Destiny Decrees Read online

  ' There is something wrong?' His glance took in the shadows beneath her eloquent eyes. Coralie felt suddenly uncertain.

  W—why didn't you tell me that you are a matador?' she said shakily.

  He eyed her laconically. Would it have made any difference?'

  With a terrifying jerk, the iron lift shuddered to a sudden halt, and Coralie's light frame was flung abruptly against the lean hardness of the Senhor's body. She uttered a little cry as if in terror, and her eyes

  almost filled the small oval of her face as he caught at her switch of coppery hair that had become entangled around a button of his immaculate jacket.

  Little fool! ' he muttered as his head came down close to her upturned face.

  Coralie closed her eyes like a frightened child, her silken lashes fluttering nervously against the fragile cheekbones—opening them only when she heard the bang of a door behind her, jolting her once more into renewed awareness.

  She was in a luxurious bedroom, beautifully furnished with antique furniture and tiles—but why was the handsome dark head still bending over her? She flushed, instinctively outraged now that she realised the bedroom door was firmly closed behind them.

  ' Do you make a habit of entangling men in your lovely hair, senhorita?' came the mocking voice, and with a sense of utter relief Coralie saw the Senhor's deft fingers releasing the fine strands of her hair from his coat button. She wanted to laugh, but instead she found herself retorting:

  Do you make a habit of seducing young girls under false pretences, senhor?' As soon as the words were uttered Coralie regretted them. She heard the sharp intake of his breath as the gypsy-dark tyrant attempted to restrain his terrible anger at her accusation. Coralie backed instinctively away from this merciless matador, fearing he would strike her. Instead, his blazing eyes turned on her face of undisguised terror, a look of cold contempt. His voice when he finally spoke, was like a steel sword.

  If a man had so accused me, he would have answered with his life, senhorita—as it is, if I wanted to seduce, it would not be a slip of a child who imagines that every time a man looks at her it is with evil intent. Furthermore,' he continued, his eyes flickering over her mercilessly, ' our rooms happen to be adjoining, but have no fear on that account—I shall not wish to use the connecting door!' His tone was coldly sarcastic. He reached into his pocket and flung a key on to the glass-topped dressing table—its

  clatter setting her nerves jangling again.

  ' On second thoughts I think it is better that you do not accompany me around the city this afternoon. It will allow you sufficient time to become fully rested. I will order lunch to be brought to your room. Dinner will be served in the restaurant at seven-thirty, and I will see you then. I do not think there is anything else.' With a brief nod he disappeared through the door, leaving Coralie twisting her fingers together, feeling strange and very much alone at the sudden withdrawal of that dominant personality, though with a certain sense of relief that she would not have to endure the rest of the day spent in his company.

  Tiredness drugged her senses, and it was with a strange feeling of uncertainty that Coralie lay down on her bed and closed her eyes. Almost immediately she fell asleep. It was some hours later when she awoke, refreshed but restless and impatient at having to while away the hours until dinner, when all she wanted was to set out on the last stage of her journey that would take her to Peter. Leisurely she ate the delicious lunch which had been left on the tray beside her bed. She looked wistfully at the cream telephone on the bedside table. She gave a sigh. How exasperating—Peter didn't even have a phone number she could dial.

  After dinner, at which Dom Ricardo did not after all appear, despite her restless desire, Coralie returned to her room and sat on her balcony, watching the seductive moon at its full, casting a blue lambency above the shimmering waters of the Tagus. She rested her burnished copper head among the deep pile of cushions on the lounger, savouring the sensuous appeal of the night, unfamiliar and disturbing. A tremor of excitement pulsated in her veins. Only a few more hours to spend captive to an unpredictable stranger. Something inside her tightened at the thought of those chiselled features, remote and frightening, the look of a man with a harsh past and a relentless future. His dangerous fascination must have captivated the heart of every woman who had watched him duel in the sun in a bullring stained with the blood of his former

  victories. A tiny shiver of alarm coursed through her slender frame. The mere thought of that barbaric sport sickened her.

