Passionate Relationship. Penny Jordan

of the fact that her father had been there for him, while she…

      ‘You will know that the Condessa is English,’ the lawyer continued. ‘On her father’s side at least, but her mother was Portuguese, and came home to her parents when her husband was killed in the early stages of our last world war. Jaime is, I think, much more his mother’s son than his father’s. He and Carlos never got on. Carlos resented him, I think, and his childhood was not a happy time for him. You have much in common, you and he, even if neither of you knows it yet.’

      He was interrupted by a maid carrying a tray of coffee. There were three cups on it, but when Jaime came in on the heels of the maid, Shelley stood up and excused herself. She saw Jaime frown as she 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.