by Penny Jordan
Vidal acknowledged how hard he had tried to fight the need for her that was sweeping over him right now, and how completely he had failed. He hadn’t planned for this to happen. In fact he had done everything he could to avoid it happening. But right now he was no more able to control his need for her than she was able to conceal her response to him.
Pointless. Pointless to fight, pointless to flee, and even more pointless to allow herself to love him—and that was exactly what she was doing, Fliss recognised, as Vidal looked deep into her eyes and then kissed her slowly and lingeringly. The sensation of his mouth moving on hers with such deliberate and controlled sensuality was stealing her resistance from her. All she wanted to do was respond to him, give to him, be held and touched and possessed by him. The force of that need made her whole body tremble in his arms like a reed in the wind, needing his support to protect her from her own vulnerability.
Vidal moved back and pulled off his shirt, then cupped her face and kissed the side of her neck, sending hot shivers of pleasure running over her skin so that her control ran from her like sand taken by a ceaseless and unstoppable tide.
‘Touch me,’ he whispered against her ear, and that rough, broken note of urgency suggested that his whole desire was for her touch and he was on the point of breaking his self-control. Surely more a figment of her own imagination than true reality? But Vidal was lifting her hand and placing it against the warm flesh of his chest, holding it there as he implored her, ‘Touch me, Fliss, as I’ve wanted you to touch me from the moment I saw you.’
Unable to stop herself, Fliss obeyed his whispered command. Wasn’t this, after all, what she had ached and longed for herself? Now, as she stroked and explored her way over Vidal’s torso, she could feel the surge of the blood beneath his skin rising up to meet the trembling excitement of her fingertips—just as she could feel the movement of his muscles as she grew bolder and explored further and lower, to the flat plane where his flesh disappeared beneath the edge of his chinos.
‘Yes.’ The heated urgency of the demand Vidal smothered against the rise of her breast came just when her hand reached the barrier of his trousers, and could only mean one thing. But still Fliss hesitated. To have come this far was dangerous. To go any further would be fatal, taking her to a state of being and emotion that once inhabited she knew she would never want to leave.
‘So you still want to torment me, do you?’ Vidal accused her. ‘Then maybe I should do a little tormenting of my own.’
Before she could stop him he had swung her up into his arms and was carrying her into his own bedroom, minimalist and masculine in design and decor, even if the large bed on which he was placing her seemed to Fliss to be the most sensually dangerous place she had ever known. Or was that because Vidal was now undressing her and himself, between kisses she was sure were designed to arouse her to the point where she ached for him so much that she was willing to do anything to have the pleasure he was giving her? Each kiss, each touch was taking her deeper and deeper into a place of such intense need that nothing else existed, and her now naked body was trembling with the force of her longing.
‘See how much you want me?’ Vidal asked her.
Fliss couldn’t deny it. She did want him. She wanted him, needed him, longed for him, loved him.
Her body shuddered in mute confirmation of that admission.
Vidal leaned forward and stroked her body from her hip to her breast with a fiercely demanding caress that ended with him bending his head to take her nipple between his lips, drawing the need up through her body until it was trembling and pulsing in response to him. His free hand was cupping her other breast, his knee urging her legs apart.
The desire that ripped into her was a volcano of molten heat. The satisfaction of feeling his naked erect flesh against her own sex, initially so pleasurable, quickly became another form of exquisite torture as she ached for even more intimacy, grinding her lower body against him whilst Vidal in turn lifted her against himself, opening her legs to wrap them around his body and hold him closer.
Fliss craved the sensation of him within her, the movement of his flesh inside and against her own. Just the thought of it made need surge through her in unbearable longing, but Vidal was pushing her away, removing himself from her, leaving her. Was this what he had meant about tormenting her?
Yearningly Fliss reached to him, but he shook his head.
‘Not yet,’ he told her softly. ‘I want to touch all of you, to taste all of you, to know all of you first.’
He was stringing kisses along the back of her knee and then the inside of her leg, whilst his fingers stroked apart the willing swollen heat of the lips covering her sex. The pulse already beating there increased in intensity, driving her towards the goal her body now craved. The caress of Vidal’s touch against the intimate wetness of her sex was both a pleasure and an incitement to want more, to want him. Fliss knew it as she curled her fingers round his wrist in a mute plea for what she really wanted.
