Passionate Relationship

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MILLS & BOON

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Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

ONLY another fifty kilometres or so to go. Shelley had paced herself and her ancient Citroën carefully during the long drive from London to Portugal, but now she was tempted to succumb to the long-suppressed sense of excitement fizzing inside her and put her foot down. But the deep vein of caution that life had bred in her stopped her.

With it came a wave of intense pain and sadness. If only she had made this journey six months ago. If only…

At twenty-four she considered herself long past such vain hopes, but it had been such a shock to discover the truth that in the last few days she had sometimes had difficulty recognising herself.

It was getting close to midday, the overhead August sun throwing sharp shadows across the dusty road as she drove through the centre of yet another sleepy village. Although she had often holidayed on the continent, this was her first visit to the Algarve, and it was not at all what she had expected. True, she was not driving along the coast, but she had not anticipated the degree of timelessness that embraced the land; she had driven past smallholdings of vines and fruit trees, tended by gnarled men and black-garbed women; she had eaten in small dusty squares where the degree of courtesy and courtliness which had accompanied her sparse meals had entranced her.

The Algarve was a land that had once, long ago, known the beneficent and civilising hand of the Moors, a land from which had sprung a race of seagoing adventurers who had carved out for themselves an empire.

Thinking about what she had read about the country helped to quell the nervous butterflies fluttering in her stomach. Nervous? Her? Shelley grimaced faintly to herself, well aware how surprised and even disbelieving her colleagues would be if they could see into her mind now.

She knew that at work she had the reputation of being cool and very, very controlled. Too controlled and withdrawn, in some people’s eyes. She had once been told by one of her university professors that she was far too wary of human contact, too determined to keep her guard up, and she knew that it was true. After getting her degree she had deliberately chosen a large organisation over a small company, wanting the anonymity such an organisation would give her, needing it to preserve her defence systems.

She had risen quickly from her first position and was now head of the department responsible for all the company’s overseas contracts. She had flown on company business to Australia and the States, and even to the Far East, but none of those journeys had given her one tenth of the sense of excitement and fear she was experiencing now. But then this journey was different. It was a journey into her past, a journey to meet the family she had never even known she possessed until four weeks ago.

Even now, Shelley could scarcely credit the fragile chain of coincidences that had brought her on this journey. If she had not refused a date with Warren Fielding, and decided to spend her Sunday in the reading room of a local museum, she would never have seen the advertisement, never have known the truth.

Several men had shown an interest in her over the years, although she couldn’t understand why. Lacking in self-confidence, she could see nothing particularly attractive in the way she looked. She was just above medium height, with shiny, thick brown hair enlivened with copper highlights. Her skin, like her hair, betrayed traces of her Celtic origins, being fair and flawlessly clear. Her eyes were almond-shaped and could change from gold to green depending on her mood.

Since she had known almost as soon as she was able to understand the spoken word that no man would ever want to marry her, she had never been burdened with the need to impress any member of the male sex, and so she chose her clothes and make-up according to her own tastes rather than theirs. Additionally, her crisp, cool manner was one that suited her, rather than being designed to flatter and attract.

Irrationally, or so it seemed to Shelley, some men seemed to find her very indifference a challenge. Warren Fielding had been the most persistent of this breed. An American colleague, he made a point of getting in touch with her every time he came to London, and Shelley had discovered that her best defence against his invitations was simply not to be at home to answer her phone.

Her circle of friends was very small, mainly composed of girls she had been at Oxford with, now all married or working abroad, and hence her Sunday visit to the museum reading room.

What whim had compelled her to start reading the personal columns of the newspaper, she did not really know, but the shock that gripped her when her own name leaped off the page at her was something she would never forget. She had read the advertisement over and over again, wondering why on earth any firm of solicitors, but especially one with such an establishment-sounding name as Macbeth, Rainer & Buccleugh, should want her to get in touch with them.

She had waited until the Wednesday of the following week before telephoning the London number, reluctant to admit to her own curiosity. An appointment had been made for that afternoon, and contrary to her expectations she had discovered that Charles Buccleugh was relatively young; somewhere around the forty mark, with a charming smile and a desk full of framed photographs of his family.

When he mentioned the name of her father her first instinct had been to get up and walk out. Only her self-control stopped her. She had taught herself years ago that it was a hard fact of life that there were countless thousands of children in the same position as herself: unwanted by the men who had fathered them.

