Love In Torment. Natalie Fox

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       CHAPTER ONE

      ‘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 СКАЧАТЬ