Love In Torment

Cover Page

Excerpt

About the Author

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

Copyright

“I’ll have you hammeringon my door before long.”

Gemma tensed. “Sure you will,” she conceded. “I’ll be hammering with a feather and I won’t have to do it twice, will I? Because you’ll be waiting eagerly enough, and you won’t have torment on your mind.”

Felipe’s face darkened. “Sleep well, querida,” he said, controlled and immobile. “And prepare yourself for the onslaught. It’s not a threat but a promise.”

NATALIE FOX was born and brought up in London, England, and has a daughter, two sons and two grandsons. Her husband, Ian, is a retired advertising executive, and they now live in a tiny Welsh village. Natalie is passionate about her three cats, two of them strays brought back from Spain where she lived for five years, and equally passionate about gardening and writing romance. Natalie says she took up writing because she absolutely hates going out to work!

Love in Torment

Natalie Fox

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

‘You can’t go! It’s out of the question!’ Isobel Soames had cried. ‘Gemma, I absolutely forbid it!’

Gemma would never forget those words as long as she lived. The forerunners of what was to come to crumble her world. Another shock, the second of recent months that would stamp her twenty-sixth year as the most emotionally traumatic of her life.

Even now, staring blindly out of the window of the Tropicana hotel in the heart of heat-hazed Caracas, she couldn’t decide which shock had hit hardest: losing Felipe, the only man she had ever loved, or finding that the man she had called ‘Daddy’ all her life hadn’t been her father at all!

‘Mother,’ Gemma had argued formally, ‘the travel arrangements have been made. I have accepted this commission and I’m going to do it…’

‘There will be other commissions. You’re talented and in a position to pick your own clients. I don’t want you to go to Venezuela!’

It was on the occasion of one of Gemma’s fortnightly visits to her mother at the family home in Surrey, usually so amiable and packed with art-world gossip, but not this time. Gemma’s news that she had been commissioned to paint the portrait of one of Venezuela’s oil barons had not filled her mother with delight as she had anticipated. Far from it; her mother’s face had frozen in shock and then had come the fury.

Shocked herself, Gemma had gaped at her mother as she’d paced the drawing-room of Whitegates. Her mother had never stood in her way before. On the contrary, she’d been delighted when Gemma had echoed her own artistic talent. Their professions lay in different directions, though. Isobel was society’s favourite interior designer and had been for the last two decades, whereas Gemma’s career had veered towards portraiture. People interested her more than the trappings they surrounded themselves with. It had never caused dissent between them before.

‘South America isn’t another planet—’ Gemma had protested.

‘South America isn’t the problem!’ Isobel had snapped, clutching her shoulders, her painted nails digging into the fine silk of her blouse. Then her whole body had sagged and when she had turned to Gemma she seemed to have aged desperately. She was still beautiful, of course, classically elegant with sculptured features that were timeless. Her dark hair, tinted now to banish the wisps of grey at her temples, was drawn back into a tight coil of twisted silk. The eyes suddenly aged her, Gemma had thought at that moment. Normally so clear and bright, as deep a brown as Gemma’s own, they were now misted painfully.

‘It’s not the place, Gemma, darling, it’s the man,’ she had husked painfully.

‘The man? Agustªn Delgado de Navas, one of the richest oil men in South America? How can you possibly object to him?’ Gemma had cried in amazement.

She remembered the silence that had preceded her mother’s reply more than anything else. That awful, aching gap where considerations were weighed and a decision made to tell or not.

‘He’s your father,’ had come the flat statement that had so brutally stunned Gemma. Those few crippling words that had torn at her heart, which had already suffered so badly in the past months.

‘He’s your father’…the words echoed and echoed in Gemma’s head. Were still echoing now, halfway round the world and weeks later.

Gemma crossed the hotel room and impatiently snapped off the air-conditioning. She poured herself a cold drink from the courtesy bar, slid open the patio doors of the balcony and was immediately swamped by a heat that took her breath away. She gasped, quickly acclimatised then slumped down in a cane chair and closed her eyes wearily, unaware of the city traffic thundering ten floors below in the tropical metropolis.

