Chapter Two
Arielle heard his words. Heard them but could not comprehend them. Could not bear to. Oh, dear God, had it happened then, was Gerald finally carrying out his threat? She felt faintness drumming in her ears. Her vision blurred. Her body swayed and folded.
She heard the man mutter an oath, in a language she did not understand, but her hearing was dimming. Clouds rolled up to smother her, suffocate her, thrust her down, down, down…
And then she was steadied. An arm snaked around her waist, holding her upright by force, all but carrying her across to the bench beside the kitchen door. She was lowered gently to the bench. A hand was at the nape of her neck, pressing her head towards her knees. Slowly, slowly, the drumming in her ears faded and her senses returned. She began to lift her head and instantly the hand at her nape was lifted away. She swallowed, sitting upright slowly, turning her head towards the man sitting beside her. She blinked blindly.
‘Who…who are you?’ The faintness might be passing, but it was in her voice still, almost a stammer.
Her eyes went to him. He was close—far, far too close—and she could see his face fully now. A narrow face with a hard jaw that was rough-edged with stubble, high cheekbones, dark eyebrows and even darker eyes.
Eyes that she could have drowned in.
Eyes that were studying her with a piercing gaze.
He sat back, reaching inside his jacket pocket. He slid out a silver card case and extracted a card from it. Not once, not even for a moment, did he take his eyes from her.
She took the card in her nerveless fingers. Lycos Dimistrios. That was all it said. She lifted her head to stare at him blankly.
Greek, she thought even more blankly, he’s Greek—
He got to his feet, removed his card from her numb fingers and dropped it casually into the outer pocket of his tuxedo jacket. Arielle found herself wondering, with that same strange detachment, why he was wearing a tuxedo. Why his bow tie was undone, hanging loosely either side of his open top button of his dress shirt. Why the effect seemed to make her want to go on gazing at him as he stood there tall, dark against the sun, looking down at her with that unreadable expression on his face with his piercing dark eyes, roughened jawline, well-shaped mouth… .
Inside her chest she felt, as if from very far away, her heart starting to thud. She realised he was speaking, still in English.
‘So now you know my name, tell me yours. Who are you?’
She got to her feet.
‘I am Arielle Degrange Frobisher,’ she said. Her head straightened and she looked at him directly. She continued speaking with quiet dignity and resolve, ‘Mas Delfine is my home. It has been…’ she took a breath, never letting her eyes drop from his ‘…my mother’s family home for over two hundred years and it has been stolen from me.’
Nothing changed on Lycos’s face.
‘Is that so?’ he said. His voice was expressionless. Something was playing out here and he wanted to know what it was without showing his hand. He never showed his hand…
He saw her shoulders go back. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is so. And, whatever claim my…stepbrother has made that it is his, it is not. Nor is he free to dispose of it.’
Her voice was calm as she spoke, but Lycos could hear the emotions in it. The anger. The rage. The fear.
His thoughts ran silently but rapidly behind his levelling eyes. Was she telling the truth? Was ownership of the mas disputed? If so, there would be, shortly, a reckoning that would be of extreme discomfort to the man he had faced down at the casino the previous night. He frowned inwardly. Stepbrother, she’d said?
‘Gerald Maitland is your stepbrother?’
She nodded. ‘You know him? Or did you deal only with his agents?’
His mouth formed a faint, caustic smile that had not a ghost of humour in it.
‘With him. Personally,’ he said. He did not attempt to hide the edge in his voice.
Her eyes widened and he could see she was about to speak. Peremptorily he lifted a hand.
‘Later,’ he said. ‘We will discuss this later. For now…’ he dropped the edge in his voice and became matter of fact, ‘…I require the use of a bathroom, preferably en-suite. And then breakfast.’
He turned away, not caring about her reaction to his list of immediate requirements, and strode back to his car. He unloaded his suitcase, retrieved the baguette and the bag of remaining croissants, and returned to where she stood in the cobbled courtyard, still bathed in sunlight. His eyes narrowed slightly, assessing her.
She really was so very lovely, standing there like that in the faded cotton dressing gown with her tumbling long dark hair and those incredible blue eyes.
Even though in there was nothing in her eyes but shock and anger.
Suddenly Lycos didn’t want to see that expression there. He held up the baguette and the paper bag, then deposited them on the bench.
‘For breakfast,’ he said. ‘We shall discuss the situation then. Now, show me to my room if you please.’
He guided her inside, into a large, old-fashioned kitchen. For a moment he thought she was going to balk but then, with the same quiet dignity with which she had told him who she was, she complied. She led the way through into a wide entrance hall with what he assumed was the front door to the mas and from which a stone staircase led to the upper storey.
‘You can use the room at the far end of the landing to the right,’ she told him expressionlessly. ‘The bathroom is next door. The water is hot at this hour as long as you do not use too much of it.’
She walked back into the kitchen, shutting the door to the hallway. For a moment Lycos looked at the closed door, as if he might want to see through it, then he headed upstairs with thoughts arranging and rearranging themselves inside his head.