Vidal denied her, bending his head and dipping his tongue into the moist arousal of her sex, lightly caressing the very heart of it, and then less lightly, whilst Fliss clung to what was left of her reason until she could cling to it no more, and then her cries for him to complete the pleasure he was giving her with the stroke of his flesh within her rose and fell against the fevered backdrop of their unsteady breathing and the inward clamour of their frantic heartbeats.
‘Now! Now,’ Fliss begged Vidal, all control and restraint lost as she was sucked into the maelstrom of desire Vidal had aroused within her. Her senses, already stimulated and aroused, absorbed the reality of his maleness as he stopped, poised over her, wantonly glorying in awareness of his need, of his erection taut and hard.
Fliss shivered in an agony of pleasure as she felt the strength of it pressing against the entrance to her own body. Her sex ached with longing, its muscles quivering in eager anticipation of the pleasure his possession of her promised. His first swift, urgent thrust made her cry out in a paroxysm of heart-stopping pleasure. Her body waited on the crest of that pleasure for more of what it craved.
Another thrust—deeper, harder—had her body tightening around him.
Her fiercely passionate ‘yes’ was breathed against Vidal’s mouth, her longing and arousal overwhelming her completely.
‘You want me,’ he told her.
‘Yes. Yes. I want you now, Vidal. I need you now.’ The hot, passionate words tumbled from her lips as she clung to him, holding him within her, trembling with pleasure and anticipation.
‘Tell me again,’ he urged as he stroked deeper inside her. ‘Tell me how much you want me.’
‘So much—too much. More than there are words for,’ Fliss told him as she pressed frantic kisses against his face.
Now he was moving within her, satisfying her need and yet increasing it at the same time. Helplessly Fliss clung to him as the tension within her grew, until it possessed every bit of her, every pulse of her blood and her heart, all that she was. And then all at once it was there, a brief second of hanging in space, and then the implosion, the fierce contraction of her body that took her over the edge of arousal and into the eye of a storm. Her orgasm was shot through with the pulse of Vidal’s release.
Lost in the wonder of their closeness, helpless and vulnerable to all that she was feeling, Fliss clung to Vidal, knowing that this wasn’t desire alone that possessed her, this was love. And his feelings for her?
Against her ear she could feel the warmth of his breath. Her voice trembled as she whispered softly, ‘Vidal?’
Vidal’s chest tightened. He could hear the emotion in Felicity’s voice. The way it had trembled when she had said his name had felt like a physical caress against his skin. That emotion, though, came from the satisfaction of desire. Nothing else.
He exhaled slowly. Taking another deep breath, he told her curtly, ‘Now we are even. You used my desire for you to prove that I misjudged you. Now I have used yours for me to prove tha
t you lied when you said you didn’t want me.’
Fliss could hear Vidal speaking coldly as she lay there, still wrapped in the vulnerability of loving him so intimately and intensely, wholly unable to protect herself from the cruelty of what he was saying now.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SHE couldn’t lie here like this for ever, in the grip of a grief so intense that it went way beyond the release of any tears, Fliss told herself. She must have showered and dressed after Vidal had gone, she recognised, but she had no memory of having done so. All she could remember was his final words to her, his final cruelty. She had been crazy to think that what had happened between them just now could change anything. He hated her.
Someone was knocking on the bedroom door. Fliss stiffened, and then trembled. Had Vidal come back? Did he want to utter more cruel words? Her heart pounded with pain. There was a second knock on the door. She would have to answer it. She got to her feet and walked unsteadily towards the door, exhaling with what she told herself was relief when she opened it to find the Duchess standing outside in the corridor, her face creased with tension.
‘Can I come in?’ the Duchess asked. ‘Only there’s something I have to say to you—about Vidal and what you said earlier.’
Numbly Fliss realised that in the heat of the moment, when she had been arguing with Vidal earlier, she had completely forgotten that his mother was also there—a silent witness to the accusations Fliss had made against her son. Unable to do anything else, she nodded her head and held open the door, closing it once the Duchess was in the room.
