From Barcelona, with Love by Elizabeth Adler Read Free Book Online

today were Juan Pedro’s only son, Antonio, and two of his daughters, Jassy and Floradelisa, all by his first wife, and all of whom stood to inherit from Lorenza, who had no children of her own. And then there was Bibi of course, the youngest, the daughter of his second wife, who died when she was born.
    Turning from the window, she sat at the gilded Venetian satinwood vanity table that Juan Pedro had complained was out of place in this heavy-beamed Spanish room, with the hint of stone exposed through the pale creamy paint.
    â€œThe stone is to let reality in,” Lorenza told him solemnly when she’d done it. “Just in case things go wrong and we have to return to that old Ravel stone cottage.” Of course that had made him laugh; “There is no old stone cottage anymore,” he’d said. “This is it. And it’s all yours.” And now it was.
    She ran a comb through her mass of shoulder-length black hair, bemoaning the fact that it was totally uncontrollable. Always had been. It floated around her face in a movable dark cloud and God help her if she were ever caught in a wind because then it stood on end and she looked ready for takeoff. Her hair, she decided, was not her best feature, though others felt differently. And indeed it gave her somehow too-round face character, as did the widely set dark brown eyes, and the too-big mouth she colored again with Lancôme’s fuchsia lipstick. Beauty was in the eye of the beholder, she thought, amused, and she had never seen herself as that.
    She wasn’t bad though, for forty-one, thinner than she had been at twenty, still bosomy, though now trimmer from hard work and the stress that also showed on her face. She turned away from the too-revealing mirror. The truth was anyone but the owner of that face would have called her lovely. A lovely woman, Doña Lorenza de Ravel. And a woman to be reckoned with.
    She went and checked herself in the long mirror: plain black suit, skirt just to the knee, pearls at the neck. The grieving widow, she thought with a pang.
    Nervous, she pulled at her three-strand pearl choker, suddenly feeling as if it were strangling her. Juan Pedro’s beautiful gift had once upon a time belonged to a famous French aristocrat whose head had been chopped off, come the revolution and the guillotine, while those tricoteuse knitted away, screaming with delight. Lorenza had been relieved to hear they had not been on the poor woman’s pretty neck at the time.
    â€œThere’s no blood on these pearls,” Juan Pedro told her, seeing her stricken look. “She was young, and, they say, quite lovely and I have no doubt she would smile to see you wearing them.” Sometimes though, in moments of stress, like now, those pearls seemed to tighten up on Lorenza’s neck.
    Tires spun on the gravel. She went to look. It was Antonio, Juan Pedro’s only son, his eldest child. In fact Antonio was almost exactly the same age as Lorenza, something that had certainly not pleased him when his father had introduced her as his new wife-to-be.
    Of course, Antonio would be first to arrive. Lorenza would bet he couldn’t wait to hear what was going on, hoping she was going to give it all up and hand over the reins to him. We’ll see, she thought, as she walked down the stairs and took a seat on one of the two cream-brocade sofas fronting the empty marble fireplace, that instead of crackling logs held a haphazard display of flowers hastily flung together by Buena.
    She did not get up when Antonio strode into the room, but she did smile and hold out her hand, while thinking that Antonio never simply “walked” into a room, he always “strode.” He was tall and dark, not handsome but with his father’s compelling eyes and beaky nose.
    â€œLorenza,” he said, in the same hearty tones that made you understand he was very much a presence. “Good to see you,” he added, not meaning it,