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