The kisses and the wine Read online

  `And now do you feel better,' he asked, 'having got off your mind the inevitable question — asked by the innocent and the experienced alike?'

  Put yourself in my shoes,' she muttered. 'You allow me to believe that you're taking me to the village, and instead you bring me to your house. If you are a married man, I doubt if your wife will be pleased about providing supper and a bed for a total stranger.'

  `In my household I am the master,' he said suavely. And in that instant he brought the car to a halt and the sweeping light of the headlamps revealed a structure that took away

  what breath Lise had left after his autocratic statement. Stone steps mounted to a great oaken door, and above that rose the frontage of a castle, topped by a cluster of square turrets and a long, indented balustrade surrounding them, and the entire building loomed and rambled and gave off an aura of ancient beauty and history. Lights winked here and there behind the windows, and when Lise stepped from the Jaguar she breathed the scent of all sorts of plants and flowers, stealing over the stone walls and hanging in pale and dark clusters.

  `This — this is where you live?' The words broke from her, and a little gasp came from her throat as he came to her side and took her by the elbow. His fingers gripped her, right through the suede of her jacket, and there was a sudden tension about his face as he gazed down at her.

  `I have done you a favour, senorita, now I ask you that you reciprocate — please, don't jump in that silly way! I am not about to ask you to honour me with your undoubted virtue! It is that I am in rather an awkward situation — for the past year I have pretended to have a fiancee in England, a pretence that was necessary in order to stay my grandmother's hand. I have a great affection for her, but I will not permit the old matriarch to choose my wife for me. She did this for my father, but she will not do it for me, and to save argument I have invented a wife-to-be whom I met, so she believes, while on a business trip to England. A little diplomacy is worth a thousand arguments, and I would be most grateful if you could pretend to be that mythical fiancee of mine. For just a few days, senorita. Before my grandmother can embarrass me by announcing to one and all that her ward, Anastasia, is to be my bride. This was threatened a year ago, and exactly to this day I promised to produce my own choice of bride. If tomorrow she is not forthcoming, the Condesa will place me — deliberately — in the awkward situ-

  ation of accepting or rejecting her ward. The girl is lovely. I don't deny it — but I will not be coerced and forced into marriage merely in order to provide the next generation, as my father was. It is legendary that he and my mother — an Iberian girl straight from a convent — were never happy together, but all the Condesa cares about is that the family name be passed on, and in her estimation I have been too tardy about this.'

  He paused at this juncture and the look he bent upon Lise was dark and compelling, and his grip was even more forceful as the great door of the castle opened and light shafted down the steps.

  'Allow me to introduce you as my English fiancée and I promise I will give you anything you desire in return. The young have many wishes, and this situation must appeal to a girl with your large and world-wondering eyes. I came to your rescue, now you can come to mine.'

  'But the situation is entirely different,' Lise protested. 'You are a total stranger to me.'

  'You allowed that stranger to carry you off in his car. I could have murdered you, but all I am asking is that you bring a small pretence to life. In return you can have a new car to replace the one which is probably, under the bonnet, put together with shoe-string and gum. In a new car of excellent make you can go anywhere without the fear of breaking down and finding yourself at the mercy of a dark stranger.'

  `Am I at your mercy?' She could feel the bite of his fingers as she spoke, and she could see the demanding glitter of his eyes. A manservant was coming down the steps of the castle towards them, and she knew that this was the most fateful moment of her life. She even believed that this Spaniard would break her arm if she did not submit to his outrageous wish. Her large eyes pleaded with him to let her

  go, but with abrupt determination he drew her close against his side and he fiercely whispered:

  `What is your name? Come, tell me!'

  `Lise,' she said breathlessly. `Lise Harding.'

  `Mine is Leandro de Marcos Reyes.' His breath fanned her cheek as he imparted to her the impressive name, and then the manservant had reached them, and she heard him welcome home to the castillo the Senor Conde.

  Her head reeled and she went weak as the Senor Conde encircled her with his strong arm.

