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

and so she had been horrified when their get-together was interrupted by the arrival of what had seemed like dozens of teenagers—many of whom already the worse for drink.
    She had tried to persuade them to leave, but her efforts had been met by jeers and even more rowdy behaviour. One of the boys—Rory—had been the ringleader of a wild crowd from her school. A swaggering bully of a boy who’d played in the school football team. He had gone upstairs with the girl who had arrived with him—a stranger to Fliss—and she had followed them, horrified when they went into her mother’s bedroom.
    In the row that had followed the girl had left, and Rory, furious with Fliss, who had been ‘spoiling his fun’, had grabbed her and pulled her down onto the bed. His actions had turned Fliss’s anger to fear. She had tried to pull free and fight him off, but he had laughed at her, pouring cider over her from the bottle he had brought up with him and then pushing her back against the bed.
    That was when the door had opened and she had seen her mother and Vidal standing there. At first she had been relieved—but then she had seen the look on Vidal’s face. So had Rory, because that had been when he had made that crude and completely untrue comment about the rest of the football team, followed by an equally untrue statement.
    ‘She loves it. She can’t get enough of it. Ask any of the lads. They all know how well she’s up for it. A proper little nympho, she is.’
    Fliss could still remember the feeling of shocked disbelief icing through her, making it impossible for herto speak or move; to defend herself or refute his boast. Instead she had simply lain there, numbed with horror, whilst Vidal had pulled Rory from the bed and marched him downstairs.
    Her mother’s shocked, ‘Oh, Fliss …’ had been ringing in her ears as she’d followed.
    Later, of course, she had explained what had happened to her mother, and thankfully her mother had believed her, but by that time Vidal had been on his way back to Spain, and the pain she had felt on seeing the contempt and loathing in his eyes as he’d looked at her had turned her crush on him into revulsion and anger.
    She had never gone back to school. She and the three girls who had become her closest friends had gone instead to a sixth-form college, thanks to the excellence of their exam results, and Fliss had made a private vow to herself that she would make her mother proud of her. She would never, ever allow another man to look at her as Vidal had done. She had never discussed with anyone just what his misjudgement of her that evening had done to her. It was her private shame. And now Vidal had resurrected that shame.
    Downstairs in the library, with its high ceiling and Biblical frescoes, Vidal stood motionless and white-lipped, staring unseeingly into space, oblivious to the grandeur of his surroundings. The bookshelves were laden with leather-covered books, their titles painted on the spines in gold, and the scent of leather and paper pervaded the room.
    Vidal knew himself to be a man of strong principle,with deep passions and convictions about his ancestry and his duty to it, and to the people who depended on him. Never before had the strength of those passions boiled over into the fury that Felicity had aroused in him. Never before had he come so close to having his self-control consumed in such intense fires.
    If he hadn’t been stopped when those lights had come on.
    He would have stopped anyway, he assured himself. But a critical inner voice demanded silkily,
Would you?
Or would he have continued to be consumed by his own out-of-control emotions until he had had Felicity spread naked on the bed beneath him, as he sought to satisfy the hunger within him he had thought extinguished?
    Vidal closed his eyes and then opened them again. He had thought he’d put the past behind him, but Felicity had brought it back to life with a vengeance.
    He needed this to be over. He needed