  Dragging her thoughts away, she prepared for bed.

  In the darkest hour towards the dawn, when one's vitality is at its lowest ebb, Coralie's fears and fancies caught up with her. She became the victim of her dreams in which there appeared a dark-faced bullfighter, relentless, a man who never listened when she asked for her freedom; whose eyes were consuming firebrands, whose tongue was barbed steel. When Coralie's fancies became unendurable, a cry tore from her, rending the silent night. A sob escaped her parched throat, and for one heart-stopping moment she imagined her dreams had materialised as light flooded her bedroom and Dom Ricardo Casimiro Carvalho stood in the connecting doorway, tall, dark and grim-faced. Coralie cowered back among her pillows shivering uncontrollably, her heart pounding wildly as the tall figure strode purposefully towards her. Coralie's thoughts were incoherent.

  ' What is all this hysterical nonsense? Do you want to rouse the entire establishment?' There was surprise and bewilderment in Coralie's eyes as he came and sat beside her on the bed. Taking hold of her shoulders, he held her in his powerful grip. She was desperately aware of the thin material of her nightdress as his eyes raked over her. She felt a strange sense of excitement at his touch. His arrogant ruthlessness afforded an unexpected measure of protection. In his half-buttoned robe, his black hair ruffled from sleep, Dom Ricardo looked very different from the man who had taken charge of her only that morning. The tightening of a muscle near his jaw was the only indication that he was not unmoved by her distress. Coralie hoped she looked braver than she felt at that moment, as she dared his unreadable eyes. He considered her for a moment.

  ' I don't know if I am wise to leave you here by yourself to risk a recurrence of such a nightmare.' His tone held a disturbing quality.

  ' Oh, please! I—I'm perfectly all right now,' she whispered shakily.

  His mouth twisted in a smile, but his eyes remained cold.

  ' You say that as if you are afraid of me. Youth is so vulnerable,' he murmured with the briefest of wicked smiles as he touched her cheek with his forefinger.

  I thought I had put your fears to rest last night when I left you the key to our connecting door. However,' with a quirk of one dark eyebrow towards the dressing table, ' as it happened it is fortunate that you forgot to lock the door or you might have screamed the place down before I could reach you. Or perhaps you didn't forget '

  She coloured at the mockery in his voice, and stared back at him with outraged incredulity.

  ' What kind of a woman do you take me for? I—I am not one of your aficionados—to----' she broke off half chokingly, feeling all at once the tears threatening. This was the final humiliation in her struggle against the relentless magnetism of this man.

  His eyes moved to the trembling curve of her lips. Abruptly he stood up. ' Should I be flattered that you imagine yourself in danger, I wonder?' He spoke with a cynicism that heightened her tension. ' Now try to get some sleep for those overstrained nerves. We make an early start in the morning, remember. Goodnight, Miss Grey.' With resolve, he snapped off the light and closed the door between their rooms firmly behind him.

  With thudding heart, Coralie waited until she heard the light dick off in his room, then reaching for her bedside lamp, she switched it on and hurried across to the dressing table. Snatching up the key that Dom Ricardo had tossed there hours earlier, she crossed noiselessly to the adjoining door and turned the key in the lock.

  All at once she was angry with herself for her utter stupid
ity in having landed herself in this situation with an autocratic stranger. She reached for her handbag and frantically rifled its contents to see if she could

  possibly scrape together sufficient money to hire a car, as was her original intention before literally stumbling across this indomitable Portuguese. All she wanted now was to be away from his sardonic eyes. Suddenly she knew what she would do. She decided she had possibly just enough money for her purpose. Breathing a sigh of relief, she climbed back into bed and flicked out the light, dozing fitfully until the dawn light broke through the shutters.

