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He moved closer and put it on her head, tugging gently on the wide brim to achieve the effect he wanted, smoothing away soft tendrils of hair, and all the time he was much too close and she had to fight a terrible craving to move a little closer still, close enough to feel that magnificent, vital body touching hers, imprinting her flesh with the magnetic potency of his.
She closed her eyes on a wave of despair. The fight was well and truly on—the fight with herself. What she felt was lust, a wild stirring of hormones too long ignored. She would not give in to it. She would not follow in her father’s hedonistic footsteps. She would not lose control. Not even for a moment!
‘Shall we go?’ She twisted her head away and tried to look frosty but her efforts only served to amuse him. She saw the half-hidden smile as he picked up a canvas bag she hadn’t noticed before and hoisted the strap over his shoulder.
‘Breakfast.’ He patted the bag lightly. ‘As I told you, I asked Rosalia to pack a picnic.’
He looked impossibly smug and quite extravagantly gorgeous and she wanted to kick him for the way he made her feel. But she had decided not to dwell on that, hadn’t she? So she told him tartly, ‘How thoughtful. But then I suppose thoughtfulness comes easily when you can pay somebody else to do the donkey work.’
‘Friends—remember?’ His voice was a throaty, velvet purr and his hand was on her waist as he led her out of the suite. Her brows peaked, expressing a vague anxiety that came out of nowhere, as they made their way down through the sturdy stone building, ending up on the wisteria-clad terraces where he’d left her the day before.
Friends. She would like to think he was her friend, she thought wistfully as he ran lithely down a flight of stone steps at the far end of the terraces and pushed open a narrow door in the curtain wall. In fact, she craved his friendship quite desperately, she acknowledged, his smile hitting her like a blow to her chest as he held open the door that led on to the mountainside.
But it wasn’t possible. How could they be friends after what he’d done? He had tricked her into coming here and would hold her here, depriving her of her freedom, until he got what he wanted— Piers’ neck beneath those strong tanned hands, she reminded herself. And as if that weren’t enough he had humiliated, insulted and embarrassed her. So no, they couldn’t be friends, and she couldn’t understand why she should want it otherwise.
She deplored the way her throat suddenly tightened, tears stinging the back of her eyes. She didn’t know what was wrong with her, and gave up trying to fathom it out when he held out a hand to help her over the stony path.
Just for today she would pretend, she capitulated as she felt those lean fingers curl around hers, give way to the unexpected side of her nature that seemed intent on fighting the calm control that had been the cornerstone of her existence. She didn’t want a battle, not today, not when the warm Andalusian wind was moulding the fine cotton to her strangely sensitised flesh, the scent of wild herbs and flowers a heady narcotic, drugging her senses, the view of the dry rocky mountains almost as magnificent and soul-stirring as the unpredictable Spaniard who gripped her hand so tightly, fierce pride in his black eyes as he pointed out the extent of his lands.
‘Has all this been in your family forever?’ she asked, flustered, as he sank to the sparse dry grass at the foot of a rocky outcrop, pulling her with him. Today she was allowing the fantasy of friendship and that probably explained the burning need to know all about him. Friends needed to know what made each other tick, didn’t they?
‘Practically,’ he answered with a tiny shrug. ‘At least, to an offshoot of my mother’s branch of the family. My mother had blotted her copybook as far as her family were concerned. I inherited a place that was rapidly falling into ruin, estates that were run-down and under-utilised, simply because there was no one else.’ Again the tiny shrug and all the time he’d been talking he’d been rummaging in the capacious haversack, producing a simple meal of bread and ham and olives, a flask of hot coffee.
‘Nothing’s ruined now,’ she probed, accepting the slice of ham
he offered on the tip of a wickedlooking knife, folding it in her fingers, watching him as he cut a slice for himself.
His thick black lashes lowered, hiding his expressive eyes, he answered levelly, ‘I made sure it is not. I look after what is mine to the full extent of my talents and energy.’
As he had looked after his sister? she wondered. Jealously, smotheringly, eventually driving her away with someone as unsuitable as Piers?
But he cut off the direction of her thoughts, telling her, ‘I gave up dealing on the international money market and gave everything I am to the task of putting everything here back together again. Making it pay. And that’s the name of the game, isn’t it, Salome?’
His smile was sweet and slow, drawing her closer into the web of his attraction, and she dipped her head, hiding behind the wide brim of her sun hat, overcome with a completely novel sense of shyness. And she felt her insides quiver as he said softly, ‘We’ve been too busy scoring points off each other to share confidences. Understandable, perhaps, in the circumstances, but I want it to stop. I want us to get to know each other. I hope you want it too. So tell me something about yourself, and take your time. We have all day.’
He wanted to get to know her, and they had all day! So this wasn’t to be a short break, breakfast sandwiched between a little essential exercise, then a return to the castle where he would leave her to kick her heels all day under the watchful eye of Rosalia. She went weak inside, almost melting with excitement at the thought of it, and said huskily, ‘What’s to tell? I’m a very ordinary person.’ She popped the last morsel of food in her mouth, hardly able to swallow it because of the tightening of her throat muscles.
‘Not so ordinary.’ He stretched full-length in the shade, his arms crossed behind his head, closing his eyes. ‘You’re the most intriguing woman I’ve ever met. Layer upon layer. Stubborn as they come. Were you a difficult child?’
She smiled and shook her head. Then, realising he had his eyes closed, she said, ‘I was very biddable. I had to be. The only one in our family allowed to be difficult was Piers. Patience—my mother—and I used to run around after him doing our best to bring some order into his life, making sure he ate and slept fairly regularly and sometimes changed his clothes.’
He was easy to talk to. Perhaps because he wasn’t looking at her, maybe drifting off to sleep. She tucked her legs beneath her, her skirts pooling around her, turning her head to watch an eagle soaring high above the picturesque village in the valley so far below, not looking at Francisco because now it hurt too much, an unbearable pain clutching at her heart.
She flinched at the sudden harshness in his tone as he demanded, ‘Was he unfaithful to your mother? Was that why you tried to become cold?’
Cold? Was that what he thought of her?
‘I’ve never consciously tried to be anything except sensible,’ she replied, stung. ‘Somebody has to be when you’re living around my father. He earned himself a reputation by his painting, and an even bigger one by horsing around. I watched Patience run herself ragged and after she died I tried to carry on the good work. But I was only a kid. There was no way I could succeed where she had failed.
‘And I don’t know whether he was unfaithful.’ Her fingers were busily pleating the fabric of her skirt, her voice going tighter. ‘If he was, Patience hid it. He used to take himself off, usually when he’d been working non-stop on a painting, and, as Patience put it, let off steam. It was only after her death that his flings with other women became public knowledge.
‘Perhaps,’ she added slowly, with a shaft of insight, ‘perhaps he missed her. Found substitutes for a short time, but wouldn’t put any one of them permanently in Patience’s place because none of them could live up to his memory of her.’
She chewed uncertainly on the corner of her lip. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think Dad and I have ever really talked about anything important. But I do know that his women were all round about his own age. Maybe mothering—which was what Patience had been doing all their married lives—was what he was looking for. As well as passion.’
Which was why, at the very beginning, she’d been unable to believe that he’d taken up with a girl younger than his own daughter.
‘So you decided to make your life tidy and ordered, in direct contrast to the chaos you probably believed was responsible for your mother’s untimely death. A natural reaction from a sensitive child in her teens.’ Suddenly his arm snaked up and fastened around her neck, drawing her down beside him on the herb-scented grass, his voice a wicked whisper as he said, ‘The repression didn’t go too deep to do permanent damage, did it, Salome?’
