Penny Jordan - The Caged Tiger

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Cover

Title Page The Caged Tiger Penny Jordan www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

Copyright

IT would be evening before the plane landed in Seville. It had been the only flight she had been able to get at such short notice and during the height of the season. It had been cheaper too, because of a sudden cancellation, but it had been a long day—all that hanging around at Heathrow to make sure they got the seats. She pushed a slim pale hand through her silver-blonde weight of hair, her amethyst eyes clouding as she shifted Jamie’s baby weight from one arm to the other. Baby… She stifled a small smile. At three he considered himself a very grown-up young man. She often had difficulty convincing people that she was actually his mother—not just because she looked younger than her twenty-four years. Her small, slender body looked far too fragile to ever have carried a child. But it had. She wasn’t a fool; she knew that despite the plain gold wedding ring she wore people wondered if she had actually ever been married—if Jamie was not simply the result of a youthful indiscretion. They were wrong, though. She had most emphatically been married; had had a husband… There were still faint traces of his orange juice round Jamie’s mouth, and as she reached into her pocket for a tissue the letter crackled ominously.

She didn’t need to take it out, to look at the heavy, expensive crested paper again. Every word written on it was engraved upon her heart, and had been agonised over ever since the letter arrived a fortnight ago.

Only a fortnight? It felt more like years. The letter was brief, couched in words as dry as dust, making it impossible for her to think it had been written with any feeling. But then it hadn’t. Any feeling that had ever existed between Jamie’s father and herself had long since turned to ashes.

So what was she doing on this plane, flying back to Spain, taking her son to his unknown father?

She glanced down quickly at the sleeping child. Under the baby plumpness lay even now the signs of his recent illness. Enteritis was so frightening in a child—one could do nothing but hope and pray. He was over it now, the doctors assured her, but she was haunted by the fear that another poor summer would lower his resistance to the point where he would be ill again come winter. In Spain he would thrive in the warmth and luxury which were his birthright; his skin would take on the mahogany hue of his father’s, his hair would gleam blue-black as a raven’s wing in, the strong sunshine… Hair that reminded her unbearably at times of Ruy… She stroked it back from his forehead where it had fallen in unruly curls. Even in sleep his profile had a subconscious arrogance inherited from a long line of Spanish hidalgos…

She had done her best for him, but it could never come anywhere near to matching what Ruy could give him. She was lucky in that she had been able to work from home, but her illustrations for children’s books and cards did not bring in enough to keep them in luxury, nor to provide the winter away from the English climate which the doctor had suggested might be as well.

Jamie stirred in his sleep, the almost purple eyes which were what she had passed on to him remaining tightly closed. She had always been honest with him. When she thought he was old enough to understand she had explained that his daddy lived far away in another country, without going into too much detail. He had been curious, but had accepted her matter-of-fact explanations without evincing any surprise or distress. At play-school several of the other children lived alone with their mothers, and he saw nothing odd in their own aloneness. Which was wrong, something inside her told her, as she remembered her own parents’ happy marriage. If a child did not grow up knowing that love could exist between adults of both sexes then how could he in turn pass that knowledge on to his own children?

She was being sentimental, she warned herself. Jamie was unlikely to learn anything good about human relationships from observing hers with his father. Which brought her thoughts back full circle. Why had Ruy written to her? Why did he want his son—now?

She had been so sure when she left that he would find some way of having their marriage set aside—it had been a Catholic ceremony in accordance with his religion, but his family were influential and rich, and there were always ways and means… His mother had never liked the marriage. ‘Liked!’ She almost laughed. It would have been truer to say that her mother-in-law detested her, if one could apply such a word to the ice-cold contempt the Condesa de Silvadores had evinced each time their paths had crossed—and they had been many. The Condesa had seen to that. In the end a million tiny pinpricks could be more fatal than one crippling blow.

The plane landed, and a smiling stewardess helped her with Jamie. ‘He’s gorgeous,’ she commented as she held him so that Davina could collect all their possessions, ‘but not a bit like you.’

‘No, he takes after his father,’ Davina answered briefly, trying not to let her voice falter.

The stewardess could not know what the words had cost her. How much it always cost her to admit how much Jamie resembled his father—the father who had never wanted him, who never had seen him; never once sent him a birthday or Christmas present, made no attempts whatsoever to see him–until now. And even now he had left it to his mother—the woman who had always derided and scorned her—to write the letter summoning her back to the Palacio de los Naranjos—the Palace of the Orange Trees—the home of the Silvadores family set among the orange groves from which the family’s fortune was derived and whose scent hung sharply and sweetly on the early morning air.

A shiver trembled through her, and mistaking it for coldness, the stewardess touched her arm, motioning her towards the airport building. Despite the huge number of people who passed through her life daily, something about Davina intrigued the other girl. She looked so frail, spiritual almost, her beauty tinged with a contemplative acceptance that touched the heart far more than any more overt signs of grief. What had happened to her to give her that look? She might have posed for some great painter of the Renaissance. Her expression told of great suffering and resignation, and yet surely she had all the things any woman could want? Youth, beauty, this adorable baby, and somewhere the man who had loved her enough to give her his son.