It had been from her grandmother that she had learned the sad but common story of her parents’ marriage. Her mother had married against parental advice, and it was no surprise that the marriage had ended as it had, her grandmother had constantly told her. The moment he knew his wife was pregnant, her father had started to neglect the young girl he had married. ‘He disappeared for weeks at a time—told your mother he was looking for a job. But I knew better. I told your grandfather how it would be from the moment she met him. Thank the Lord he didn’t live long enough to see how right I was.’

Shelley knew that her grandfather had died before she was born. She also knew from her grandmother that shortly before she was born, her father had deserted her mother, leaving her alone at nineteen with no one to turn to apart from her mother.

‘Of course, they had been living with us right from the start of the marriage. I insisted on that,’ she had been told. ‘I wasn’t going to allow my daughter to be dragged off to some dirty one-room flatlet. She could have done so well for herself, too. All he was interested in was his drawing. Never even tried to get himself a decent job. Your grandfather and I never approved. Of course, your poor mother was heartbroken when he left, but I’d warned her all along how it would be. Six weeks and he was gone, without so much as a word. You were born prematurely, and my poor Sylvia died almost before you drew a single breath. Four weeks later we heard that your father had been killed in a road accident. Good riddance, I thought.’

Here her grandmother’s mouth would always tighten, and she would warn Shelley against giving her heart to any man.

‘In my day we had to marry,’ she would tell her granddaughter, ‘but for you it’s different. You have a choice. I don’t want the same thing that happened to your mother to happen to you.’

Gradually, as she grew up, Shelley had learned that her grandparents’ marriage had not been a happy one. There had been a long-standing affair between her grandfather and someone else in the early part of their marriage, which seemed to have soured the relationship. Her grandmother didn’t like the male sex, and she had brought Shelley up to feel the same way. As a young child she had felt the pain of her mother’s loss and betrayal as though it had been her own, her vivid imagination all too easily able to conceive the anguish her young mother must have known. And now she was being told that her father wasn’t dead at all, and that moreover, for the last eight years he had been searching desperately for her.

The story Charles Buccleugh revealed to her was almost too astonishing to be true. It appeared that, contrary to what her grandmother had told her, her father’s search for work had been genuine, and that, moreover, he had actually found a job in London. He had written to her mother, giving her the good news, and telling her that he would be coming home to collect her.

It was during that journey that he had been involved in the accident that her grandmother had claimed ended his life. He had been injured, quite badly, so badly that the hospital authorities hadn’t realised he was married until he himself was able to tell them.

Immediately they helped him to write a letter to her mother, telling her what had happened, but the reply he received to it came from her grandmother, informing him that both his wife and child were dead.

He had been too ill to leave the hospital to make the journey home, and a week later he had received another letter from his mother-in-law, advising him that the funerals had taken place and that she never wanted to see him again.

Stricken with grief himself, he could well appreciate that she must blame him for the tragedy, and gradually he had started to rebuild his own life. He had always wanted to be an artist, and with the compensation money he received for the accident he had gone out to Portugal to paint.

Several years later he had remarried—a widow with two children of her own, and then by the most amazing of coincidences he had bumped into an old acquaintance from his home town, who was holidaying on the Algarve with his family. It was from him that he learned that he had a daughter, but by that time her grandmother was dead, and Shelley had gone through a series of foster parents, and despite all his efforts he had been unable to trace her.

Now he was dead, and apparently it had been his dearest wish that somehow his lost daughter was found, hence the advertisement in the paper.

‘There is a bequest to you in his will,’ Charles Buccleugh had told her, ‘but you’ll have to get in touch with his Portuguese solicitors to find out about that. We’re only acting on their instructions to find you, or rather on the instructions of his stepson, the Conde Jaime y Felipe des Hilvares.’

Shelley had raised her eyebrows a little at the title, although she permitted herself to show no great degree of surprise or shock. Under the calm exterior she was showing the solicitor, she was still trying to come to terms with the fact that her grandmother had deliberately withheld the truth from her. She had long ago come to recognise that fact that her grandmother disliked the male sex, but to discover that she had deliberately lied to her about her father’s death was something Shelley was finding it very hard to accept.

All those wasted years…

She said the words out loud without being aware that she had done so as she drove through yet another dusty village. In front of her the road forked, one fork ribboning down towards the coast and the sea she could see glittering under the hot sun, the other reaching higher into the hills.

This was the fork she had to take. It would lead her eventually to the home of the Conde, and presumably the rest of his family. Her family…

All those years when she had ached for a family of her own, a real family, believing she ached for the impossible, when all the time… A different woman would have wept for all that might have been, but that was not Shelley’s way.