  By the time of the first stirrings of the city, Coralie had dressed and swiftly collected together her few belongings into her holdall. On her dressing table lay a hasty note of thanks to Dom Ricardo. Desperately hoping she would not make any sound which might arouse the suspecting sleeper in the adjoining room, she fled silently down the apparently endless staircase. She had no time to wait for the lift—the need for speed was urgent: Breathlessly she noted an address near the reception desk giving details of a car hire service. She had spotted the advertisement last night. Her hand trembled as she lifted the receiver inside the phone box. The lift was just opposite, and Coralie feared that at any moment the irate figure of Dom Ricardo would emerge from behind the iron doors and demand to know what she was up to.

  With a sense of relief she heard a voice over the phone assuring her that a car would immediately be put at her disposal, and that it would be driven round from the nearby garage to the front entrance of the hotel for her within the next ten minutes.

  After what seemed an eternity, a small Avis car drew up into the kerbside, and after she had settled the necessary payments with the driver, he handed over the car and Coralie slid behind the wheel, pulling away into the endless stream of Lisbon's traffic. She felt as if she were driving on air. No misgivings as to the wisdom of her defection dogged her as she repressed a crazy urge to put her foot down harder on the accelerator. Heading out of the city through palm-lined streets thronged with early morning traffic, Coralie was filled with a reckless gaiety. Her dark

  moment of panic forgotten, she was exhilarated by the feel of the wind in her hair, the salt spray upon her lips, and the lure of a definite destination.

  As the traffic thinned out and she was able to relax behind the wheel, Coralie laughed aloud at the comparative ease of her escape. She pulled a wry face as she remembered that she hadn't so much as the price of a meal left now she had paid for the car hire. But what did that matter, she told herself, when by lunch time she would be reunited with Peter after these long months of lonely separation from him? He should have received her letter by now, she concluded, telling him the approximate day of her arrival. The decision to come out to him had been made on such an impulse that there had been no time to await his reply. Suddenly she had not been able to stand the strain of separation any longer during the depressing days of an English February. That would not trouble Peter, she knew, so long as she had come to him at last after his continual pleadings with her to join him at the little fishing village in the Algarve, where they would be married at once, he had written. His letters had been full of enthusiasm for his work, containing lengthy descriptions of the light and shade and local colour, as if here he had found the Mecca of his artistic dreams.

  Into the mounting excitement of her thoughts there kept breaking the image of a dark, matador grace stamped with Iberian autocracy. It made Peter seem like a schoolboy idol in comparison. What would be Dom Ricardo's reaction when he found his little protégée gone? she wondered with returning alarm. Would he give the eloquent shrug of the Latin and forget the incident? Coralie somehow thought not. He already held the opinion that she was a creature of impulse; he had left her in no doubt about that from the way in which he had taken her into his charge like a lost child. He did not understand that it was not entirely impulse that had brought her to Portugal, she thought defensively. It was a promise she had made to Peter before he came out to the Algarve to

  study architecture; a promise that she would come to him when her father was better, but her father had never recovered from his long illness, and after his death not long after that of her mother, it had been only a matter of time while she attended to the winding up of his affairs before she came to Portugal to marry Peter. There was no one else now in the world to whom she belonged. She thrust out a determined chin. She had no further need of Dom Ricardo's chivalrous protection, grateful as she had been for a helping hand in a strange land.

  Coralie concentrated hard on the unfamiliar countryside before her. It was quite different from anything she had ever seen before, and she found her spirits once more soaring as she drove further south through the Anentejo and headed for the Algarve' The Land Beyond , Dom Ricardo had called it, explaining how at the first faint hint elsewhere of coolness in the air the birds came soaring off to this land of almond trees and cliff nesting places.

  It was difficult to believe that so recently she had left a frost and fog-bound England, and was now in a region that knew no wintertime. A winding and colourful road led through green stretches of tall spring wheat. Wild flowers filled the ditches and fallow land, and eucalyptus trees spiced the air. She took a deep breath, filling her with a superb vitality. Coralie felt stirred and excited. She drove on past shepherds in long sheepskin coats carrying newborn lambs; peasant girls worked barefoot in the rice swamps, their skirts tucked under forming baggy trousers, and a man's felt hat worn over a knotted headscarf protecting them from the sun.

