Playboys. Lynne Graham
and slotted a champagne flute into her hand regardless. ‘Make an effort. This is a special occasion.’
Rigid with anger and an awareness of him that inflamed her even more, Ophelia held the flute so tightly she was afraid it would break between her fingers. In a sudden movement she drank the contents down in an unappreciative gulp and set the glass down again. No doubt it wouldn’t do her any harm this once. She looked around: the Great Hall was full of lawyers enjoying the generous array of drinks and food on offer. Lysander was soon engulfed by his legal team, so Ophelia headed straight for her solicitor.
Haddock announced his presence in the corner by breaking into an off-key rendering of ‘Here Comes the Bride'. Heads turned, supercilious brows lifting. Ophelia almost groaned out loud, for she had brought the parrot upstairs only because he was lonely in the kitchen. Unfortunately that well-known melody sent a chill down Ophelia’s spine because she had grown up with a mother who always burst into tears when she heard it. She continued her journey over to her solicitor.
‘I have the letter here,’ Donald Morton told her cheerfully.
‘Thanks.’ Ophelia clutched the surprisingly fat envelope and hesitated before ripping it open. When she unfolded the document within, a small piece of notepaper that had been attached to it fluttered free and fell to the floor. She bent to scoop it up and frowned when she saw the single handwritten sentence it carried.
Molly had been put up for adoption.
There was nothing else, no opening preamble, no signature, nothing other than that brief bald admission in her grandmother’s spidery scrawl.
Ophelia was shaken by a possibility that she had not previously considered. Her sibling had been adopted? Had the story about Molly’s father taking her only been a convenient piece of fiction? Ophelia stilled while she pondered: unless Molly chose to look into her own past and seek out birth relatives, Ophelia’s sister might well be lost to her for ever. Her eyes stung with sudden tears of regret and frustration. She looked numbly down at the other document in her hand and read the first few lines of it over and over again before she could accept what she was reading. Disbelief attacked her and she re-approached her solicitor, who was being served with food at the buffet.
‘There’s what looks like another will in the envelope,’ she told him shakily.
The older man was astonished and he immediately set down his plate. ‘May I have a look?’
Still bound up in her disappointment, Ophelia passed over the document. She knew she should have known better than to get her hopes up about the letter. While she had finally learned the truth behind her sister’s disappearance, she felt as if Molly was more out of her reach than ever.
‘May I speak to you in the drawing room, Miss Carter … sorry, er, Mrs Metaxis?’ Donald Morton had assumed his more formal manner again. Ophelia and her solicitor were fast becoming the centre of attention and silence was slowly spreading across the Great Hall.
‘Metaxis bounder—good-for-nothing swine!’ Haddock squawked with gleeful abandon. ‘There’ll never be a Metaxis at Madrigal Court!’
Impervious to the shock value of Haddock’s announcement, Ophelia watched dully as Donald Morton approached one of the other lawyers. A look of consternation crossed the man’s face and he quickly went into a huddle with his colleague.
The drawing room was now barely recognisable to Ophelia. Its former shabbiness and clutter had been banished in favour of wonderful paintings and handsome furniture. Beautiful curtains hung at the windows. She pressed clammy hands to her tense face. The implications of the existence of another will were finally sinking in. What new torment had Gladys Stewart planned with the provision of a second will that would invalidate the first, if it post-dated it?
‘Ophelia …’ Lean, strong face hard, Lysander strode into the room and towards her. ‘What is happening? What is this about? A second will?’
‘I don’t know … I really don’t know,’ she said tautly,dragging her attention away from him, hastily burying the memory of that wide sensual mouth playing with hers. Playing was the operative word, she told herself unhappily. She had let her guard down. She hastily buried the reflection that she was now married to Lysander. The very thought embarrassed her, trespassing as it did over the barriers she was determined to erect in her mind. It wasn’t a marriage; it was an ‘arrangement'.
Lysander startled Ophelia by closing a lean hand over hers when she tried to turn away. Flustered and flushed, she collided with his brilliant questioning gaze and snaked her fingers free, turning her head away in angry discomfiture. She suppressed the sense of connection she felt to him, stamping it out like a spark that threatened to cause a conflagration. There might be a ring on her finger but, in essence, it was meaningless.
Donald Morton arrived to confirm, ‘Mrs Stewart appears to have had another will drawn up by a London firm. It’s signed and witnessed and it is of a more recent date.’
‘Which means it takes precedence over the first,’ Lysander said flatly.
‘You’re not mentioned as a beneficiary in this will, Mr Metaxis,’ the older man told him heavily.
Ophelia frowned. ‘Then what does it say?’
A few minutes later, Ophelia sank down on a nearby chair because her knees felt too weak to support her. She was too stunned to know quite what she was feeling—her grandmother had left her Madrigal Court in its entirety.
Cold wrath held Lysander still and silent, his attention shooting straight to his bride. Ophelia didn’t look at him. There she sat, delicate as a tiny porcelain doll with baby-blue eyes, in an attitude of shock. Lysander wasn’t impressed. Ofcourse she must have known about the second will! The very fact that he was forced to operate within time constraints had given Ophelia an advantage, Lysander reflected rawly. He had gone against legal advice in pushing the marriage through so quickly. If background checks on the Stewart family had been made, they might have revealed facts that would have given him pause for thought or picked up on the late Mrs Stewart’s dealings with another legal firm. But, be that as it may, Lysander was quick to regroup under threat; he always had a contingency plan to fall back on.
The Metaxis legal team joined them. The situation was discussed in Greek. When the lawyers began to wrangle in two languages, Ophelia rose and went back out to the Great Hall. Honest and straightforward as she was, she was appalled by the cruel cunning of her grandmother’s trickery.
‘Hello, Ophelia,’ Haddock said chirpily.
Ophelia took the parrot back down to the kitchen. She recalled Gladys Stewart’s triumphant forecast that Madrigal Court would make her granddaughter’s every hope and dream come true. But Ophelia had dreamt only of being able to find her sister and the freedom to get on with her life. And that latter dream she had never shared with anyone, as it had made her feel guilty. That she had unwittingly become the instrument of her grandmother’s revenge appalled her. The older woman had not cared who might suffer when it came to striking a lethal blow against the Metaxis family. She had set up her granddaughter alongside the son of her greatest enemy. The end result was unarguable: Lysander Metaxis had married Ophelia for nothing!
Ophelia pondered the explosive truth that she was now the new and outright owner of Madrigal Court! But before a sense of joy could take hold of her, the most awful guiltassailed her instead. Because of the terms of the previous will, Lysander had been expecting her to sell her share of the house to him and, of course, she could not have afforded to do otherwise. The entire picture had changed, however; now that the whole house was hers, surely she had more options. A heady sense of challenge was already bubbling inside her. Could Madrigal Court be turned into a paying proposition so that she could keep her inheritance? What the heck was she going to do? What was fair? And would she still be fair to Lysander, even if being so meant going against her own inclinations?
The guests had departed and the house seemed eerily silent when Ophelia finally walked back up the basement stairs. Darkness had fallen and elegant new lamps glowed in corners. She almost switched them off to save electric and then winced,