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‘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.
