His timing was positively machiavellian. He couldn’t have failed to see the way she’d been transfixed by his near-nakedness, her eyes coveting his gorgeous body; he must have been laughing at her inside his head, tormenting her with what he withheld, remembering her ‘generous’ passionate response to his earlier, idly experimental lovemaking!
She ground her teeth together. She hated and loathed him, she really did! And that was a whole load better than imagining herself in love with the louse! Snorting to herself, she decided she might as well make use of his wretched shirt and, turning her back very decisively on him, bunched the soft fabric under her head. She listened to the music of the water, to the breeze as it danced through the tops of the trees and drifted to sleep with her fingers possessively clutching her makeshift pillow.
She woke, disorientated, to find him sitting beside her. It was cooler, the light much dimmer beneath the trees now, and she saw him turn his head to look down at her, his face shadowed, mysterious.
‘You slept for three hours.’
A gentle hand brushed the tousled hair away from her face and she struggled upright, objecting blearily, ‘You should have woken me ages ago. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s not important. There’s no hurry. And I’ve been thinking—I want to ask you something, Salome.’
Oddly enough, she couldn’t object to that once hated name but reached for his shirt and pushed it at him. There was only so much she could take. She twisted her legs beneath her, not looking at him as he pushed his arms into the sleeves, doing her best to sound reasonably friendly but cool as she invited, ‘Ask away.’
She held her breath as he began bluntly, ‘Did you mean it when you said I was responsible for the way Encarnación has rejected her home, the values that were instilled into her since birth? It has been plaguing me; I have thought of little else.’
How to answer? The tension coming from him was stinging. He had obviously taken her words deeply to heart and much as a part of her weakly wanted to reassure him, stop him from blaming himself, she knew she could never lie to him again.
‘I think it’s a distinct possibility,’ she answered quietly. ‘I don’t know her, of course, or what kind of life she had here, but generally speaking the young are curious, adventurous. If freedom to satisfy their curiosity is denied them then sooner or later they’ll kick against the traces. I’m not saying that’s what happened in your sister’s case,’ she said into the deep silence. ‘Only that it’s a possibility.’
‘It’s more than that,’ he said heavily. ‘You made me think, made me look at myself. I kept her in a silken cage and when she showed signs of restlessness I thought I could cure it by taking her to Seville, pushing money at her so that she could indulge her passion for beautiful clothes.’
He took her hands in his and she hadn’t the power to pull away from the magic of his touch. He needed to talk this out, and she needed to listen, to help if she could, so she told him gently, ‘I’m sure you always did what you thought best for her. Teenagers are notoriously hard to handle.’
‘Not Encarnación,’ he denied bleakly. ‘She was always biddable, even as a baby. Too biddable, perhaps. Even when she told me she wished to study art, to make it her career, she did no more than dip her head when I told her I didn’t think it suitable, that, being who she is, she didn’t need a career.
‘I was afraid for her,’ he admitted. ‘She would have had to live away from home, attend a college where she would have to mix with students who might be on drugs, lead promiscuous lifestyles. I offered to arrange for a private tutor to work with her here, but she declined.’
He sighed deeply. ‘Her nature is so gentle and sweet that it was an easy matter for her mother, and then me, to push her into the mould we had decided was suitable. I should have trusted her, allowed her to make some decisions about her own life.’
‘Then you can tell her so, when you see her,’ Sarah said firmly. ‘After all, Spain has emerged from the days when daughters and sisters were kept behind iron grilles.’
‘You must think me a tyrant, rooted in the past.’ His teeth gleamed in the dusk, his smile bleak. ‘There were circumstances—’ She watched his shoulders lift in a graceful shrug. ‘Our mother came from Aragon, from a great military family, stiffnecked with pride. One summer, long ago, she came south to stay with cousins while she was recuperating from an illness. She met my father and immediately fell in love with him. And he with her. They eloped and she was disowned.
