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‘Heaven,’ she murmured, gazing around. It was hard to believe such perfection existed.
‘Oh, yes,’ Annalisa was telling the young girl at the beauty salon confidently. ‘I can quite easily leave everything for a few hours. The animals have been fed, the house is tidy and the orange groves look after themselves.’
She laughed happily. It was far more important to be relaxed and in control for tonight, she thought, watching the stripes of shimmering pink gradually turn her well-buffed toenails into shell-like perfection. She wriggled her toes contentedly as the beautician finished her work. Next came the seaweed treatment. Annalisa had no idea what that entailed, but it promised miracles for the skin as well as relaxation for the mind. Perfect!
As she drove home Annalisa was smiling contentedly. She had gone straight from the beauty salon to buy a new dress. White, simple in design, and extremely chic, it had had a price tag to match. But that didn’t matter—not today. Today was a special day. A day for taking control of her life and for spoiling herself. She doubted that she had ever been so well groomed. There was not one inch of her that had not been brushed, buffed, plucked or polished. And mood wise, having been painted from neck to ankle in thick green goo and then baked in a foil blanket before finally being hosed down with an icy cold power jet, she was ready for anything…or so she thought.
She had hardly stopped the car before she flung herself out of it.
‘Hey! What are you doing?’ Her voice sounded hoarse in her ears and she completely forgot the fact that she was dressed ready to go out.
Sprinting towards the wooden gate, she didn’t wait to open it and snagged her dress as she scrambled over the top. Stumbling through the tangled shrubbery, she tripped several times as she struggled to negotiate a treacherous carpet of recently cut tree branches…so many branches! Not caring that her new shoes were getting scuffed, or that the elegant white dress was already smeared with dirt and ripped in several places, she hurried to the clearing where she had spotted the intruder.
Her arms and legs were quickly covered in scratches and weals, but nothing mattered—nothing except stopping the carnage. Almost beyond speech, she could only fling wide her arms in a failed attempt to encompass the devastation and gasp, ‘What have you done?’
The man she was confronting had a face as gnarled and as brown as the tree branch he was clinging to. ‘Buenos tardes, señorita!’ he said, clearly oblivious to her distress. And, brandishing a battered greasy hat in the air, he embroidered the greeting with a tobacco-stained, gap-toothed grin.
Annalisa’s mouth formed a circle of despair as she stared up at him. Wearing an assortment of clothes that might have been handed down through the generations and had certainly never been washed, the wiry vandal wore a garland of cutting tools around his waist and a bright, inquisitive expression in his raisin-black eyes.
‘So you are the daughter of Don Pedro,’ he called out in heavily accented English, tapping his chest. ‘I am Enrique Caradonda.’
‘Never mind who you are,’ Annalisa retorted sharply. ‘I think you’d better explain what you’re doing here…and this!’ She gestured fiercely at the piles of branches littering the ground. All that was left of her beautiful orchard as far as she could see was a forest of leafless skeletons.
‘I am working,’ Enrique declared with an affronted shrug. ‘Señor Perez—’
At the sound of Ramon’s name Annalisa uttered a sharp angry sound and ordered Enrique Caradonda out of the tree.
‘Sí, señorita,’ Enrique agreed amiably. ‘The light will soon be fading. I’ll come back tomorrow.’
‘You’ll do no such—’
But Enrique had already swung to the ground and was quickly swallowed up in the deepening shadows as he hurried back to the village.
Slowly turning in a circle, Annalisa felt a sob rising in her throat. She was so quick to trust…too quick. How could anyone, especially Ramon, do this to her? Was he really so impatient for progress on the proposed site for his marina? If he thought he could drive her away by pulling a stunt like this he was badly mistaken. The property was hers to develop as she chose.
She drew a ragged breath and tried to confirm the extent of the damage. The trees would never recover in time to crop. And if she had nothing to sell how could she possibly keep afloat financially for another year? To rub salt in the wound it had happened while she was at the beauty salon, congratulating herself on how well things were going! Her grubby hands balled into fists. Ramon Perez was about to get the biggest tongue-lashing of his life!
