overcoming the effort she had made to straighten it into an immaculate elegance. Not that her appearance could ever compete with the true elegance of the smartly turned-out Spanish women around her. She favoured casual clothes, and was dressed in a pair of clean but well-washed and faded jeans, worn with a loose white cotton top. The jacket she had been wearing when she had boarded her flight in the UK was now stashed away in her roomy leather handbag.
Vidal frowned as his gaze was drawn inexorably to the windblown sensuality of her naturally honey-streaked hair, reminding him of the last time he had seen it. Her hair, like her body, had been spread against her bed, enjoying the amorous attentions of the boy who had been fondling her before Vidal and her mother had interrupted their illicit intimacy.
Angrily Vidal looked away from her. Her presence here was unwanted and unwelcome, her morals an affront to everything he believed in, but like the dark matter at the heart of a poisoned wound there was also that kernel of self-knowledge that raked his pride and refused to be locked away and forgotten.
To have looked into the wanton sensuality of her face, to have witnessed the manner in which she, at sixteen already an experienced tramp, had flaunted that sensuality mockingly in front of him, without a trace of shame, should have filled him with disgust and nothing but disgust. Only along with that disgust, like a sword plunged straight through his body, there had been that momentary pride-searing, lightning surge of desire. It had burned a brand of searing self-contempt through him, and the embers had never fully cooled.
She might be able to get under his skin, but he could never allow her back into his heart.
She shouldn’t have come here, Fliss told herself. Not knowing that she would have to confront Vidal. Not knowing what he thought about her and why. But how could she not have come? How could she have denied herself this final opportunity to know something of the man who had fathered her?
Unlike her, Vidal looked impeccably cool in the heat, his suit that shade of neutral light beige that only continental men seemed to be able to wear with confidence, the blue shirt he was wearing beneath his jacket somehow emphasising the falcon gold of his eyes. A hunter’s eyes, a predator’s eyes, cold with cruelty and menace. She knew she would never forget those eyes. They haunted her nightmares, their gaze sliding over her like ice, their chilling contempt burning her skin and her pride.
She was not going to allow Vidal to see how she felt, though. She wasn’t going to shrink away in fear beneath their incisive, lacerating focus, just as she wasn’t going to be intimidated by him. Only to herself was she prepared to admit that it had been a shock to find him waiting for her at the airport. She had not expected that—even though she had written to the lawyers informing them of her plans—plans she knew he would not like or approve of, but which she had no intention of changing. A thrill of triumph laced with adrenalin shot through her at the thought of getting the better of him.
‘You haven’t changed, Vidal,’ she told him, summoning her courage. ‘You still obviously hate the thought of me being my father’s daughter. But then you would do, wouldn’t you? After all, it was in part thanks to you that my parents were forced apart, wasn’t it? You were the one who betrayed them to your grandmother.’
‘They would never have been allowed to marry.’
Fliss knew that that was true—her mother had said so herself, with more sadness in her voice than bitterness—but Fliss wasn’t going to give up the opportunity to seize the moral high ground from Vidal so easily.
‘They might have found a way, if they’d had more time.’
Vidal looked away from her. Inside his head was a memory he didn’t want to have brought back to him: the sound of his own seven-year-old voice, naively telling his grandmother about the way in which he and his au pair had unexpectedly bumped into his adopted uncle when she had taken him on a visit to the Alhambra—not realising then that his uncle was supposed to have been in Madrid on family business, and certainly not realising the significance of that seemingly unexpected meeting.
His grandmother had realised what it meant, though. Felipe had been the son of her oldest friend, Maria Romero, an impoverished but aristocratic widow. When Maria had learned she had terminal cancer, and only a matter of months to live, she’d asked her friend to adopt twelve-year-old Felipe after her death and raise him as her own son. Both his grandmother and Maria had held the old-school belief that those of certain families—of certain blood and tradition—should always and only marry those who shared those things.
Guilt. It was a heavy burden to bear.
‘They would never have been allowed to marry,’ he repeated.
He was hateful, arrogant, with a pride as cold as ice and as hard as granite, Fliss thought angrily. Technically her mother might have died from heart failure, but who was to say that part of that failure had not been caused by a broken heart and destroyed dreams? Her mother had only been thirty-seven when she’d died, and Fliss eighteen, just about to go to university. Eighteen and a girl still—but now, at twenty-three, she was a woman.
Was that a hint of guilty colour she could see burning up the golden skin bequeathed to him by generations of high-born nobles of supposedly pure Castilian blood? She doubted it. This man wasn’t capable of such feelings—of any kind of real feelings for other people. His blood didn’t allow that. Blood which some whispered had once been mixed with that of a Moorish princess coveted by the proud Castilian who was her family’s enemy and who had stolen her away from that family for his own pleasure, giving to the wife who shared his bloodline the boy child born of his forbidden relationship, and leaving his stolen concubine to die of grief at the loss of her child.
Fliss could well imagine that a family that had spawned a man like the one standing in front of her now could have committed such a terrible act. When her mother had first told her the tale of that long-ago Castilian duque she had immediately linked him in her own thoughts to the current duque. They shared the same cruel disregard for the feelings of others, the same arrogant belief that who they were gave them the right to ride roughshod over other people, to make judgements about them and then condemn them without ever allowing them to defend themselves. The right to deny a child access to her father, prevent her knowing and loving her father simply because they did not consider that child ‘good enough’ to be a part of their family.
Her father. Inside her head Fliss tasted the words, rolling them round her tongue, their flavour and intimacy both confusing and new. She’d spent so much of her life secretly wondering about her father, secretly imagining them meeting, secretly wanting to bring about that meeting. At home, in her smart flat in an elegant Georgian house which had been converted into apartments set in beautifully maintained gardens, complete with a tennis court and an indoor swimming pool and gym for the use of the residents, Fliss had a box in which she kept all the letters she had secretly written to her father but never sent. Letters she had kept hidden from her mother, not wanting to hurt her. Letters that had never been sent—all bar one of them.
Her great-grandmother might have been the one to originally part her parents, but it was Vidal who had prevented her from making contact with him. Vidal who had denied her the right to get to know her father because he had not thought her ‘good enough’ to be acknowledged as part of his family.
At least her father had attempted to make some kind of reparation for allowing her to be shut out of his life.
‘Why have you come here, Felicity?’
The coldness in Vidal’s voice stirred Fliss’s pride.
‘You know perfectly well why I am here. I’m here because of my father’s will.’
As
