A Stormy Spanish Summer by Penny Jordan Page A

year. She always spends the spring on our estate. The almond blossom is her favourite,’ he responded, in a curt voice that showed Fliss how little he actually wanted to make any kind of contact with her at all, even though he had turned towards her as he spoke.
    Pain flowered darkly inside her, like a bruise on wounded skin. Fliss’s breath caught in her throat, in denial of what she was feeling, trapped there by the thudding sensation in her heart that merely looking at him brought her.
    And she
was
looking at him, she recognised. Just like all those years ago in the bathroom, she was physically unable to remove her gaze from him. Why did this have to happen to her? Why could
this
man bring to life feelings within her that no other man had ever touched? Was there some part of her that wanted to be humiliated?
    The flush burning her skin grew even hotter. She mustn’t think about Vidal. She must think instead about her parents, and about the love they had shared. She had been created out of that love, and according to her mother that made her a very special child. A child of love. Was it any wonder, knowing that, that she had been so stricken with shock and horror by Rory’s behaviourthat she had not been able to find the words to deny his lie about her? At sixteen she had naively believed that sexual intimacy should be a beautiful act of mutual love. She had had no desire whatsoever to experiment with sex, put off by what to her had seemed the coarse and vulgar attitude displayed by boys of her own age. Instead she had dreamed of a passionate, tender, adoring lover with whom she would share all the mysteries and delights of sexual intimacy.
    And then Vidal had come to see her mother. The child she had heard so much about transformed into a hero who fitted her private template for what a man should be so perfectly that he had stolen her heart before she had even realised what was happening to her. Vidal—so handsome that just looking at him made her breath catch in her throat. Vidal—who carried about him such a powerful aura of male sensuality that even she at sixteen had been aware of it. Vidal—who knew her father. Was it any wonder that he had held so many of the keys that could unlock her emotional defences? Not that he had needed to unlock them. She had thrown down her barriers for him herself.
    Shocked by her own vulnerability, Fliss tried determinedly to concentrate again on the countryside beyond the car window. They had turned off the main road now, and were travelling along a narrow road that was climbing between two outcrops of rock. Beyond them, she could see as the car crested the top of the incline, lay a lush, wide and fertile valley filled with orchards, and on the lower slopes of the ring of hills that enclosed it rows of vines.
    ‘The boundary to the estate begins here,’ Vidal told her, as they started to descend into the valley, still in that formal tone which told her how little he wanted her company and how much he wished she wasn’t here with him.
    Well, she didn’t care. She wasn’t here because of him, after all. She was here because of her father. But much as she tried to take comfort from that knowledge, comfort eluded her, and her aching heart refused to be soothed.
    ‘You can’t see the
castillo
yet, but it is at the far end of the valley—built there so that it could command a strategic position.’
    Fliss caught a glimpse of the silver ribbon of a river, wending its way below them on the valley floor. The valley was a small perfect paradise, she recognised, caught off-guard by the unexpected sharp pang of envy that touched her as she thought of how wonderful it must have been to grow up here, surrounded by so much natural beauty. In the distance she could see the high peaks of the Sierras, and she knew that beyond the Lecrin Valley lay a sub-tropical coastline of great beauty.
    But the coast and what lay beyond this place were forgotten as the road twisted and turned and then, up