As a young child she had been too acutely aware of the fact that in her grandmother’s eyes she was somehow tainted with the blood of her father, and had learned young to hide her feelings and her pain. What she felt now was beyond relief in easy tears. It was too anguished, too tormented with all that might have been.

All those years when she might have known her father and had not. She wasn’t really interested in whatever it was he had left her in his will; that wasn’t what brought her to Portugal. No, what she had come for was to learn about the man who had been her father.

Had he too known this aching anguish that now possessed her? This mingling of bitter resentment and helpless compassion for the woman who had so deliberately kept them apart?

A signpost warned her that she must turn off for her destination, the road running between rows of well-tended vines. Her stepbrother was a wine producer, or so Charles Buccleugh had told her. This could well be his land. Was he, she wondered, as regimented and formal as his vines?

All she knew about her father’s second family was that his stepson was older than she was and his stepdaughter younger. It had been a surprise to discover that her stepmother was half English. What sort of woman would be attracted to a Portuguese conde and a penniless English artist? An unpleasant thought struck her. Could her father have married for money?

She shivered slightly, pushing the thought away. Hadn’t she already decided that it was foolish to prejudge the situation? She knew nothing about her step-family or the life her father had lived here in Portugal apart from the fact that he had continued to paint. Charles Buccleugh had known that much at least. Indeed, he had seemed almost amused by her own tentative questioning on this point, although she didn’t know why.

It had been the Portuguese solicitors in Lisbon who had informed her that her stepbrother wished her to travel to his home. Although his request had seemed a little high-handed, she had been due some leave, and there was no reason why, if she found her step-family in the slightest degree uncongenial, she should not simply get into her car and drive home.

The mingling of anticipation and dread she was experiencing was an unfamiliar sensation. She didn’t normally allow herself to be so troubled by ‘nerves’, but for once her notorious self-control seemed to be deserting her.

The road crested a small hill, and she caught her breath in shocked delight as she had her first glimpse of her destination.

Below her, nestling in the curve of the hills, lay a collection of buildings whose whitewashed walls and terracotta tiled roofs should have looked untidy, but instead looked entrancingly picturesque. So much so, in fact, that Shelley found herself having to blink to make sure she was not daydreaming.

The lines of vines ran straight and true right up to the wall which surrounded the house and gardens, and although it was impossible for her to hear such a sound from so far away, she could almost have sworn she heard the sound of water falling from fountains. In her mind’s eye already she could almost see the interlocking paved courtyards that were so much a feature of Moorish buildings; she could almost smell the pungent aroma of coffee and taste the sticky sweetness of the little cakes so beloved of these people of the south.

Indeed the scene below her was so familiar she could not believe she had never actually beheld it before. Telling herself she was being over-imaginative, she found her handbag and checked that her hair and makeup looked neat and fresh.

The face that stared back at her from the small mirror was reassuringly familiar, her expression faintly aloof and withdrawn, the cleverly tailored cut of her thick glossy hair making it fall in a smooth, controlled curve.

It was only natural that her heart should start to pound so suffocatingly fast as she re-started the car, but because she was so unused to these nervous tremors their effect on her was magnified, causing her to grip the steering wheel tightly.

A narrow road, dusty and uneven, led down to her destination. The white wall surrounding the buildings was higher than she had anticipated, throwing out a dark shadow. The two wooden doors that guarded the arched entrance stood open, and as she drove in underneath it Shelley heard, quite unmistakably, the sound of fountains. So she had been right about those at least!

Seen at closer quarters, the house was larger than she had thought: two-storied and very rambling. Somewhere inside the building a dog barked, but apart from that, no sound disturbed the hot silence of the afternoon.

She had, she realised, arrived at the time of siesta. Without the engine running, the interior of her small car was quickly becoming stifling. Opening the door, she gazed at the heavily studded arched doorway in front of her. In style it mirrored the one through which she had just driven, and she suspected that it must lead into one of the secret interior courtyards so beloved by people of Moorish descent.

Climbing stiffly out of the car, she was half-way towards the door when the clatter of a horse’s hoofs attracted her attention.

The sun was in her eyes as she turned to look at the horse and rider. She had a confused impression of a tall, dark-haired man seated astride an equally large and dark horse before the sharp glitter of the sun made her close her eyes and man and horse merged into the shadows.

Fumbling for her sunglasses, she put them on, and looked up at the rider.

‘Miss Howard, I presume.’