She had defied her mother and now here she was, waiting in Caracas for her escort for the last stage of her journey, a short flight in comparison to the long haul from Heathrow. Private jet from Caracas, over the mountains to the plains of Loma de Grande and the Villa Verde where she would come face to face with the man who was her father but would never know it.

‘If you insist on going, Gemma, you must promise me you’ll not reveal your true identity,’ Isobel had bargained.

‘Just what is my true identity? A Soames, a Villiers, a de Navas?’ Gemma had questioned bitterly. ‘For nearly twenty-six years I’ve believed myself a Soames; now I find I’m the offspring of some dubious Latin oil baron—’

‘You are a Soames,’ Isobel had interjected levelly. ‘And don’t you ever forget it. Peter adopted you and thought of you as his own. He loved you and cherished you.’

‘But he wasn’t my real father,’ Gemma had croaked, her eyes bright with unshed tears. ‘How could you have cheated me so?’ She had bitten her lip miserably and looked at her mother. If she thought she was suffering, she could imagine what her mother was going through. ‘I’m sorry,’ she’d whispered, regretting hurting her mother with her outburst. ‘It’s such a shock…I can hardly believe it. But I want to know everything. Tell me, Mother, everything.’

Gemma had listened without interruption. The irony of it all had amazed her. The story her mother related was almost a carbon copy of her own affair with Felipe, with one exception. Agustªn had left his lover not knowing she was carrying his child. Felipe had left Gemma with nothing—though a broken heart could hardly be described as nothing.

Was it a cliché associated with all South American men—love ‘em and leave ‘em? And how strange that she had fallen for the same type of charismatic man her mother had.

Isobel Soames had spared nothing; it was a story so poignantly paralleled with her own affair with Felipe that soon Gemma was in tears.

‘Would you have told me all this if Daddy was still alive?’ she had murmured at last. At seventeen she had mourned his death not knowing he wasn’t her own. Even knowing the truth now didn’t alter the love she held for him. He’d been a wonderful father.

‘No, I wouldn’t,’ Isobel had answered honestly. ‘Your father loved you and you loved him. I saw no reason to make waves in our life. There were no more children to come after you…it was a difficult birth and…and, well, Peter loved me enough not to mind.’

‘And did you love him?’

‘Yes,’ her mother had insisted quickly, and then sighed. ‘Of course I loved him, we’d been friends for a long time, but not like——’

‘Not like my real father?’ Gemma had finished for her, furiously swinging her long black hair away from her face. Her moods had been lurching dangerously from anger to sadness as her mother talked. Some of the time she’d understood, sometimes she just hadn’t.

‘My love for Agustªn was quite different, Gemma,’ Isobel had said softly. ‘A once-in-a-lifetime love, never to be repeated at such a depth. The day he went back to South America was the worst of my life. He said he would send for me, but he didn’t.’

‘And yet you let him go, you just let him walk out of your life!’ Gemma had protested hotly. ‘You were pregnant with me and you didn’t even put up a fight for him? He didn’t even know you were carrying his child?’

Even as the words had spurted angrily from her mouth she’d known why her mother hadn’t fought for the man she loved. Hadn’t she done the very same thing herself? Let Felipe go because pride and confusion and the sting of betrayal had bitten so deeply into her soul, scarring her so deeply that grovelling was out of the question.

Pride. She was as deeply imbued with it as her mother. Felipe had been there one day, gone the next, Bianca, his stunning cousin, along with him. A week later he’d left a message on her answerphone, to contact him on a New York phone number. She hadn’t, of course. He’d walked out and left her, taken Bianca with him, hadn’t he? All she had was a recorded message, cryptic and to the point, no words of love or missing her, no inflexion of caring in the tone of his voice. God knew, she’d played it back enough times, each time hoping to find what she was seeking, some small hint of their past love, their week of love and passion. She had found nothing.

‘How long did your affair last?’ she had asked her mother.

‘Six months. The most wonderful months of my life.’

