A Stormy Spanish Summer Read Free Page A

expecting you to stay withus, and will be awaiting our arrival, I’m afraid that that is not possible.’
    ‘Your mother?’
    ‘Yes. She has come especially from her home in the mountains to our townhouse, here in the city, so that she can welcome you into the family.’
    ‘Welcome me into the family?’ Fliss shot him a derisory look. ‘Do you think I
want
that after the way “the family” treated my mother—the au pair not good enough to marry my father? The way they refused to acknowledge my existence?’
    Ignoring Fliss’s angry outburst as though she hadn’t spoken, Vidal continued coldly, ‘You should have thought of the consequences of coming here before you decided to do so—but then you are not someone who thinks it important to think of the consequences of your behaviour, are you, Felicity? Neither the consequences nor their effect on others.’
    Fliss couldn’t bring herself to look at him. Of course he
would
throw that at her. Of course he would.
    ‘I have no wish to meet your mother. My hotel booking—’
    ‘Has been cancelled.’
    No, she couldn’t. She wouldn’t. Panic hit her. Fliss opened her mouth to protest, but it was too late. She was already being propelled firmly towards the car park. A sudden movement of the crowd pushed her closer to Vidal’s side, and her own flesh was immediately aware of the male strength and heat of his body as her thigh came into brief contact with his, hard with muscle beneath the expensive fabric of his clothes. She recoiled,her mouth dry, her heart thudding, as memories she couldn’t bear to relive mocked her attempts to deny them.
    They moved swiftly along in the full glare and heat of the high summer sun—which was surely why her body had started to burn so hotly that she could feel the beat of her own blood in her face.
    ‘You should be wearing a hat,’ Vidal rebuked her, his critical gaze raking her hot face. ‘You are too pale-skinned to be exposed to the full heat of our sun.’
    It wasn’t the sun that was the cause of the heat burning her, Fliss knew. But thankfully only she knew that.
    ‘I have a hat in my case,’ she told him. ‘But since I expected to go straight to my hotel from the airport by taxi, rather than being virtually kidnapped and forced to stand in the sun’s full glare, I didn’t think it necessary.’
    ‘The only reason you were standing anywhere was because you chose to create an argument. My car is over here,’ Vidal told her. His arrogance caused Fliss to grit her teeth. How typical it was of everything she knew about him that he made no attempt to apologise and instead tried to put
her
in the wrong. He had lifted his hand, as though to place it against the small of her back and no doubt propel her in the direction of the waiting vehicle, but her immediate reaction was to step hurriedly away from him. She could not bear him to touch her. To do so would be a form of self-betrayal she could not endure. And besides, he was too … Too what? Too male?
    He had seen her hasty movement, of course, and now he was looking at her in a way that locked her stomach muscles against the biting contempt of that look.
    ‘It’s too late for you to put on the “shrinking virgin, fearful of a man’s touch” act for me,’ he warned her
    She wasn’t going to let him speak to her like that. She couldn’t.
    ‘I’m not acting,’ she told him. ‘And it wasn’t fear. It was revulsion.’
    ‘You lost the right to that kind of chaste reaction a long time ago, and we both know it,’ Vidal taunted.
    Anger and something else—something aching and sad and lost—tightened painfully in her chest.
    Once—also a long time ago, or so it seemed now—she had been a young girl trembling on the brink of her first emotional and sensual crush on a real-life adult man, seeing in him everything her romantic heart craved, and sensing in him the potential to fulfil every innocent sensual fantasy her emerging sexuality had had aching inside her. A