Passionate Relationship. PENNY JORDAN
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walked to the door, but he made no move to check her.
She had spoken to the lawyer and there was nothing to keep her here now. Her cases were in her room, but it was an easy task to carry them down to her car, which she found by asking the old man who tended the gardens what had happened to it.
It had apparently been parked in the quinta’s stable-cum-garage block. At another time she would have lingered to admire and stroke the silky coats of the horses she glimpsed as she walked past their boxes, but she was too intent on what she intended to do.
Two days ago it would have been impossible for her to imagine leaving anywhere without saying goodbye to her host and hostess, but her stepbrother and his family would feel no regret at her going. It was shaming to feel such an intense wave of desolation, something she should have been far too adult to experience.
Her car started first time. The petrol tank was a quarter full, plenty to get her to the nearest garage. As she drove away from the quinta she resisted the impulse to look back, and yet thirty kilometres on, when she came to the place where the road forked, she found herself taking the fork that led down to the coast.
She had given in to the craziest impulse, and yet she knew she couldn’t leave the Algarve without at least seeing the villa her father had left her.
Luckily the lawyer had mentioned the village in which it was situated, and she had remembered the name. That quick glance at the map in the garage, supposedly to check her bearings, had shown her that she could easily reach the village by late afternoon; there were several large hotels dotted along this part of the Algarve coastline, or so she remembered from her guide book, and surely she could find a bed for the night in one of them before continuing her journey home?
A tiny voice warned her that it was folly to go to the villa, but she couldn’t resist the impulse to see it. Perhaps there she would find something of her father, some sense of him that she could cling to in the years ahead.
THE village lay just below the thick belt of pine forest that clad the lower slopes of the hills, and as the road dipped, Shelley saw the sea, impossibly blue for the Atlantic, reflecting the colour of the cloudless sky.
After the welcome shade of the forest, the white glare of the sun bouncing back off the houses in the village made her wince. In the small square, groups of people sat outside the one pavement café.
One or two people eyed her curiously as she climbed out of her car, but in the main she was courteously ignored. The Portuguese as a nation were much more withdrawn and aloof than their other Latin cousins.
She sat down at one of the empty tables and a waiter came to take her order. Despite the dust thrown up by the traffic that went through the square the tables and chairs were immaculately clean. Shelley ordered a lemonade and tentatively asked the waiter if he knew the way to the Villa Hilvares, as the lawyer had told her her father’s property was called. To her relief the waiter obviously understood and spoke English, and quickly gave her the directions she needed. It seemed that the villa was a little way out of the village, overlooking the sea.
There had been more than a slight flicker of curiosity in the waiter’s eyes when she had mentioned the villa’s name. Since it took its name from her stepbrother’s family and had once belonged to them, Shelley guessed that they were probably quite well known in the area as local landowners.
Although she had accused Jaime of not wanting any of the family property to pass out of his hands. Shelley knew really that she had probably done him an injustice. He was far too proud a man to be betrayed by such a vulgar vice as greed. Not that it mattered. She had already instructed the lawyer to draw up the papers which would enable her to return the villa, and the income that would come to her from the rest of her father’s bequest, to Jaime and his family, and she had asked him to forward them to her solicitors in London. She would be back there sooner than she had anticipated. She had come to Portugal with such high hopes—ridiculously emotional hopes, she derided herself now. Anyone with an ounce of common sense would have realised that she wouldn’t be welcome. But her stepfamily hadn’t known the truth…
Moving restlessly in her seat, she tried to banish Jaime and his family from her mind. Someone on the next table ordered a sandwich, and Shelley suddenly realised how long it was since she had eaten. it took her ten minutes to catch the waiter’s eye, but when he eventually returned with her order, she found the coffee he had brought her tasted hot and invigorating and the ham roll was deliciously fresh.
It was six o’clock when she returned to her car. The directions the waiter had given her were easy to follow, and she found the villa at the end of a narrow, untarmacked road.
Like the quinta, it was built primarily in the Moorish style, its wooden shutters closed and a large arched wooden doorway blocking her entrance. She should, of course, have realised that the place would be locked up. With a let-down feeling, Shelley stared at the white walls and shuttered windows, filled with a sense of depressed frustration. She would find nothing of her father here outside this shuttered, empty house.
This part of the Algarve was renowned for its sandy beaches, and less than a couple of miles further down the beach Shelley saw that someone was constructing a large hotel. It was a strange sensation to realise that this land she was standing on actually belonged to her. In Portugal the beaches were all the property of the nation, but the villa and several acres of land that went with it were apparently hers.
It was no good. She felt no sense of ownership, of belonging. If she could have gone inside the villa…or even perhaps seen some of her father’s work. But she had too much pride to go back to the quinta and ask.
The sun was dipping into the sea, sinking slowly. Soon it would be dark. She ought to head back to her car and drive down the coast, otherwise she would never find a hotel where she could spend the night, but something father had lived here in this land, in this very building, but she couldn’t picture him here. She didn’t even know what he looked like, she reflected bitterly. Her grandmother had destroyed the wedding photographs after her mother had died.
Coming here had been a stupid impulse, a waste of time. She turned round abruptly, tensing in shock as she saw the man watching her.
‘Jaime!’
She wasn’t aware of saying his name, only of the intense panic locking her muscles. A confrontation here with this man was the last thing she wanted.
‘I hoped I might find you here.’
Something had changed. He no longer looked quite as austere, and his eyes when they met hers held both regret and remorse.
He stood within an arm’s length of her, but made no attempt to touch her.
‘What can I say?’ He spread his hands in a gesture that was totally continental.
‘Why did you not tell us, querida?’ His voice sounded rough and tired. ‘Had we known…’
‘You would still have resented me,’ interrupted Shelley curtly. ‘You wanted to believe the worst of me, and now that you’ve discovered that you were wrong, you’ve followed me here to apologise. But it’s not my feelings that concern you, but your own, your own pride. You don’t give a damn about me, or my pain; all you’re concerned with is your own precious pride.’
‘You are wrong. I am concerned about you; but I am not the only one to be guilty of the sin of pride. I believe it is your pride that leads you to punish us by leaving us with our burden of guilt by not allowing us the opportunity to make amends. Your father was one of the best men I have ever known, and I have always considered myself more than fortunate to have him as my mentor in the place of a father with whom I never got on. Since you share with me the sin of pride, I am sure you must know what it does to me to know that my gain, my good fortune, was your loss, your unhappiness.’
Ridiculously, his words softened her resentment and made her eyes prickle with tears. She turned