  `Blasco, I wish you to meet my fiancée,' he said in very deliberate Spanish. 'I should have telephoned ahead so that a suite could be prepared for her. She is very hungry, however, so while we eat supper together her rooms can be aired and made ready. She will have the Dove Suite which belonged to my mother.'

  `Si, senor.' The manservant cast a swift look at Lise, who had never been so close to fainting in her life. Everything was suddenly so unreal ... everything but the arm that gripped her as she and the Conde de Marcos Reyes mounted the steps towards the open door of this castle that dominated a Spanish mountainside.

  `Y — you must let me go,' she said, and she tried to pull away from him, only to find that his strength was as audacious as his suggestion that she play the part of a fiancée he had invented.

  `I cannot,' he said. 'You are now committed, Lise.'

  She automatically corrected his mispronunciation of her name, but thought how appropriate that he should make it rhyme with 'lies'. 'You called yourself the master,' she scoffed. 'It hardly seems masterful to me, to be scared of being forced into a marriage you would find fettering to your independence.'

  `In this one particular case love is my master,' he said, in

  clipped tones. 'The Marcos Reyes family has diminished to just two people, my grandmother and myself. I happen to care for her, but I will not have that caring used by her to force me into marrying a pretty creature of her choice merely for the sake of making babies — to put it bluntly. If the Condesa wished me to be the normal sort of Spaniard she should not have sent me to an English college. I not only learned to -speak your language, senorita, but I learned to like my independence, and I will not take on the yoke of marriage until I am ready to do so, least of all with a young girl reared to the idea that women are made for only one purpose. To put it bluntly, I wish to marry woman of the world, but the very idea would kill the Condesa. You, who look so young and unworldly, will fit in very well with my plan to keep the Condesa from throwing her ward at my head. She will see at once that you have good teeth, skin and hair, and that will be sufficient for her.'

  `Like a — a filly,' Lise gasped. The whole event had taken a mad turn as far as she was concerned, and suddenly she began to laugh and just couldn't stop. Hands gripped her shoulders and shook her. Dark eyes looked directly down into hers, and deep within them' burned a flame of danger

  a signal that he would have his way and she had better give in to him, or get hurt. Tiredness swept over her, an inability to fight his dominance made her want to weep.

  `I think I hate you,' she said fretfully.

  `You may hate me, so long as you don't reveal it,' he rejoined. 'It is essential that the Condesa believes you to be this girl I found in England, for it does her no good to have those continuous arguments with me. She has a heart defect, you understand. And she is very much the Latin woman who likes to have her own way. On this matter I remain adamant. I choose my own wife!'

  Lise could only gaze at him in bewilderment, there be-

  neath the lights of the great hall into which they stepped as he spoke. — I must be dreaming,' she said. 'No one in reality would suggest such a thing — that a pair of strangers pretend to be engaged. It would never work, in the first place, and I would feel an absolute fraud and be bound to give myself away. I'm no actress, senor.'

  'But you are a young woman of spirit, who came to Spain looking for adventu
re. I offer you one. Are you too afraid to be a Dona Quixote?'

  In the strangest way this description appealed to her, and she found herself reluctantly intrigued. She had often longed to tilt at a windmill, but up until now her life had run along safe and regular lines. She hardly dared to think of what it would mean to act the part of fiancée to this tall, commanding Spaniard, with eyes so dark the pupils shone like jets at the centre of them.

  'It's all very mad,' she murmured. 'A lot for you to ask in exchange for a bed and a bite of supper.'

  'I'm not forcing you,' he said, and he took his hands away from her and left a curious feeling of coldness in place of where his touch had been.

  'Aren't you?' she said, and she looked at him very gravely, and saw for the first time that he was the best looking man she had ever met in all her life.