‘He was a gypsy, you see. Untamed, even though he had got out of the warren of caves and tunnels above Granada where the children run like a pack of young wolves, swift and tricky and without hope. He got himself out of there by the power of his looks and his voice. As a cante jondo singer he was regarded as one of the best in living memory, much in demand for parties given by the wealthy. That is how she met him.’
His lean hands tightened around hers, his thumbs softly stroking her skin. ‘After they were married, they lived in a small rented house in Cadiz, managing on what earnings he didn’t squander away. When I was five years old he disappeared. He was wild, that one, untamed. The restrictions of a wife and a child and a settled home became too much for him to take. I missed him deeply. He had been my hero—handsome, proud, generous to a fault when he had money, carelessly optimistic when he had none. Laughing or scowling, he drew people to him like a magnet. He made me proud to be part gypsy.’
‘Did you never see him again?’ she asked gently, hurting inside for the small boy who had watched for the idolised father who had never come home.
Her compassionate heart twisted inside her when he answered sadly, ‘Many years later. I was then seventeen. And in the intervening years, believing the wild gypsy had left our lives, my mother’s family had unbent sufficiently to make her an allowance, enough to get me a good schooling, had provided a better house in a more acceptable area. And with the unthinking arrogance of youth I let him know he wasn’t welcome. We managed without him, he had deserted us once and we didn’t want him now. Soon after, he left, and in the fullness of time Encarnación was born. I hated my father then, with all the savagery of blind youth. Can you understand that?’
She nodded mutely, sensing his torment, but he said harshly, ‘I can’t, not now. In my arrogance I took on the role of my mother’s protector, turning him away. If it hadn’t been for my rigid attitude they could have had many happy years together. He was older, mellower, and they loved each other. I knew nothing of the blind passion that can pull two people together against all reason.
‘That was my first mistake,’ he told her bleakly. ‘My second was to go along with my mother when she announced that my baby sister must be protected, watched over to make sure that she didn’t ruin her life as she herself had done. By that time, the two old aunts who were all that was then left of my mother’s family had withdrawn their grudging support. The evidence that she had taken that wild gypsy back into her bed, if only for a few nights, was more than they could bear. So I worked like a mad dog, used my brain to exploit the money markets, became more ruthless than I like to remember. But it meant that my small family could live in comfort, hold their heads up in the community.
‘And then I inherited the estates, and the rest you know, and perhaps my biggest mistake of all was when I continued to protect and isolate Encarnación from any possible contamination after our mother’s death. It had become a habit. Which is no excuse and doesn’t alter the fact that I am to blame for driving her away to God knows what!’
He released her hands and jerked to his feet as if he could no longer contain his regret and pain, and Sarah scrambled up, unable to watch the torment he was putting himself through yet respecting the innate honesty of this proud man, an honesty that had made him ask questions of himself, made him face the unwelcome answers squarely.
She said, ‘Don’t!’ and reached out to touch him, laying her hand against the side of his face. She knew that she loved him, and always would, and would find th
e strength from somewhere to face the fact that he would never love her. ‘Everyone makes mistakes,’ she told him gently, knowing her heart was in her eyes. ‘We would hardly be human if we didn’t. You, at least, have the courage to admit yours. And in your sister’s case you can put it right.’
He slid his hands around her waist and she saw the gleam of his smile in the star-spangled purple dusk; she knew that if he wanted to make love to her now she would give herself as generously as she knew how. She desperately wanted to give him whatever comfort she could.
‘As soon as I see her,’ he promised.
‘Before or after you’ve killed my father?’ she chided, unable to resist the temptation, and he pulled her into his arms, holding her so possessively that she thought he’d never let her go.
But he proved her wrong as he released her, keeping a careful distance between them as he told her, ‘There is one more thing to say before I take you back. You are free to leave. You were right. I am as unprincipled as your father. I am going to have to try very hard not to be, I think. To that great end I shall not harm a hair of the reprobate’s head. I am as much to blame as he for what happened. I will even confess to keeping you in my bed under false pretences. You have too strong a character to even think of jumping from a great height. I followed your pattering feet to the roof because I was curious—I’d heard you huffing and sighing in the bathroom for what seemed like hours.
