it seemed, she had been caught napping. To Liz’s certain knowledge, Alicia had not set foot in the place for months, which meant that every horizontal surface would be thick with dust and the rooms would have a musty smell.
Wondering if tomorrow Alicia would find herself out on her ear, Liz saw one of the upstairs persianas being hauled up by the stout tape that reeled the slats into a box at the top of the window. Many village houses, including her own, still had the old-fashioned wooden-slatted blinds that were pulled up by cords into a roll that remained visible. But La Higuera had been altered and modernised.
The person who had lifted the blind was a man but, because he was silhouetted by the lights in the room behind him, all she could see was that he was tall and broad-shouldered, with dark hair. In fact he looked like a Spaniard. Although many of the elderly locals were short and often bandy-legged, owing to an inadequate diet in the years when Spain was a poor and backward country, the younger Spaniards had much better physiques and were as well-built as their contemporaries in other parts of Europe.
Then a second person came into view, a woman. As the man, whoever he was, stood looking out at the moonlit valley, she moved close behind him and put her arms round him. Immediately he swung round to return her embrace. Liz saw his head bend towards the girl’s and, for quite a long time, they engaged in what was clearly a passionate kiss.
It was still going on when, almost as if some sixth sense told him they were not as private as they might expect to be in a small Spanish village at one o’clock in the morning, he reached out an arm towards the side of the window. The next moment Liz’s view of the embrace was blocked by the pair of curtains whose draw-cord he must have pulled.
Feeling as guilty as if she had been caught watching something far more intimate than a kiss, Liz drew the kitchen curtains and felt her way to the light switch. Then she made another cup of tea and took it up to her bedroom, intending to continue reading the book on top of the stack on her night table.
But, like a love scene in a movie or on TV, what she had seen had stirred up the powerful yearnings that, as they had no hope of being realised, she did her best to keep battened down.
She was also curious to know if the man in the bedroom at La Higuera was, in fact, the legendary womaniser whose amorous exploits provided so many titbits of gossip for his fellow foreigners to relish.
‘…a different girlfriend every time he comes here,’ was one of the allegations Liz had heard about him.
‘Not what you could call handsome, but madly attractive…my goodness, yes, as attractive as the devil and totally without morals. Still, as he isn’t married, can you blame him for grabbing his opportunities?’ was another comment that had stuck in her memory.
Liz, who had had her childhood and teenage years blighted by a man of the same stamp who had been married, was disposed to dislike all philanderers. She had no time for people who treated sex as a game. She despised them all.
Despite a disturbed night, she was up at her usual early hour the next day. Brushing her teeth in the bathroom, she thought for the umpteenth time how different she looked today from the way she had looked on arrival, pallid-faced and drawn after a cold and wet northern European winter and a succession of head colds caught while commuting from her home in the outer suburbs to her workplace in central London.
Now, even after a disturbed night, she had three times as much vitality as she had ever had in England. She had never been a beauty. Her dark blue eyes and her clear skin—once pale but now lightly tanned—were her best features, counterbalanced by a disastrous nose and a rather unfeminine chin.
In her other life, as she had begun to think of it, she had adapted her hairstyle to a conservative version of whatever was the prevailing fashion. Here, to save money, she had given up going to the hairdresser and let it grow to a length she could tie back or pin up. Her basic colour was mid-brown. In place of professionally-done highlights, these days she had only sun streaks, helped by rubbing selected strands with a cut lemon. There was always a lemon to hand because there was a limonero, that bore fruit all year round, growing in her little back yard.
After a quick hot shower, she dressed in a plain white T-shirt, a navy blue cotton skirt and navy sneakers. Later she was driving to the weekly produce market in a larger village a few kilometres away. She had planned, immediately after breakfast, to spend half an hour working in the walled garden of La Higuera.
In the same way that Alicia was supposed to look after the interior of the house, the previous owner of Liz’s house, an elderly Englishwoman called Beatrice Maybury, had undertaken to take care of the neighbouring garden. Beatrice had asked if Liz would be willing to continue this work and Liz had agreed. She had always liked gardening, and the generous fee paid to her predecessor in return for an hour’s work a week would be a welcome addition to her limited funds. At that time, of course, she had not known the kind of man the house belonged to. Beatrice had never mentioned his predatory tendencies. Perhaps she had been unaware of them since, by all accounts, she had kept herself to herself and not been part of the expatriates’ grapevine.
After their late arrival, and whatever had followed that passionate kiss, it seemed unlikely the people staying at La Higuera would be up and about before mid-morning. Liz decided to stick to her plan and do some weeding and watering before they surfaced for the day.
She entered the property by a gate at the side of the house that, by way of a narrow passage, led down to the ‘secret’ garden at the rear. Most of the larger houses in the main part of the village did not have gardens, only patios. In the rest of Europe, a patio meant any paved sitting-out area. But in Spain it was an open area within the structure of a building. In Valdecarrasca, many of the houses too small to have a patio had a small garden or yard. But the garden behind La Higuera was the size of a tennis court.
Her first task today was to plant out some cuttings she had taken from a clump of silvery-grey artemisia and kept, in water, in a dark green wine bottle until they put out small roots.
She was on her knees by the narrow bed at the foot of the wall clad with variegated ivy that spilled over the top and cascaded into her own little yard on the other side, when a man’s voice said, ‘Hello…who are you?’
The question gave Liz such a start that she let out a muffled squeak and, in scrambling to her feet, almost overbalanced. He stepped forward, grabbing her arm to steady her.
‘Sorry…I didn’t mean to scare you. I suppose you thought the house was still empty. I got back late last night, or rather early this morning. I’m Cam Fielding, the owner. And you are…?’
She had known who he was immediately. ‘Madly attractive’ had not been an exaggeration. He was unquestionably the most attractive man she had ever encountered.
Last night she had taken him for a Spaniard and he did have some of their characteristics: the black hair and eyebrows, the olive skin that tanned easily, and the hawk-like features that often indicated Moorish ancestry. But although by no means all Spanish people had brown eyes, she had yet to meet one whose irises were the colour of steel.
‘I’m Liz Harris,’ she said, acutely aware of his grip on her arm and also of the fact that, under a white terry bathrobe, he was undoubtedly naked. Glancing downwards, she saw that his feet were bare, which was why she hadn’t heard him approaching. Looking up again, she noticed his hair was damp. He must have just had a shower, come downstairs to make coffee and seen her from the kitchen window.
She had never been inside his house but Beatrice had described its layout so she knew that the two doors set close to each other led into the kitchen and the garage.
‘Are
