stepping out of the expensive car he had driven from London to their house, Fliss had been smitten, developing a huge crush on him. She could vividly remember the day she had inadvertently walked into the bathroom when he had been shaving. Her besotted gaze had been glued to his naked torso. Of course that kind of intimacy had sent her febrile teenage longings surging out of control. Theirs had normally been a mostly female household, so the sight of any bare male chest would have had her studying it in secret curiosity, but when that bare chest belonged to Vidal…

She had felt almost sick with excitement and longing when she had finally managed to step back out of the bathroom, her imagination working overtime and conjuring up various scenarios in which she had not merely looked at it but even more breathtakingly excitingly been held close to it. It was all very well to mock her sixteen-year-old naivety now, but wasn’t it the truth that she was still every bit as personally unfamiliar with the actual reality of sexual intimacy, bare skin to bare skin, now as she had been then?

Clumsily Fliss turned round, as though in flight from her own knowledge of herself. But the fact was that there was nowhere to run to from the reality of her virgin state. No matter how many defensive barricades she had built around herself, no matter how strong an aura of adult womanly confidence she had taught herself to manifest, and no matter how closely she guarded the secret of her past-its-sell-by-date virginity, she could not escape from the truth.

What was the matter with her? she challenged herself. She had lived with being sexually inactive for years. It had been her own decision to make and to keep. It was just one of those things. The pace of modern life, the need to establish her career, had somehow prevented her from meeting a man she wanted enough to let go of the past.

It would be pure self-indulgence for her to start feeling sorry for herself. By many people’s standards Fliss knew that her childhood had been a privileged one. She still considered herself to be privileged now—and not just because she had had such a wonderful mother.

With her grandparents and her mother dead, the big house had seemed so empty—and yet at the same time filled with painful memories. At the height of the property market, before it crashed, Fliss had been approached by a builder who had offered her an unexpectedly large sum of money for the house and its land. After trying to work out what her mother would have wanted her to do she had gone ahead and sold the house to him, and bought herself the flat in the converted Georgian townhouse. Her work in the Tourism Department of the very pretty market town in which she lived kept her busy, and she had plenty of friends—although many of her schoolfriends were now pairing off and making ‘nesting’ plans, and her three closest friends from school and university, whilst single like her, now lived and worked overseas.

A brief rap on her bedroom door had her getting up off the bed and tensing as she waited for the door to open and Rosa to appear—no doubt radiating further disapproval.

However, it wasn’t Rosa who stepped or rather strode into the room, but Vidal himself. He had changed from his business suit into a more casual shirt and a pair of chinos, and had also had a shower, to judge from the still-damp appearance of his slicked-back hair. Her heart turned over inside her chest cavity in slow painful motion, her breath seizing in her lungs. Her awareness of the intimacy of him being in her bedroom brought back too many memories of the past for her to feel comfortable even before the door had closed and locked.

Once before Vidal had come into her bedroom…

No! She would not allow herself to be dragged into the dark agony of that dreadful place where those memories were stored. It was the present she needed to focus on—not the past. It was she who must challenge and criticise Vidal—not the other way around.

Summoning her strength, she demanded, ‘Why did you tell me that your mother would be here when that was a lie?’

The sudden surge of blood creeping up along his jaw betrayed his real reaction to her challenge, even if he was trying to deny it by giving her a coolly dismissive look.

‘My mother has been called away to visit a friend who is unwell. I was not aware of her absence myself until Rosa informed me of it.’

‘Rosa had to tell you where your mother is? How typical of the kind of man you are that you need a servant to tell you the whereabouts of your own mother.’

The hot, angry red blood surged over the sharp thrust of his jawline like an unstoppable tide.

‘For your information, Rosa is not a servant. And as for my relationship with my mother—that is not a subject I intend to discuss with you.’

‘No, I’m sure you don’t,’ Fliss answered him grimly. ‘After all, it is in no small part because of you that I never got to have a relationship with my father. You were the one who intercepted my private letter to him. And you were the one who came all the way to England to bully my mother into pleading with me not to try to contact him again.’

‘Your mother believed it would not have been in your best interests for you to continue to write to Felipe.’

‘Oh, so it was for my sake that you stopped me communicating with him, was it?’ Fliss’s voice was icy with sarcasm as the memory of all the anguish and humiliation Vidal had caused flooded past her defences. He was cruel and arrogant. Willing to destroy others without compunction so that he could have his own way. ‘You had no right to stop me knowing my father, or denying me the right to at least see if he could love me. But then we know that love for another person isn’t a concept someone like you understands, is it, Vidal?’

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