Natalie Fox - Love In Torment

Cover Page

Excerpt “I’ll have you hammeringon my door before long.” Gemma tensed. “Sure you will,” she conceded. “I’ll be hammering with a feather and I won’t have to do it twice, will I? Because you’ll be waiting eagerly enough, and you won’t have torment on your mind.” Felipe’s face darkened. “Sleep well, querida,” he said, controlled and immobile. “And prepare yourself for the onslaught. It’s not a threat but a promise.”

About the Author NATALIE FOX was born and brought up in London, England, and has a daughter, two sons and two grandsons. Her husband, Ian, is a retired advertising executive, and they now live in a tiny Welsh village. Natalie is passionate about her three cats, two of them strays brought back from Spain where she lived for five years, and equally passionate about gardening and writing romance. Natalie says she took up writing because she absolutely hates going out to work!

Title Page Love in Torment Natalie Fox www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

Copyright

Gemma tensed. “Sure you will,” she conceded. “I’ll be hammering with a feather and I won’t have to do it twice, will I? Because you’ll be waiting eagerly enough, and you won’t have torment on your mind.”

Felipe’s face darkened. “Sleep well, querida,” he said, controlled and immobile. “And prepare yourself for the onslaught. It’s not a threat but a promise.”

NATALIE FOXwas born and brought up in London, England, and has a daughter, two sons and two grandsons. Her husband, Ian, is a retired advertising executive, and they now live in a tiny Welsh village. Natalie is passionate about her three cats, two of them strays brought back from Spain where she lived for five years, and equally passionate about gardening and writing romance. Natalie says she took up writing because she absolutely hates going out to work!

Love in Torment

Natalie Fox

www.millsandboon.co.uk

‘You can’t go! It’s out of the question!’ Isobel Soames had cried. ‘Gemma, I absolutely forbid it!’

Gemma would never forget those words as long as she lived. The forerunners of what was to come to crumble her world. Another shock, the second of recent months that would stamp her twenty-sixth year as the most emotionally traumatic of her life.

Even now, staring blindly out of the window of the Tropicana hotel in the heart of heat-hazed Caracas, she couldn’t decide which shock had hit hardest: losing Felipe, the only man she had ever loved, or finding that the man she had called ‘Daddy’ all her life hadn’t been her father at all!

‘Mother,’ Gemma had argued formally, ‘the travel arrangements have been made. I have accepted this commission and I’m going to do it…’

‘There will be other commissions. You’re talented and in a position to pick your own clients. I don’t want you to go to Venezuela!’

It was on the occasion of one of Gemma’s fortnightly visits to her mother at the family home in Surrey, usually so amiable and packed with art-world gossip, but not this time. Gemma’s news that she had been commissioned to paint the portrait of one of Venezuela’s oil barons had not filled her mother with delight as she had anticipated. Far from it; her mother’s face had frozen in shock and then had come the fury.

Shocked herself, Gemma had gaped at her mother as she’d paced the drawing-room of Whitegates. Her mother had never stood in her way before. On the contrary, she’d been delighted when Gemma had echoed her own artistic talent. Their professions lay in different directions, though. Isobel was society’s favourite interior designer and had been for the last two decades, whereas Gemma’s career had veered towards portraiture. People interested her more than the trappings they surrounded themselves with. It had never caused dissent between them before.

‘South America isn’t another planet—’ Gemma had protested.

‘South America isn’t the problem!’ Isobel had snapped, clutching her shoulders, her painted nails digging into the fine silk of her blouse. Then her whole body had sagged and when she had turned to Gemma she seemed to have aged desperately. She was still beautiful, of course, classically elegant with sculptured features that were timeless. Her dark hair, tinted now to banish the wisps of grey at her temples, was drawn back into a tight coil of twisted silk. The eyes suddenly aged her, Gemma had thought at that moment. Normally so clear and bright, as deep a brown as Gemma’s own, they were now misted painfully.

‘It’s not the place, Gemma, darling, it’s the man,’ she had husked painfully.

‘The man? Agustªn Delgado de Navas, one of the richest oil men in South America? How can you possibly object to him?’ Gemma had cried in amazement.

She remembered the silence that had preceded her mother’s reply more than anything else. That awful, aching gap where considerations were weighed and a decision made to tell or not.

‘He’s your father,’ had come the flat statement that had so brutally stunned Gemma. Those few crippling words that had torn at her heart, which had already suffered so badly in the past months.

‘He’s your father’…the words echoed and echoed in Gemma’s head. Were still echoing now, halfway round the world and weeks later.

Gemma crossed the hotel room and impatiently snapped off the air-conditioning. She poured herself a cold drink from the courtesy bar, slid open the patio doors of the balcony and was immediately swamped by a heat that took her breath away. She gasped, quickly acclimatised then slumped down in a cane chair and closed her eyes wearily, unaware of the city traffic thundering ten floors below in the tropical metropolis.

She had defied her mother and now here she was, waiting in Caracas for her escort for the last stage of her journey, a short flight in comparison to the long haul from Heathrow. Private jet from Caracas, over the mountains to the plains of Loma de Grande and the Villa Verde where she would come face to face with the man who was her father but would never know it.

‘If you insist on going, Gemma, you must promise me you’ll not reveal your true identity,’ Isobel had bargained.

‘Just what is my true identity? A Soames, a Villiers, a de Navas?’ Gemma had questioned bitterly. ‘For nearly twenty-six years I’ve believed myself a Soames; now I find I’m the offspring of some dubious Latin oil baron—’

‘You are a Soames,’ Isobel had interjected levelly. ‘And don’t you ever forget it. Peter adopted you and thought of you as his own. He loved you and cherished you.’

‘But he wasn’t my real father,’ Gemma had croaked, her eyes bright with unshed tears. ‘How could you have cheated me so?’ She had bitten her lip miserably and looked at her mother. If she thought she was suffering, she could imagine what her mother was going through. ‘I’m sorry,’ she’d whispered, regretting hurting her mother with her outburst. ‘It’s such a shock…I can hardly believe it. But I want to know everything. Tell me, Mother, everything.’

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.