‘I had to speak to you,’ the Duchess told Fliss as she sat in one of the chairs by the fire, obliging Fliss to take the other or be left standing over her visitor. ‘No mother likes to hear her child being spoken of as you spoke of Vidal earlier. You will learn that for yourself one day. But it is not just for Vidal’s sake that I want to talk to you, Felicity. It is for your own as well. Bitterness and resentment are destructive. They can eat away at a person until there is nothing left but those destructive emotions. I would hate to think of such damaging emotions destroying you—especially when those feelings are not necessary.’
‘I’m sorry if I hurt or offended you,’ Fliss apologised. ‘That wasn’t my intention. But the way Vidal has behaved—preventing me from making contact with my father—’
‘No, that is not true. It was not Vidal. On the contrary, in fact. You owe Vidal so much, and it is thanks to him that you have had—Oh!’
Guiltily the Duchess placed her hand over her mouth, shaking her head.
‘I only came up here to defend Vidal, not to. But I’ve let my emotions run away with me. Please forget what I said.’
Forget? How could she. ‘What is not true?’ Fliss demanded, urgently. ‘And what do I owe him? Please, tell me.’
‘I can’t say any more,’ the Duchess answered, very obviously flustered and uncomfortable. ‘I have said too much already.’
‘You can’t say something like that and then not explain,’ Fliss protested, feeling equally emotional.
‘I’m sorry,’ the Duchess apologised. ‘I shouldn’t have come up here. Oh, I am so cross with myself. I’m sorry, Fliss. I really am.’ She got up and walked towards the door, pausing there before opening it to repeat softly, ‘I really am sorry.’
Fliss stared at the closed door. What had the Duchess meant? What was it she had started to say and then refused to tell her? It was, of course, only natural that a mother should defend her child, Fliss could understand that. But there had been much more than maternal protection in the Duchess’s voice. There had been certainty, knowledge. A knowledge that she did not have. What kind of knowledge? Something to do with Fliss’s father? Something to do with the fact that Fliss had never been allowed to contact him? Something she had a right to know. Something that only one person could tell her, if she had the courage to demand an answer.
Vidal himself. And did she have that courage?
The Duchess’s slip made Fliss feel as though a secret door had suddenly appeared in a room she had thought she knew so well that it could not hide any secrets. It was an unnerving, uncomfortable experience. There was probably nothing for her to discover, no secrets for her to learn, no darkness for her to fear beyond that secret door. But what if there was? What if …? What could there be? Vidal had told her himself that he had intercepted her letter to her father and that she was not to write to him again. The evidence had spoken for itself. Hadn’t it?
She needed to talk to Vidal, Fliss recognised.
Vidal was in his own suite of rooms, working, Rosa informed Fliss in a tone that suggested he would not want to be interrupted, when Fliss asked her where he was.
Not giving herself time to change her mind, Fliss started to climb the stairs. All the way up her stomach was cramping and her knees were almost knocking. Her mouth was dry with apprehension.
As she walked along the corridor, part of her wanted her to turn round, her courage almost failing her. The door to Vidal’s rooms was slightly ajar. Fliss knocked on it hesitantly and then waited, a cowardly relief filling her when there was no immediate reply.
Letting her hand fall to her side, she was just about to step back from the door when she heard Vidal call out briskly in Spanish from inside the room, in a voice that commanded obedience, for her to enter.
Feeling decidedly unsteady, Fliss turned the handle.
She might not have touched any alcohol, but she felt slightly light-headed—light-headed and, she recognised, rather dangerously emotional.
The first thing she realised as she stepped into the room and let the door swing shut behind her was that this room was decorated in a far more modern and pared-down fashion than the rest of the house, in shades of grey and off-white, and was furnished as a functional working office. The second was that Vidal was standing in the doorway between the room she was in and a shower room adjacent to it, with only a towel wrapped round his damp body, and he was looking at her in a way that told her that her presence was neither expected nor wanted.