That was the subtle difference, Gemma dismally thought as she went back into her hotel room now to shower away the stickiness of the tropical heat. Her affair with Felipe was a drop in the ocean compared to her mother’s and Agustªn’s. Six months was long enough to form a deep, lasting relationship, for all the good it had done her mother, but a solitary week barely touched the perimeters of real love; so the agony aunts would have you believe.

Gemma knew better. She had given Felipe her heart and soul. She’d not led a sheltered life; her mother’s career alone had seen to that. There had been social gatherings at Whitegates that had broadened her mind, packed full as they were with the so-called beautiful people. Her father’s friends too, academics from the university, writers, poets, philosophers. And her own career had hardly been without event. Her first one-woman exhibition in the much acclaimed Portia Gallery in Paris had set the ball rolling. Nepotism, one cruel art critic had pronounced in a Sunday paper known for its hardline tactics with new artists, but nepotism had nothing to do with the commissions that poured in. Gemma was mature and wise enough to know she had talent. A pity that wisdom and maturity didn’t follow through in her personal life. Yes, she’d seen life, but it hadn’t helped her where Felipe was concerned.

Gemma towel-dried her hair and combed it through in front of the dressing-table mirror. It had grown long since that week with Felipe in London, and now hung like a sable curtain beyond her shoulders. Straight like her mother’s, thick and glossy too, but there the likeness ended. Her mother’s beauty was classical whereas Gemma’s was softer. Her lips fuller, not nearly so well defined, and her large brown eyes more limpid and fawn-like than Isobel’s. Vulnerability—did that have something to do with the difference in their looks? Whatever, they weren’t alike and in the circumstances it was a blessing. Agustªn would never associate her with his mistress of the past.

Gemma peered at herself more closely. She was vulnerable, but hadn’t been before Felipe. Once she had handled her associations with men with detached aplomb. Felipe had changed all that with a single glance across a crowded gallery floor on the opening night of her London exhibition. Their eyes had met and Gemma, who had never believed in such a thing as love at first sight, had fallen as if she had been flung from Westminster Bridge with lead weights round her ankles.

‘I like your work,’ he’d said after battling his way through the crowds to reach her. His dark, nocturnal eyes held hers and everyone and everything around them faded away into nonentity.

‘Thank you,’ she’d murmured, and he’d smiled.

‘Can I do us both a favour and whisk us away from all this? I want to make love to you,’ he’d husked softly.

She hadn’t even been surprised at his outspokenness, it had just seemed so right. He’d taken over her life in a brief, blatantly honest exchange of words and taken her elbow and guided her out into the cold, wintry London night.

There was no pre-nuptial dinner to melt her reserves, no voyage into pasts to get to know each other better, nothing but the feeling that it was right and beautiful and so very exciting. He held her hand in the back of the taxi, this tall, dark, enigmatic stranger. Her experienced artist’s eye registered beauty beyond compare, deep-set sultry eyes that hinted of Hispanic descent, an aquiline nose so perfectly proportioned above a mouth that was strong yet sensuous. His hair was as black as a moonless night and she knew that when she touched it the tight curls under the tips of her fingers would spring like coils of eastern silk.

Felipe Santos was the most perfect of lovers. Only one small doubt wavered hesitantly within Gemma when they reached his mews house in St John’s Wood. Never in her life had she done this, given herself to a man without thought to the consequences. But it was a passing hesitation, as swift as a cloud powered away by the wind of change.

He took her in his arms as soon as he had shut the door behind them. His mouth was warm and tender, no hint yet of the power of his passion, the near violence of his lovemaking.

‘You’re the most beautiful animal I have ever seen,’ he grated at her throat, and Gemma smiled. No man had ever compared her to an animal before, and her excitement mounted.

He led her up to his sumptuous bedroom, which was thickly carpeted and furnished with swags of silk hung at the windows. There were warm antiques and the bed was huge, soft and inviting, draped in heavily embroidered blue silk. A lover’s bedroom.

Felipe undressed her, stripping the black silk lace from her trembling body, the act almost a ritual with softly spoken words of adoration for her creamy skin, and the perfection of her firm round breasts.

‘I will make love to you every day of my life,’ he murmured throatily. ‘Whether we are together or apart, in the flesh or in my mind, but every day I will possess you.’