Whoever he was he spoke perfect English, even if his voice did hold a tinge of sarcastic contempt.

Never one to let a challenge slip by uncontested, Shelley raised her head and, using her coolest voice, agreed silkily, ‘Yes, I am she. And you, senhor…?’

‘Your stepbrother, Jaime y Felipe des Hilvares—but you must call me Jaime.’ As he spoke he swung down from his horse, and from round the side of the building a gnarled, bow-legged man came hurrying to take the reins from him and lead the animal away.

Her new stepbrother said something to the groom in Portuguese, the language making his voice far softer and more liquid than it had appeared when he spoke to her. The groom’s face split in a wide smile, his head nodding. ‘Sim, Excelentíssimo… sim…’

Against her will Shelley suffered a sharp sense of shock. She had known of course about her stepbrother’s title, but such a blatant acknowledgement of it was not something she had anticipated.

He looked arrogant, she thought, studying him covertly and trying to quell her sense of suddenly having stepped on to very unfamiliar and alien ground. There was nothing in her background or her present life to equate with this. Contrarily, she decided she was not going to let that put her at a disadvantage. If her stepbrother chose to be supercilious and contemptuous towards her because he possessed a title and she did not, well, he would soon learn that she was not so easily cowed.

‘It is rather hot out here, Jaime,’ she said, ‘and I have had a long drive…’

‘Indeed…and yet you look remarkably cool and fresh.’

He was looking at her assessingly, hard grey eyes studying her slender form in its covering of white top and jeans.

‘We are very honoured that you have at last chosen to visit us, and you do right to remind me that I am being less than courteous in keeping you standing here in our hot sun. Please follow me.’

Again his voice was tinged with sarcasm, his mouth hardening imperceptibly as he moved towards her, his whole manner towards her somehow suggesting that he was holding himself tightly in control, and that beneath that cool polite surface simmered a dislike he was only just holding in check.

But why should he dislike her?

He moved, the sunlight shining sharply across his face, revealing for the first time the high cheekbones and harshly carved features that were another legacy of the Moors’ occupation of the Algarve. His skin was tanned a warm gold, making her all too aware of her own pallor. Her skin was very pale and only coloured very slowly. She felt positively anaemic standing at the side of this dark-haired, golden-skinned man. She also felt almost frighteningly small and fragile. She had not expected him to be so tall, easily six foot with the broad shoulders and muscled body of an experienced rider. As he walked towards the door, Shelley saw that he moved with a coordinated litheness that was curiously pleasing to the eye.

‘I thought you wanted to go inside because you were too hot?’ He was watching her she saw, his expression politely aloof, but his mouth gave him away. It was curled in open, contemptuous dislike. The shock of that dislike drove away her embarrassment at being caught scrutinising him.

His aloofness she could have accepted, even approved of; after all, it was her own response to strangers and acquaintances. But his contempt! The contempt of her peers was something she had never had to deal with. On the contrary, she was aware that most people who knew her held her faintly in awe and accorded her their respect. In her work she had occasionally come across men who affected to despise the female species in its entirety, but her crisp no-nonsense manner soon convinced them that she was not going to be influenced by such anti-female tactics. And anyway, Jaime was not anti-women, not trying to prove some superior male psychology. It was her he despised. She had seen that plainly enough in his eyes. But why?

Warily she followed him into the cool tiled hall. The shutters had been closed to keep out the strong heat of the sun and, momentarily blinded, she missed her step and grabbed instinctively at his arm.

Beneath his shirt sleeve his muscle were hard and rigid, his flesh warm and dry. Her fingertips seemed acutely sensitive all of a sudden, relaying to her his abhorrence of her touch. Even so, he courteously helped her regain her balance.

Perhaps it was the way she looked that he didn’t like, Shelley pondered as her eyes adjusted to the dim light. Perhaps… Abruptly she curtailed her thoughts. What did it matter why he didn’t like her? She had come here for one purpose, and that was to discover the father she had never known she had. Her inheritance from him, whatever it might be, was of secondary and very little importance. She had no assets in the sense that her stepbrother would consider such matters, but she had a well-paid job and had supported herself virtually from the moment she went to Oxford. She liked and felt proud of her financial independence, and whatever her father left would be cherished because he had been the donor, because he had after all cared about her and loved her, rather than for its monetary value.

Several doors gave off the hallway. As he showed her into one of them, Jaime explained that the main part of the house was built round an open courtyard and that most of the rooms overlooked this cool oasis.