‘I must admit, when I saw you leaning so far over the battlements, I had some fear and rushed to grab you back in case of an accident. But oh, Salome, when you tried to convince me that you had about as much strength of character as a jelly, I couldn’t resist pretending to believe you would kill yourself rather than endure my home and me for a moment longer.’
The laughter in his voice curled round her and because she knew she loved him to distraction she couldn’t be even slightly annoyed at the way he’d seen through her plots and plans and used them for his own amusement. And anyway, he had said she was free to go, and the thought of leaving, never seeing him again, was a misery that was almost too great to contain.
He escorted her to the Jeep, helped her into the cab and while she waited for him to join her she thought, So that’s it, is it? Everything nicely sorted. If the home truths she’d hurled at him—responsible for his black mood of the night before—would help him reach a better understanding with his sister in the future, let Piers off the hook, then fine. She was glad. But where did that leave her?
With her freedom, she supposed numbly. The freedom she’d been fighting and scheming for from the moment he’d shown her into that suite of rooms and locked the door. But London, her work, her neat and comfortable flat seemed like a prison from where she was standing. She didn’t want it. She wanted him!
She then got exactly what she’d thought she wanted when he climbed in beside her, started the engine but left it idling, telling her over the rumble, no trace of mockery in that dark velvet voice now, ‘You are free to leave in the morning. But I want you to stay. For as long as you like. I need you, as I’ve never needed anyone or anything. Take an extended holiday; fax Jenny tomorrow. Be my woman. I will sleep in one of the guest rooms to-night—I want to give you that much time to make up your mind. When you share my bed again it will be because that is what you want too.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BY THE time they left the Jeep in the castle courtyard Sarah had made up her mind. She didn’t need to sleep on it.
She loved Francisco so much it hurt and although he had said nothing about loving her—in fact, it had probably never entered his head—he had said he needed her. So she would stay, partly because he did need her at the moment and partly because she needed him more than he would ever know.
The feelings she had for him went too deep to be denied. And when she left for England she would be leaving him; she was far too level-headed to imagine any other scenario—such as Francisco declaring his undying love, begging her to be his wife.
It was unthinkable. When he decided to marry he would choose a compatriot, a well-connected, upper-class raving beauty, not an unremarkable foreigner who had to work damned hard for her living, whose only family happened to be an old reprobate who regularly earned himself embarrassing publicity in the sleazier of the tabloids.
At the moment he desired her, she accepted that. And the way he had opened up to her about what had happened in the past, laid his guilt over Encarnación on the line, meant that for a time there would be an inevitable closeness between them.
But he would work his way through that, and could even come to resent her for being the recipient of his private anguish over the way he had been instrumental in sending his father away for that second and final time, the part he had unwittingly played in his sister’s rebellion. He was proud and he was arrogant and knowing he had allowed her to see him at his most vulnerable would be a cause of acute discomfort. And anyway, by then he would have slaked his desire for her, become bored, wanting her gone because her presence would have become an irritant, an embarrassment probably.
But she could stay for a little while, just a week, and take off before he had a chance to grow tired of her, began to regret ever having bared his soul to her. That way she would have beautiful memories, and because she knew she would love him until the end of her life that wasn’t too much to ask for, was it?
No, she had no illusions about this. When she went she would be leaving him for good. And that would be drenchingly painful and the sorrow of it would be with her for a long time to come. But she would have her memories, and in time the pain of it would ease and she would be left with the loveliness of the beautiful days and nights they had shared.
There was no need to waste precious hours pretending to think it over. Her mind was made up. She would tell him now. At least he hadn’t tried to pressure her during the journey; he’d stayed silent, leaving her to her own thoughts. She was grateful for that.