  When she had set out from Lisbon this morning, in the first throes of her eagerness to escape her self-appointed guardian, Coralie had determined at all costs to be reunited with her fiancé by lunch time. Throughout the journey she had meant to keep to the Alantejo highway, the short cut to the Algarve, yet already the country had so taken a hold of her that she found herself driving along roads that now touched in

  at the estuaries of coastal streams; glanced off at fishing ports; and zig-zagged in and out amid bamboo canes and gnarled fig-trees.

  When next she stopped to study her map, Coralie found that somewhere she had taken a wrong turning; not surprisingly in her eager anticipation. The warm sunshine of early morning had given way to a thin drizzle, causing the road to be hazardous in places.

  Suddenly out of the faint mist which was gradually dosing in there loomed the sombre ranges of a sierra, gloomy and uninviting under its scrubby cover of briar plant and rose-laurel. She was beginning to feel the strain of driving for several hours in unfamiliar country, and gradually a faint unrest began to invade her former high spirits. The journey had already taken far longer than she had anticipated, and she was hoping desperately that her petrol would last out until she reached her destination. Her last coins had been spent on refuelling, some miles back; and anyhow garages were few and far between, or non-existent on this solitary stretch of road, she had noticed.

  For the first time Coralie began to doubt the wisdom of leaving her awesome protector. The first shadow of regret at her lonesome wanderings tinged her glance until finally a sense of panic gripped her by the throat as she admitted to herself that she was lost in this strange no-man's-land, with no trace of habitation. It seemed hours since she had encountered any other vehicle on the road and that had been a laden donkey-cart staggering along a by-road. She felt that at all costs she must keep going, otherwise she would never be found. The realisation that no one knew of her whereabouts frightened her, the depression becoming almost unbearable. She was no longer sure that Peter would have received her letter. No doubt he had no idea that she had even left England. Once again, not for the first time while travelling that lonely stretch through the sierra, Coralie experienced an acute longing for the security of the stranger who had given her the shelter of his arms when nightmares had last assailed her, only a handful of hours ago. She saw

  with sudden clarity what a fool she had been to spurn him. To say the least, a woman travelling alone was open to every conceivable haza
rd. Dom Ricardo had known exactly the state of her predicament, but she had been so blind to the pitfalls, and so ungraciously cynical of his hospitality to a stranger in his country; he would have extended the same courtesy to anyone; she saw it all so clearly now—too late!

  Suddenly there broke upon her ears the constant booming of surf pounding against shattered rocks. Coralie braked quickly, but again too late. The last thing she saw before she lost consciousness was the scarred outline of purple-dyed rocks slithering down into Technicolor-green depths furiously churning. The last sound she heard was the moan of the waves far below her as they dashed themselves against the jagged face of storm-carved grottoes. Was it merely the stark imagination of her wild, hopeless panic that tore from her a foreign name—as strong arms seemed to reach out and hold her in their vice-like grip before she fell into darkest oblivion?

  CHAPTER II

  When Coralie awoke it was broad daylight. What an incredibly vivid dream ! She reached for the glass of water that always stood by her bed. It was not there. This was not her room—there had been no dream, only reality. She clutched at the apple-green sheets, all at once very much aware of her surroundings. She was lying in a large four-poster bed whose gossamer curtains concealed nothing of her view of what appeared to be a highly ornate bedroom. As she jerked up to look about her, at once the figure of an old woman appeared from behind the bed curtains.

  At last! You are better, senhorita?' she ducked in a foreign accent. The wizened features showed no sign of emotion, Coralie thought.

  ' Better?' she queried faintly. Her voice seemed to come from afar, and putting a tentative hand to her temple, she winced.

  ' A terrible bump,' replied the old woman tonelessly, yet she bustled away to return with a cloth moistened with a perfumed lotion. Her touch was like balm. The pain was soothed instantly, and Coralie was again able to summon her thoughts with some effort.