A Stormy Spanish Summer by Penny Jordan Read Free Book Online Page A

danger. Her whole body was on fire, pulsing with a reaction to him which seemed to have exploded inside her. Her eyes closed …
    Vidal felt the force of his own angry desire surging through him, sweeping aside barriers within himself he had thought impenetrable. The more he tried to regain control, the more savage his reaction became. Anger and out-of-control male desire. Each of them was dangerous enough alone, but incite them both, as this woman he was holding now had done, and the alchemic reaction between them had the power to rip a man’s self-respect to shreds—and with it his belief in himself.
    Behind his own closed eyelids Vidal saw her as his body most wanted her: naked, eager to appease the male passion she had induced and unleashed, offering herself. Her white skin would be pearlescent with the dew of her own arousal, the dark pink crests of her breasts flowering into hard nubs of pleasure that sought the caress of his fingertips and his lips.
    Outside in the garden below them the gathering dusk activated the system that brought on the garden lighting. Sudden illumination burst into life, causing Vidal to open his eyes and recognise what he was doing.
    Cursing himself mentally, he released Fliss abruptly.
    The shock of transition from a kiss so intimate that she felt it had seared her senses for ever to the reality of who exactly had been delivering that kiss had Fliss shuddering with self-revulsion. But before she could gather her scattered senses—before she could do anything, before she could tell Vidal what she thought of him—he was speaking to her. As though what he had done had never happened.
    ‘What I came to tell you is that it will be an early start in the morning, since we have a ten-o’clock appointment with your father’s lawyer. Rosa will send someone up with your breakfast, since my mother isn’t expected back until tomorrow. I also have to tell you that any future attempt by you to … to
persuade
me to satisfy your promiscuously carnal desires will be as doomed to failure as this one.’ His mouth twisted cynically and he gave her a coldly insulting look. ‘Over-used goods have never held any appeal for me.’
    Over-used goods.
    Trembling with rage at his insult, Fliss lost her head. ‘You were the one who started this, not me. And … and you’re wrong about me. You always have been. What you saw—’
    ‘What I saw was a sixteen-year-old tramp, lying on her mother’s bed, allowing a young lout to paw her and boast that
he
intended to have her because the rest of his football team already had.’
    ‘Get out!’ Fliss demanded, her voice rising in anger. ‘Get
out!’
    He strode away from her and through the bedroom door.
    As soon as she could trust herself to move she half ran and half stumbled to the door, turning the key in the lock, tears of rage and shame spilling from her hot eyes.

CHAPTER THREE
    I T WAS too late to try and hold back the memories now. They were there with her in every raw and cruel detail.
    Fliss sank down into one of the chairs, her head in her hands.
    She had been shocked and hurt when Vidal had told her that he’d intercepted her letter to her father. Such a cruel action from someone she had put on a pedestal had hurt very badly, coming on top of Vidal’s existing coldness towards her. Rejection by her father and his family—something she had always tried to pretend didn’t matter—had suddenly become very real and very painful. She had seen the warmth with which Vidal treated her mother, and that had made her own sense of rejection worse. He wasn’t after being cold to them both—just to her.
    When her mother had told her that Vidal was taking her out to dinner as a thank-you for his stay, Fliss had asked if she might have some schoolfriends round to celebrate the ending of the school year and their exams. Her mother had agreed—on the strict understanding that she was only to invite half a dozen of her classmates. Thishad seemed fair to Fliss