Legacy: Love, Intrigue and Redemption Under the Scorching Spanish Sun (Andalucian Nights Trilogy)

Hannah Fielding

Published by London Wall Publishing

2 March 2017

Summer, 2011 – A troubled young journalist goes undercover in Spain, and finds her loyalties tested when love and desire unearth secrets she hadn’t bargained for.

When Luna Ward, a beautiful ice-blonde graduate, is commissioned by a leading New York science journal to investigate the head of a Spanish alternative health clinic, she jumps at the chance. But her life becomes far more complicated once she meets the man she has been tasked to expose. Luna finds Rodrigo de Rueda Calderon to be a brilliant, outspoken oncology specialist with irresistible, dark gypsy looks and a devilish sense of humour. The pair are irrevocably drawn to each other, but how can she give herself up to a passion that threatens to topple all reason? And how could he ever learn to trust the person who has kept her identity from him, even though he has a terrible secret of his own?

The lovers unearth dark and brooding dramas in their family histories, binding them together in a web of intrigue that threatens to bring their lives toppling down.

Excerpt of "Legacy"

by Hannah Fielding

Unexpectedly, at an abrupt bend in the narrow street, the sound of live, full-blooded flamenco music burst out once more, echoing through the night. It came from a nightclub a few yards away, its façade painted with warm sunny colours under the flashing fluorescent sign El Cabo de Oro.

Now, as she approached the tavern, Luna could clearly hear the loud clapping of hands, the olés, and the clinking of glasses. She hesitated outside the bright walls a few moments longer, a curtain of beads the only thing separating her from the exuberant sounds of the show.

Finally, she pushed it aside and went down the few steps leading into the dimly lit room below. Anti-smoking campaigns had obviously not reached this wild little world, she noted, engulfed by the hazy atmosphere.

Here, the cuadro flamenco sat in a semicircle on a platform at the far end of the room with that part open to the night sky. The troupe played its music at a fast tempo, while the audience clapped their hands and stamped their feet in rhythm on the tiled floor with cries of olé to encourage the young dancer. A girl was singing hoarsely, seductively, and her castanets marked their own syncopated rhythm.

Lamps on the red painted walls threw out a warm amber glow, illuminating an assortment of bullfighting posters, advertisements, and photographs of toreros and flamenco dancers. On one side, to the right, stood a long, wooden bar lined with endless bottles of different shapes and colours and topped by a row of gleaming glasses. Tended by a scraggy-looking waiter chewing a quid of tobacco, most of the clientele sat on cane stools along the bar, eating tapas or drinking around low tables made from empty wine barrels. To the left of the stage, an arched roof opened out on to a walled patio, where a small number of people sat drinking and chatting in the balmy evening air.

Luna made her way deeper into the room, looking for a table nearer the patio where she would be less affected by the fug of smoke. The tavern was packed. The audience was mostly men and what women there were, were all accompanied. Luna was the only single woman in the place, and it made her feel uncomfortable. She began to regret her rash decision. Back in New York she had never been to a bar alone, so why had she suddenly decided it was a good idea to do so on her first night in Barcelona? Her pale blonde hair and pearly complexion caused her to stand out starkly against the darker colouring of the Spaniards who filled the club.

There was a drop in the level of noise as she became an object of interest. Men’s eyes were drawn to her like a magnet. Some of them whispered to each other, casting sidelong glances. Women also stared, their eyes narrowing, reflecting quite a different sentiment altogether. The cuadro had stopped playing while the musicians sipped their wine and a new dancer emerged from the background to take over the lead. Luna stood at the side of the seated audience and glanced around.

Maybe I should go back, she thought, feeling distinctly out of place.

And then it happened ... their eyes met across the room and held for a long moment. The effect was electric and hit Luna like a bolt of lightning. His gaze, fringed by long black lashes, burned with a fire that scorched her as it moved slowly and deliberately over her face, then her body, with frank admiration, as if drinking in her every feature. Though she could not see the exact colour of his eyes at this distance, she knew they were paler than his tanned complexion – brilliant and alive with passion.

The man before her was mesmerizing in his perfect male beauty. His bold, open stare should have made her want to turn and run but something more powerful than she had ever experienced, a shot of pure adrenaline in her blood, had her rooted to the spot.

About the Author

Hannah Fielding is an incurable romantic. The seeds for her writing career were sown in early childhood, spent in Egypt, when she came to an agreement with her governess Zula: for each fairy story Zula told, Hannah would invent and relate one of her own. Years later – following a degree in French literature, several years of travelling in Europe, falling in love with an Englishman, the arrival of two beautiful children and a career in property development – Hannah decided after so many years of yearning to write that the time was now. Today, she lives the dream: writing full time at her homes in Kent, England, and the South of France, where she dreams up romances overlooking breath-taking views of the Mediterranean.