No man could compare to this one. He was unique, charismatic, hedonistic in his approach to sexuality.

She watched in awe as he removed his own clothes, peeling off his evening suit and shirt to reveal a body as perfect and faultless as any Rodin sculpture. Smooth bronzed skin, dark curly hair that massed his chest, narrowing down his stomach in a column of hazy blackness to his groin. The need to touch was overpowering but part of his ritual was to wait, to suspend the feeling-need till the moment was right.

Eventually he stretched his hands out to her and she took them and slowly he drew her into his arms, drawing her into his power, into the heady realms of a world she had never known before.

He carried her to the sensual bed, and laid her down. His tongue explored, lightly at first, and then his urgency powered them both to a fierce eroticism that swam them into a haze of white-hot passion.

Her breasts ached with her need, her heart pounded fiercely with the depth of that need. Her body wasn’t her own. It floated mystically under his touch then rose in flames of desire as he entered her for the first time, driving hard into her, groaning her name over and over till it became a primeval incantation deep in his throat.

Their need for each other was insatiable that first night. They made love till dawn then made love again. They slept and murmured words of love to each other, lay in each other’s arms wondering at all that was happening to them. Later, they rose, showered, drank sweet thick Turkish coffee, talked quietly, made love on the soft leather sofa downstairs in the lounge.

The hours ran into days and Gemma forgot work and all that passed for her life before Felipe. They were both cocooned in their ethereal, perfumed lovenest, oblivious to outside intervention. Then Bianca arrived. Rich, angry and beautiful Bianca.

‘You were supposed to pick me up from the airport, Felipe!’ she cried when Felipe answered the door to her one morning. ‘Pay the taxi, will you?’ she ordered, thrusting her way into the house.

Gemma stood at the top of the elegant spiral staircase watching this scene below, too afraid to move, her heart racing. It didn’t stop racing when Felipe urged her down to meet his cousin who had just flown in from New York.

Cousin—it didn’t help somehow. Bianca was exotically beautiful, so was Felipe, and, cousins or not, the look Bianca gave Felipe was one of raw anger, and it had little to do with arriving at Heathrow and having to hail a taxi to St John’s Wood.

Felipe was unaware of his cousin’s hostility to Gemma; men often didn’t see what was obvious to another woman. But Gemma registered every look, every adverse vibration the girl gave off. She was younger than Gemma but exuded that mature air common to women who were beautiful, rich and spoilt.

‘So this is your excuse for not meeting me, is it?’ She flicked her eyes frostily over Gemma and slid out of her feather-weight cashmere coat, letting it fall carelessly over the sofa. ‘I might have known. No thought of me sweating it out at the airport, hanging around waiting——’

‘I forgot,’ Felipe interjected with a tolerant smile.

‘Well, damn you! I need sleep. I’m exhausted. Don’t wake me.’ With that she swept upstairs, slamming the door of the guest bedroom behind her.

‘I’d better go,’ Gemma murmured uncomfortably.

‘Like hell you will!’ Felipe grated, pulling her into his arms.

‘Don’t, Felipe, not with——’

‘Not with Bianca in the house? Why so suddenly prudish?’

‘I’m not!’

‘Forget her, then…’

‘As you forgot to pick her up from the airport?’

‘Is it any wonder?’ He grinned down at her. ‘Since you, I’ve forgotten there was a life before.’

His kiss melted away her doubts and she stayed, for a while.

Suddenly they were a threesome. Felipe took them both out to dinner that night and was charming and sweet, secretly squeezing Gemma’s hand yet dividing his conversation equally between the two women.

Gemma didn’t return to the mews house with them but diplomatically insisted on getting a taxi to her home and studio in Maida Vale.

‘I’ll call you first thing in the morning,’ Felipe told her outside the restaurant, not arguing with her but kissing her tenderly. Somehow that kiss had seemed so final.

But the next morning, true to his word, he phoned and sent flowers. Later he came round to the studio, saying how much he had missed her, and she locked all thoughts of Bianca away in the depths of her mind.

