JACQUELINE BAIRD - Raul's Revenge

‘Such wisdom from one so young,’ he mocked, but continued in a more serious vein. ‘I was your age—twenty-three—fresh out of university with a degree in engineering specialising in design. I thought I would work at a large firm in Granada and live happily at the hacienda, helping out on the estate for the rest of my days. Unfortunately my father died. I discovered the ranch was mortgaged to the hilt, and that a salary, however good, would not allow me to redeem the mortgage in one lifetime. That is why I started my own business—’

‘I didn’t realise. I simply assumed you had always been disgustingly wealthy,’ Penny interrupted teasingly.

‘So did I,’ he said with dry irony. ‘Until I found out different. It is only in the past ten years I have actually been solvent. And this desalination plant in Dubai was to be my crowning achievement.

‘I designed it. It is an innovative and slightly controversial design. Unfortunately one small part needs to be rethought. I have to stay here and solve the problem, because the rewards if I succeed are astronomical—not solely in monetary terms but in human terms. Think of the millions that die each year in Africa alone because of drought, and yet in some countries the sea is there to be used but is ignored.

‘I can foresee the design being used not just in the Middle Eastern countries but any coastal area in the world where a shortage of water is a major problem—including my own country.’

Penny was stunned. This was a new Raul, talking about his life and work as he never had to her before, and she was enormously impressed at the depth of his commitment and flattered that he had confided in her. She felt as though it marked a new phase in their relationship, increasing her belief in him and his love for her.

‘So you see, Penny, much as I want to keep you with me, to be honest, I cannot afford the distraction.’

He stretched a hand across her chest to cup the underside of her breast, and she shivered in reaction, the nipple peaking blatantly beneath the soft cotton of her top. She glanced sideways at his rugged face and caught his wry smile.

‘And you, querida, are a major distraction,’ he husked throatily. ‘At least if I know you are at home waiting for me I will have the incentive to work all the harder, simply to get back to you.’

It was her turn to move and press her lips to his. ‘I do understand, Raul, and I will be counting the days.’

He hauled her into his arms, local laws forgotten, and kissed her thoroughly. Then he murmured against her softly parted lips, ‘And I will be counting the nights. Dios, Penny, you must know you can ask anything of me—anything in the world—and I would move heaven and earth to get it for you.’

As an avowal of love, Penny couldn’t have asked for more, and, with his words warming her heart as his kiss still lingered on her lips, fifteen minutes later she boarded the waiting aircraft. Her confidence in their love was at an all-time high... And she never imagined for a second that two weeks later the reverse would be true...

Penny slowly opened her eyes and groaned. Her sleep had been haunted by dreams; her body burning and aching with need, as she had spent a restless night in the huge four-poster bed. She glanced down at the fine cotton sheet tangled around her naked body and sighed. So this was what sexual frustration did to one, she thought grimly, and wished for the hundredth time that Raul was back.

She yawned and stretched; then, slowly untangling herself from the sheet, she swung her long legs to the floor. Raul’s ‘a few days’ had lengthened into two weeks, and, much as she loved the hacienda, if she was honest with herself, after months of doing absolutely nothing she was beginning to get bored. She was slowly reaching the conclusion that she hadn’t been cut out to be a lady of leisure.

A deep sigh escaped her and she sat for a moment on the side of the bed. She pushed the unruly mass of her long hair back from her face and glanced idly out of the window. Another scorching hot day, but her flesh was burning with a different heat—the heat of arousal unfulfilled.

Still, she told herself bracingly, breakfast and down to the stables for a long gallop on her own small Arab mare, Daisy—a present from Raul the first time she had stayed with him in Spain. Followed by lunch, a swim... Who was she trying to fool? She had done the same thing every day for weeks, and was fed up.

What would her mother have said, she mused, if she could have seen her precious daughter now, a wealthy man’s mistress? Her blue eyes hazed with tears. Deep in her innermost being Penny knew the answer, and it gave her no joy. Her parents had been a wonderful loving couple; they might have tolerated her lifestyle because she was their beloved daughter, but they would never have approved in a million years.

Her thoughts went back to the past. As the much loved only child of the local doctor in a small town in West Sussex, she had had an idyllic upbringing until her father had been killed in a car crash when on a night call to an elderly patient. Even after his death she had still been relatively content; she had grown even closer to her mother and life had gone on.

It had been when she was seventeen that the final disaster had struck: her mother had been diagnosed as having cancer. A braver woman never lived, Penny thought with some pride. Her mother had insisted that Penny stay at school and take her final exams. She had been destined to follow in her father’s footsteps and had been accepted for medical school.

Whether it was the worry over her mother or simply that she was not quite clever enough, she didn’t know, but her exam results had not been good enough for her to take up her place. With hindsight she could see that it had been a blessing in disguise.

The local pharmacy where she had worked every Saturday since the age of fifteen had allowed her to work part-time, twenty hours a week, and she had devoted the next year to looking after her mother. Then, when the end had come and her mother died, the same firm had agreed to sponsor her through pharmaceutical college. Reluctantly she had sold the family house, bought a small apartment in London and started college.

A reminiscent smile curved her full lips. The very first day she’d met Amy, an orphan like herself, but looking for accommodation. They had shared Penny’s apartment ever since. In fact Amy was still living there. Which reminded her...

She stood up and walked across to the en suite bathroom. She owed Amy a phone call; apart from ringing when she had first arrived back in Spain, to apologise for not keeping her appointment in London with her, she had not spoken to her friend at all.

Raul, on the other hand, had called Penny every night, but as she stepped into the shower and turned on the cold spray she seriously questioned the effect of his calls. Invariably she put the phone down in a state of sexual arousal, and she was getting heartily sick of cold showers. In fact she would have loved to know what idiot had actually decided they worked as a cure for frustration, because they did not seem to be doing her much good.

Half an hour later, after a quick cup of coffee—she could not face Ava the houskeeper’s idea of a breakfast—Penny was astride Daisy, cantering along the dusty track that led to her favourite spot—a wild grove of orange and lemon trees, gnarled and old, planted decades ago by whoever had once lived in the tumbledown adobe building at the edge of the orchard. A small stream trickled by only twenty feet from the ruined home. The stream was almost dried up in the mid-summer heat, but still Penny found it soothing.

Eventually, reluctantly, she returned to the hacienda, groomed and fed her horse, and then made her way back to the house.