  No! The good teeth he had remarked on clenched over the word. She wasn't so romantic and female that she was going to be led into this masquerade because a man happened to be . . . well, devastatingly good-looking in a dark, hawkish way, standing there in a perfect fitting pair of grey slacks, a smooth dark jacket that fitted him like a glove, and with a cravat of dark blue silk tied loosely about his brown throat. He was about thirty-four or five, and he looked as if he had always liked twisting women around his little finger.

  No, he wasn't going to twist Lise Harding around his finger. She glanced wildly at the open front door, beyond which the manservant was mounting the steps with her suitcase, its red leather bright against his alpaca jacket. As she ran towards him he paused and looked rather startled. Then Lise gave a little cry as the Conde leapt after her, swift, silent and intentional as a panther, and caught hold of her.

  `Amada, you must not be nervous of meeting my grandmother,' he said in Spanish, so the servant would understand his words. 'As I told you before, pequelia, she will be so delighted that I have decided to marry you that she won't mind — after the first shock — that you are so unsophisticated and so very different from Latin girls.'

  `Let me go!' Lise twisted in his grip, and at once, with a flash of white teeth at the man carrying her suitcase, Leandro de Marcos Reyes swept the reluctant, struggling girl up into his arms and carried her effortlessly and purposefully across the hall of his castle, making for an oval door set deeply in the solid white wall, against which stood enormous Moorish-looking pots aflame with scarlet azaleas.

  `You must have a glass of wine to settle your nerves, little one.' And though he spoke with a smile, his grip was like steel.

  Lise was helpless in that grip and she knew it as he thrust open the oval door and carried her into a room where a log fire glowed in the fireplace and played its shadows over walls lined with deep red leather and masses of books.

  It was such a warm, richly comfortable room after the darkness that surrounded the castle, and the wind blowing down from the sierras, that Lise was captivated against her will. She was lowered to her feet and held for a brief moment against the smooth material of the Conde's jacket

  and she was acutely aware as never before in her life of the magnetism that certain men could exert. He held her and drew her towards the fireplace, a great oval of stone alive with flame and warmth, and with lean hands he pressed her down on a great leather footstool and smiled to himself as he went to a mahogany sideboard to pour wine from a crystal carafe into matching glasses on long stems.

  Lise noticed that he smiled ... like a man who had once again made a woman surrender to his autocratic will.

  `In Spain we say that a good sherry is the king of wines.' The Conde handed down to her a glass of the wine he had poured, and Lise took it because she really did need something to steady her shaken nerves. She had never dreamed that by accepting a lift from this man she would land herself in her present predicament. If she insisted on leaving the castillo she had no way of knowing how to reach the village, and she could tell from the Conde's face that he had no intention of taking her there. Also the wind had risen out there in the night; she could hear it howling in the wide chimney of the fireplace and the very sound made her incline towards the glow of the burning logs. Leandro de Marcos Reyes had planted himself in front of the fire, looking so tall because Lise sat on the pliant footstool that she had to look all the way up at him, to where he rested the rim of his wine glass against his lips ... lips, she had noticed, with both a hardness and a certain sensuality to them.

  `Drink your wine and it will make for you a feeling of felicidad, senorita. The wine of the grapes grown at El Serafin are said to have the sun of the slopes in them, and also a little touch of the snow that resides upon the peaks of the sierras. Come, you mustn't hold on to the glass as if I have given you hemlock to drink.'

  `You called this place El Serafin,' she said. 'Is that the name of the castle or the region?'

  `The castle is the region, senorita.' He smiled quizzically, as if at her innocence. 'All the land that stretches around us at this precise moment is land owned by the Condesa and myself. The castle stands on a rocky niche, with the mountains towering above its turrets, both grim and splendid, half gold and half stony-grey. The blue jacaranda tree grows in our courtyards where we capture the sun, but when there is a storm our rooftops are often pelted with hailstones. The situation of the castle is said to dictate the character of the Marcos Reyes family and we are said to be both hot and cold-tempered people.'

  `I see.' Lise obeyed him, now, and drank some of her wine, which had a taste of fruit and fire in it and was instantly warming. 'Are you warning me that when you lose your temper there is hell to pay? That I would not enjoy the experience and would find it easier to give in to your — your incredible proposal?'