She showed him the latest project she was working on, a portrait of an industrialist for some élite boardroom.

‘He looks boring and pompous,’ Felipe told her, without meaning to offend.

‘He is,’ Gemma told him abruptly, and he swept her into his arms to kiss away her petulance.

‘You’re offended?’ he laughed.

‘Not at all. I paint what I see.’

‘Paint me.’

‘Never!’ She grinned. ‘I don’t do animal portraits!’ He growled at her neck then and they laughed and everything was suddenly all right. Later she cooked supper and he stayed all night, loving her till the small hours as if Bianca had never been part of the last two days. Gemma didn’t mention her; it would have been an intrusion on something so very special between them. There was only herself and Felipe and their love in the whole wide world…

She’d never seen him again after that. He’d left her at lunchtime, promising to call her later, but he hadn’t. The next day she had driven to the mews house in St John’s Wood, Felipe’s London home when he was in the country. She’d sat in the car and stared up at the house, just knowing it was empty. He’d gone and so had Bianca.

A week later had come the call from New York, but by then it was too late. Gemma had suffered enough.

Gemma glanced at her watch now and frowned. Her escort was late and she was restless and bored but there was little choice but to sit tight and wait. It was too hot to wander the streets of Caracas, and if she did venture out into the soporific heat she might miss Mike Anders, her father’s pilot, who was to fly has the last leg of her journey.

Gemma shivered. She mustn’t think of him as her father; he was a client, a Venezuelan oil man, nothing more, nothing less.

The phone purred and Gemma lifted it. ‘Thank you, I’ll be right down.’

She swung her leather satchel with her brushes and oils over her shoulder and wheeled her suitcase to the lifts. She’d faxed through her other requirements to the Villa Verde: an easel and several canvases. She didn’t know yet what sort of conditions she was expected to work under. A proper studio with the correct light was ideal but on these sort of assignments, in the client’s own home, she would have to make do.

‘Sorry to have kept you waiting, Miss Soames…’ ‘Call me Gemma.’ She smiled at the young American pilot, who was cool, blond and sporty.

‘Gemma it is,’ he grinned back. ‘Pretty heavy schedule today, I’m afraid—that’s why I’m late. Flew de Navas out to Maracaibo last night and just got back this morning. One helluva problem out theremassive oil leak as they were loading one of the tankers. No doubt the ole man will sort it all out.’

‘He’s still there?’ Gemma frowned. She wanted to start as soon as possible, as she had other commissions waiting back in the UK.

‘Yeah, he won’t leave till it’s under control. Hey, don’t worry, be happy, plenty to keep you buzzing out at the ranch,’ he laughed, ushering her into a taxi to the airport. ‘Pool, horses, tennis, shooting; you name it, they got it. Hey, are you really going to paint the old man? Queer sort of a job for a woman, ain’t it?’

Gemma was glad of his company. Hadn’t Wordsworth waxed lyrical about the bliss of solitude? He’d obviously never been holed up in blistering Caracas trying not to think of people he’d rather forget. ‘They’ troubled her mind at this very moment in spite of Mike’s boisterous running commentary as they hurtled through the busy streets of Caracas. Agustªn would probably have a wife and a family. It was one of the arguments her mother had put up to try to stop her coming.

‘You’ll only hurt yourself when you meet his family. You can’t do it, Gemma. Leave things as they are.’

Gemma had shaken her head determinedly. ‘I can’t be hurt, Mother, not any more. I don’t know him, he’s a stranger to me but I have to go, more so now after what you’ve told me. He’s my father; I’m curious. Can’t you understand that?’

She had at last, but hadn’t given Gemma her blessing; that was too painful for her.

She still loves him, Gemma thought as Mike loaded her suitcase and satchel into the Lear jet, after twenty-six years and life with another man she still loves him. Somehow she understood.

The mountains beyond Caracas were enthralling, threatening and savage. Mike kept up his commentary, unknowingly diverting Gemma away from her own troubled thoughts. She talked herself into thinking it was a good thing Agustªn wouldn’t be there to meet her. She wasn’t ready yet, but would she ever be?