He reached for her hand in the darkness as they walked slowly across the huge courtyard to the castle which, in Sarah’s loving eyes, now took on the misty aspect of a fairy-tale come true, a place she could grow to love and cherish. But there wouldn’t be time for all this to take a stranglehold on her heart and mind. His invitation to stay had carried a limit of a couple of weeks, she made herself remember. Besides, she had promised herself one week only.
His fingers closed reassuringly around hers and her love for him nearly exploded inside her, the sheer enormity of the emotion making her feel faint. But she mustn’t give him the slightest inkling of how she really felt. When they parted she didn’t want to give him an extra burden of guilt to carry. It would be difficult to hide her true feelings, but she would manage it.
Making her voice cool and light, as if this sort of thing happened to her all the time, she told him, ‘About your invitation to stay on for a while—I don’t need to think about it; I—’
And then all hell seemed to break loose. The heavy front door was dragged open, light spilling out into the darkness, and a long-legged whirlwind rushed out and hurled itself at Francisco.
Encarnación. It couldn’t be anyone else, Sarah decided, stepping back quickly, out of the way, as the tall Spaniard gathered the girl into his arms, returning her bear-hug. Glossy dark hair was restrained in a thick braid that reached down to her waist and her generously proportioned body was clad in—of all things—the despised blue jeans and sloppy T-shirt. And she was talking non-stop—explaining?—in a torrent of rapid Spanish, her words seeming to fall all over themselves as if she couldn’t wait to get them all out.
‘Speak English,’ Francisco demanded, pleasure and relief enriching and deepening his voice. ‘We have a visitor.’ He unwound her arms from around his neck. ‘You’re strangling me!’
‘Oh! Of course!’ The Spanish girl twirled round and her eyes were sparkling with merriment, eyes the colour of dark, sweet sherry. She was very lovely, Sarah thought; no wonder Piers had acted out of character and romanced a girl y
ounger than his own daughter. ‘You’re the one he hijacked! Oh, Francisco!’ She launched herself at her brother again, hugging her arms around him. ‘You are wicked! Did you keep her locked in the dungeon? Feed her on bread and water?’
The way Francisco had described his sister had made Sarah equate her with a cup of sweet, tepid, milky tea. But now she was bubbling like champagne, so her adventure obviously hadn’t done her too much harm. And she was back now, safe and sound by all appearances, and from Francisco’s obvious relief and happiness he had forgiven her and would rethink the outdated rules he had made her live by in future. So she should be greatly relieved. Why, then, was her overwhelming feeling one of aching emptiness?
‘Behave yourself!’ Francisco disentangled himself again and Sarah could sense the effort he was having to make to put on the stern big brother act. ‘You went away a meek little angel and return in the guise of a minx. Just because I’m relieved enough to let you get away with it this time, don’t think you can put me through that kind of anxiety ever again.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Encarnación bit her lip. ‘I didn’t think you would be worried. I was only thinking of what I wanted, and he—’
‘Is Bouverie-Scott here?’ The sudden frosting of his voice told Sarah that he might have forgiven his sister for the worry and upset she’d caused, blaming himself for driving her away, but he wouldn’t so readily forgive Piers for taking advantage of a young girl’s natural wish to try her wings.
Encarnación answered quickly, her huge eyes shining, ‘Oh, yes! He got your message. He said you were so angry you’d kidnapped his daughter and we must come back to face the music together!’
Sarah shivered. Only a couple of hours ago Francisco had given his word that he wouldn’t harm the older man and she didn’t doubt him. He was a man who could be trusted to keep his word. But that didn’t mean that the coming confrontation would be anything but grossly unpleasant.
‘Where is he?’ She spoke for the first time, aware that the panicky, shivery feeling inside her made her sound almost aggressive, as if she was blaming the girl for what had happened. And Francisco evidently thought so too, judging by the hard, piercing look she earned herself as Encarnación blithely explained.
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