  `Were you not told that we in Spain take very seriously the maxim that one good turn deserves another? Here at the castle you will be far more comfortable than at a mountain inn catering for pedlars and travelling troupes of gipsy dancers. Our beds are warm, clean and large, and our cook is the best in the region. Now you must be feeling very hungry and I cannot allow that a moment longer.' He strode to a bell-pull affixed to the wall near one of the overflowing bookcases and with his hand upon it he quirked a black eyebrow at Lise. 'Do you fancy empanada, which is a hot pie packed with appetizing meat, onion and peppers? It is a favourite dish of mine and Florentina always has one prepared when she knows I am on my way home. I should mention that the family business is concerned with fabrics of every sort, from the finest velvet to the sheerest silk, and from the softest suede to the strongest leather. I am the director-general of our manufacturing organization in

  Madrid and I am home at the present time for the birthday of Madrecita. In a few days' time she will be eighty years of age, and the gift she expects from me is a novia. What harm, senorita, is there in a little deception? When you return to England you can forget all about me, but for these few days bear with me – make me this good turn, eh? Think of it in this way. You will be saving a man from a marriage of disaster – the act of a real Dona Quixote.'

  'You mean the act of a Dona Infeliz,' Lise rejoined.

  'You think I take you for a simpleton?' He jerked on the bell-pull, and then gave Lise a sardonic smile 'It was a little foolish of you to drive alone in Spain, which is said to be the land of devils and saints, and though I think you a bit of an innocent, I don't regard you as simple. I believe you to be a rebel, senorita, who is running away from a certain situation in England which has become trying for you. I read in your eyes a certain defiance – am I correct?'

  'It's really none of your business.' She stared down into her wine glass, for it was unfair that he should have the advantage of being so worldly that he could read her dilemma in her eyes.

  `Is it a young man' he asked, and under her lashes Lise could see him approaching her across the deep golden carpet, his feet encased in hand-tailored shoes, and his long legs made even longer by the narrow, well-tailored trousers. He had, she thought, a silent, animal tread, as if he were stalking her and would trap her beyond escape.

>   'Do you imagine that I am going to unburden myself to a perfect stranger?' Lise gave him an indignant look.

  I shall have to know one or two things about you, if we are to convince Madrecita that I have known you for a year. You must tell me about your parents—'

  I have no parents. They're dead, and my brother who is ten years older than I has always looked after me. He's mar-

  ried and has a family, and all I want is to make a life of my own. There it all is in a nutshell, but if you think I'm going through with this novia business then you are mistaken, Senor Conde. You have no right to ask, or expect such a return for your — your generosity in bringing me here for the night. I don't doubt that everyone else jumps as if whipped when you crack an order, but I'm a British tourist, and I'll pay you for my night's bed and board!'

  `You amuse me.' A smile flicked across his lips. 'You come alone to Spain, yet you have so little knowledge of the Spanish character. How dare you think that I would accept payment for my hospitality!'

  `How dare you assume that I would jump at the chance to play your fiancée,' Lise shot back at him. 'You must consider yourself highly irresistible, and so accustomed to exerting your droit du seigneur that it comes as a shock when a mere female refuses to do your bidding. I tell you I refuse—'

  As her words rang out the door opened and a stout woman in a spotless apron and dark dress entered the room, looking at Lise with large eyes over the contents of the tray she was carrying.

  'Senor, I bring your supper,' she said, and she carried the tray to a circular table set in the window space and she was still staring at Lise, taking in her fair tumbled hair and her blazing grey eyes . . . the very British contrast which she made to the dark, lean, autocratic figure of the Conde de Marcos Reyes. 'The good Blasco told me that you had brought with you your English novia, senor. I hope the young lady will like my empanada, which tonight has chicken included with the veal. It is all nice and hot and I recommend that you both sit down at once to eat it.'