Unable to say anything, but helpless with longing and love, and humiliatingly aware that she was in danger of betraying everything that he made her feel, Fliss forced herself to drag her gaze away.
Only now did it dawn on her that Vidal had instructed her to come in in Spanish because he had assumed she was one of the servants. He certainly wasn’t at all pleased to see her. She could tell that from the grim expression on his face.
To her dismay he was actually turning away from her, about to walk off.
‘No!’ Fliss protested, darting forward and then coming to an abrupt halt when he turned round so quickly that only a couple of feet separated them. ‘I want to talk to you. There’s something I want to know.’
‘Which is?
Why did you stop me communicating with my father? That was what Fliss had intended to ask him but for some reason she heard herself saying instead, ‘Was it really you who stopped me from making contact with my father?’
The silence in the room was electric, the air almost humming with Vidal’s tension, and Fliss knew immediately from his unmoving silence that her question had caught him off-guard.
‘What makes you ask me that?’
Should she lie to him and say it was just curiosity? If she wanted to hear the truth from him then maybe she should start the ball rolling by offering him her own truth first. Fliss took a deep breath. ‘Something your mother let slip, by accident, that made me think what I’ve always assumed to be fact might not be.’
‘When the decision was taken it was done with your best interests in mind,’ Vidal told her obliquely.
He was choosing his words carefully—too carefully, Fliss realised. Too carefully and in a way that suggested to her that he was concealing something—or protecting someone?
‘Who took that decision?’ she demanded, adding fiercely, ‘I have a right to know, Vidal. I have a right to know who made that decision and why it was made. If you don’t tell me I wil
l go back and ask your mother and I shall keep on asking her until she tells me,’ she threatened wildly.
‘You will do no such thing.’
‘Then tell me. Was it your grandmother? My father? It has to be one of them. There wasn’t anyone else. The only other person involved was my mother …’ Fliss had almost been speaking to herself, but the sudden movement of Vidal’s head, the brief tensing of his jaw when she mentioned her mother, gave him away, made her stiffen and stare at him in disbelief. Her voice was a raw, emotional whisper as she demanded, ‘My mother? It was my mother? Tell me the truth, Vidal. I want to know the truth.’
‘She believed she was doing the right thing for you,’ Vidal told her, sidestepping her question.
‘My mother! But you were the one who brought my letter back. You …’ Fliss felt so weak with shock and disillusionment that she couldn’t help saying tremulously, ‘I don’t understand.’
The admission was a small agonised whisper that made Vidal want to go to her and hold her protectively, but he fought the urge. He had sworn to himself that he must allow her to have her freedom, that he must not impose on her the burden of his love for her. It was hard, though, to see her so distressed and not be able to offer her the comfort he longed to give her.
Instead all he could do was say quietly, ‘Let me try to explain.’
Fliss nodded her head, sinking down into the nearest chair. Her thoughts and her emotions were in total disarray, and yet totally focused on what her questions had revealed. But still there was something about the sight of Vidal wearing only that towel around his hips that touched her senses as though they were a raw wound, reminding her of all that she could never have.
‘After my father’s death, control of the family’s affairs and finances passed back to my grandmother. I was a minor, and my grandmother was my trustee along with the family solicitor. My grandmother’s treatment of your father, combined with her refusal to help your mother financially or recognise you, resulted in your father having what was in effect a minor breakdown. Your father was a kind, loving man, Felicity, but sadly his mental health was damaged by my grandmother’s determination to ensure he married well. He was a very gifted amateur historian, and as a young man he wanted to pursue a career in that field. My grandmother refused. She told him that it wasn’t acceptable for him to take up any kind of paid occupation. As I said before, your father was a kind and gentle man, but my grandmother was a strong-willed woman who rode roughshod over everyone and thought she was doing the right thing. She bullied and cowed him from the moment she realised he wanted to choose his own path in life. She never allowed him to forget that she was trying to do what his birth mother would have wanted for him, and that caused so much guilt and confusion in him. That was why he gave up your mother so easily, and I believe it was also why he had a breakdown when he learned of your mother’s pregnancy. He wanted to be with you both so much, but he could not stand up to my grandmother. He never recovered fully from that breakdown.’
