Passionate Relationship. PENNY JORDAN
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Instead of telling him the truth, she said curtly, ‘Must I?’
The absolute contempt in his eyes fuelled her anger, pushing her through the barrier of logic and caution to the point where she heard herself saying huskily, in a voice vibrating with emotion, ‘And by what absolute right do you dare to criticise me? You know nothing, either about me or about my motives in coming here. You are unbelievable, do you know that? You have the arrogance to criticise and condemn me without even trying to discover the facts; without knowing the first thing about me!’ Her eyes flashed huge and dark in her too-pale face, the violence of her emotions draining her last reserves of energy. She was literally shaking with the force of them, knowing that she was no match either physically or emotionally for this man, but driven to defy him.
‘I’m not staying here another minute!’ her voice rising now, her strength rushing away from her. ‘I’m leaving—right now.’
She turned sharply on her heel, her thirst forgotten, her one desire to leave the quinta just as soon as she could, but her flight was arrested by the hard fingers gripping her arm.
‘Be still!’
The rough shake that accompanied the hissed words almost rattled her teeth. She turned to look at him with loathing, shocked into immobility as the door he had come through suddenly opened and a woman stood there.
‘Jaime, querido, what is going on?’
She spoke in English, but even without that, Shelley would have know that this fair-haired woman could not be Portuguese.
So this was her father’s wife…her stepmother. As she looked into the delicately boned, fragile face, Shelley recognised the grief and pain in it. Yes, this woman had loved her father. A lump of cold ice formed round her own heart, the pain she had suffered as a child gripping her in a death hold as she met the worried blue eyes that looked first at her and then at Jaime.
‘Miss Howard seems to want to leave us,’ Jaime told his mother curtly. ‘I am just about to impress upon her the inadvisability of such a course of action. For one thing the village has no guest house or hotel, and for another, the advogado arrives tomorrow morning to discuss with her those matters relating to her father’s estate which concern her.’
Now, for the first time, her stepmother was forced to look at her. Up until now she had been avoiding doing so, Shelley recognised bleakly.
‘So you are Philip’s daughter. Your father…’ Tears welled in her eyes and she turned her head away. Jaime released Shelley’s arm to go to his mother’s side, his obvious care and concern for her so much in contrast to the way he had spoken to and touched Shelley that she felt her resentment and misery increase.
Part of her longed to burst out that it wasn’t fair, that she hadn’t been responsible for the split with her father, that she had suffered too, but caution and pain tied her tongue. She was not going to reveal her vulnerability in front of this man. He would enjoy seeing her pain… Oh, he would cloak his enjoyment with a polite semblance of concern, but deep down inside he would enjoy it.
The door opened again and a young girl came out. In her stepsister the Portuguese strain was less obvious than it was in Jaime, but she had her brother’s dark hair and olive skin.
Jaime said something to her in Portuguese, and after flicking a brief glance at Shelley she gently led her mother away.
‘I strongly advise you against leaving here tonight,’ Jaime told her coldly when his mother and sister had gone. ‘Of course, if you insist then I cannot stop you, but as I mentioned earlier, the advogado arrives tomorrow morning; there will be much he will want to discuss with you.’
‘And a great deal I shall want to discuss with him,’ Shelley told him fiercely. ‘Very well, Excelentíssimo.’ She let the title roll off her tongue with bitter sarcasm. ‘I shall stay until I have seen him, but believe me, your hospitality is as unwelcomely accepted by me as it is given by you.’
Before he could say another word she turned on her heel and went back upstairs. She was still thirsty, but she was damned if she would ask him for as much as a glass of water. God, how she hated him! When she got into her room she found that her nails had dug so deeply into her palms that they had left tiny crescent-shaped marks.
She was just on the point of getting back into bed when she heard a brief knock on the door. Stiffening slightly, she stared as it opened inwards.
The sight of her stepbrother carrying a tray of tea and sandwiches was the last thing she had expected. Her eyes rounded hugely as he carried it over to the bed and put it down beside her.
As though he sensed her shock he drawled mockingly, ‘You might be unwelcome among us, but it is not our policy to starve our guests.’
Her mouth almost watered at the thought of a cup of tea, but a coldly gracious, ‘Thank you,’ was the only acknowledgement of his thoughtfulness that she made. In truth, she was too shocked to say anything else. That he should actually think to provide her with something to eat and drink after the row they had just had totally astounded her, but then perhaps his Latin temperament was more accustomed to such heated exchanges than hers. And yet he had not struck her as a temperamental person; far from it. She had received an initial impression of a very cool and controlled man indeed.
‘My mother asks you to forgive her for not greeting you personally, but, as you will have seen, she is still suffering from the effects of your father’s death.’
‘Unlike me, you mean?’
The hostility was there again, his eyes burning their message of bitter contempt into hers as he leaned towards her, palms flat against her mattress.
‘You said it, not I,’ he told her coldly. ‘But since you have said it, you leave me free to comment that I do find your very obvious lack of grief rather…disturbing.’
Shelley could have told him that she had cried many tears for her father over the years, and more since learning the truth, but her grief was a very private thing, not something she could easily find relief for. She could have told him that, unlike his mother, she had no one to turn to, no shoulder to cry on, no firm supporting male arm to comfort her. Instead she said mockingly, ‘I’m surprised to learn that anything or anyone can disturb you, Jaime, least of all someone as insignificant and unworthy as myself.’
‘Unworthy, maybe, but insignificant, never.’
Shelley caught her breath as her heartbeat suddenly accelerated wildly. He was insinuating that he found her sexually desirable—but surely that was impossible? For no reason at all she felt acutely conscious of the fact that she was in bed and wearing her nightdress, even if it was a very sensible cotton affair without the slightest pretensions to being provocative. For one inexplicable and totally appalling moment she found herself wondering what it would be like to be held in those sinewy male arms, to feel that cynical, masculine mouth caressing her own. The treacherous direction of her thoughts shocked her into tensing back, her eyes widening with shock.
Appallingly, as though his mind too had travelled along the same intimate lines, Jaime raised one hand and touched her face. The sensation of the hard pads of his fingertips against her skin made her jerk back in horror, her reaction registered by the hard gleam in his eyes.
‘Unpleasant, isn’t it?’ he agreed softly. ‘But then nature does so enjoy playing these little tricks on us. For all that I, in my role as your father’s stepson, despise and dislike you, as a daughter, as a man I cannot avoid knowing that I would very much like to discover if all that fire and temper you have inside you would be there if we were together in bed. Lust is a tremendous leveller, but you need not worry; for both our sakes I intend to make sure that neither of us gives in to such an unseemly desire.’
Did he really desire her, or was he just trying to intimidate her? Surely it must be the latter?
Wordlessly Shelley watched as he got up and walked to the door. There were a thousand things she should have said to him, the most important of which was an instant