A Stormy Spanish Summer Read Online Free Page B

A Stormy Spanish Summer
Book: A Stormy Spanish Summer Read Online Free
Author: Penny Jordan
Pages:
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‘Let me introduce you to Rosa, who is in charge of the household here. She will show you to your room.’
    The housekeeper advanced towards Fliss, her gaze still searching and assessing, and then, ignoring Fliss, she turned back to Vidal. Speaking in Spanish, she told him, ‘Where her mother was a dove, this one has the look of a wild falcon not yet tamed to the lure.’
    Fresh anger flashed in Fliss’s own eyes.
    ‘I speak Spanish,’ she told them both. She was almost shaking with the force of her anger. ‘And there is no lure that would ever tempt me down into the grasp of anyone in
this
household.’
    She just had time to see the answering flash of hostility burn through the look Vidal gave her before she turned on her heel to head towards the stairs, leaving Rosa to come after her.

CHAPTER TWO
    O N THE first floor landing Rosa broke the stiff silence between them by saying in a sharp voice, ‘So you speak Spanish?’
    ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Fliss challenged her. ‘No matter what Vidal might want to think, he does not have the power to prevent me from speaking the language that was, after all, my father’s native tongue.’
    She certainly wasn’t going to admit to Rosa, or anyone else here, her early teenage dream of one day meeting her father, which had led to her secretly saving some of her paper-round money to pay for Spanish lessons she’d suspected her mother would not want her to have. Fliss had come to recognise well before she had reached her teens that her mother was almost fearful of Fliss doing anything to recognise the Spanish side of her inheritance. So, rather than risk upsetting her, Fliss had tried not to let her see how much she had longed to know more about not just her father but his country. Her mother had been a gentle person who had hated confrontations and arguments, and Fliss had loved her far too much to ever want to hurt her.
    ‘Well, you certainly haven’t got your spirit from eitherof your parents,’ Rosa told her forthrightly. ‘Though I would warn you against trying to cross swords with Vidal.’
    Fliss stopped walking, her foot on the first step of the next set of stairs as she turned towards the housekeeper. Her body had immediately tensed with rejection of the thought that she should in any way allow Vidal to control any aspect of her life.
    ‘Vidal has no authority over me,’ she told the housekeeper vehemently. ‘And he never will have.’
    A movement in the hallway below her caught her attention. She looked back down the stairs and saw that Vidal was still standing there. He must have heard her—which was no doubt the reason for the grim look he was giving her. He probably wished he
did
have some authority over her. If he had he may have prevented her from coming to Spain—just as years ago he had prevented her from making contact with her father.
    In her mind’s eye she could see him now, standing in her bedroom—the room that should have been her private haven—holding the letter she had sent to her father weeks earlier. A letter which he had intercepted. A letter written from the depths of her sixteen-year-old heart to a father she had longed to know.
    Every one of the tenderly burgeoning sensual and emotional feelings she had begun to feel for Vidal had been crushed in that moment. Crushed and turned into bitterness and anger.
    ‘Fliss, darling, you must promise me that you will not attempt to make contact with your father again,’ her mother had warned her with tears in her eyes, afterVidal had returned to Spain and it had been just the two of them again.
    Of course she had given her that promise. She had loved her mother too much to want to upset her—especially when …
    No!
She would not allow Vidal to drag her back there, to that searingly shameful place that was burned into her pride for life. Her mother had understood what had happened. She had known Fliss was not to blame.
    Maturity had brought her the awareness that, since her father had always
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