Arielle waited until, some minutes later, she could hear the sound of the shower running through the rumbling, ancient pipework. Then, swiftly, she ran upstairs to the sanctuary of her own bedroom.
But what sanctuary was it now? How could it be?
The numbness, which had overtaken her since she had so nearly passed out with shock, had left her and now only shock remained. Shock and anger and anguish.
How can I bear it? To lose my home? My heritage—my birthright?
She shook with the intensity of her emotions. She’d been through it all with the lawyers and now, this very day, the blow she had dreaded for so long had finally fallen.
She gave a smothered cry, hurrying herself into her clothes with shaking hands. She pulled open her bedroom door cautiously and peered out along the landing. The shower had stopped. Maybe he was shaving now, this man who had come to take her home from her.
His image flashed into her head. He’d needed a shave, badly.
He looked like a pirate.
But that was what he was, wasn’t it? This Lycos Dimistrios, a pirate who seized the property of others. Who helped himself to it.
Lycos snapped open the lid of his suitcase, which he’d lifted onto the bed. It was an old-fashioned bed with a metal frame and a thick mattress that was covered with a quilt. The furniture was equally old-fashioned. A sturdy wooden dressing table, a large wooden wardrobe and a pair of straw-seated upright chairs. Knotted rugs lay either side of the wide bed and the rest of the floor was bare wooden boards that had been polished smooth over the years. Flowered curtains hung either side of the window. He opened the window to let in fresh air and the curtains rustled in the warm breeze. He sifted through his clothes and selected a polo shirt and casual chinos. He slipped on the chinos, dropping the thin towel he’d found in the bathroom—as old-fashioned as the bedroom, though sufficiently functional for his needs—from around his hips. As he pulled the polo shirt down over his torso he wandered to the window. The morning was heating up. He wondered if the place had a pool. A swim might be welcome later.
He frowned. Later? Was there going to be a later? Wasn’t he simply going to eat, get shown round the place—however unwillingly—and then set off for Paris again? The interruption to his journey being as brief as that?
He stood, thoughts revolving, looking out of the window. It overlooked the rear of the house, out over the garden. Or should that be gardens, plural? They seemed extensive, sloping down through a couple of terraced levels to a hedge, beyond which seemed to be a field of lavender. He caught a whiff of the fragrance, borne towards him on the light breeze. To either side of the gardens were trees—citrus from the look of them and mulberry—creating a sheltered seclusion. Bougainvillea tumbled over low walls separating the terraced levels. Oleanders and olive trees lined the far edge of the next level. And immediately below his window, a wide stone-paved terrace was dotted with a multitude of terracotta pots bearing vividly hued geraniums. Another scent caught at him, besides that of lavender on the breeze. Coffee. He glanced sideways, taking in an ironwork table, shaded by a faded striped awning pulled out from the wall of the house above a pair of French windows. Breakfast was being set out for him.
He turned away, hungry suddenly. The two croissants he’d demolished en route from the village seemed a long time ago, and completely inadequate.
He wanted to eat. He wanted to see his new possession. And most of all, he realised with a mixture of self-mockery, purely masculine anticipation and something he could not identify so dismissed accordingly, he wanted to see the woman who said she still owned what he had, as it happened, acquired for himself.
Acquired on the turn of a card.
Like everything else he owned.
And now he owned this place too.
Arielle slid open the barn doors. The hens, followed by the ducks, surged out hungrily. She fetched their feed from the feedstore, added it to a bowl and took it to their pecking ground on the rough area beside the barns beyond the gateway. Averting her eyes from the monstrous car pulled up on the drive, she felt emotion stab.
Tight-mouthed, she went back into the kitchen, snatching up the baguette and bag of croissants from the bench as she passed it. She was in no mood to lift a finger over breakfast for the man who was taking her home from her, but alienating him might not be wise. He might order her to leave immediately, without time to make her preparations. Without time to pack up her belongings, arrange for the poultry to go to her neighbours and send her piano to the local lycée.
So she put the coffee on, sliced up the baguette and set it out with the croissants, put out some butter and apricot jam, heated the milk, set crockery and cutlery on a large tray, and then carried it all through to the parlour and then out to the terrace.
She stopped dead. He was already by the ironwork table, this Lycos Dimistrios whoever he was. She neither knew nor cared. But it was impossible not to let her gaze go to him and not just because of the threat he presented. No, it was quite a different reason.
Dressed in his tuxedo, with his open-necked dress shirt, loosened black tie and the darkly shadowed jawline, he’d looked a mix of elegant and decidedly rough. It had done things to her she’d had no business experiencing, let alone acknowledging. Now, though, his image was quite different. His jaw was smooth. His hair, still damp from his shower, feathered across his brow and his torso was sleekly contained within a dark blue polo shirt that moulded a clearly muscled chest and shoulders. A leather-strapped watch snaked around one wrist, echoing the leather belt on his pale chinos snaking around his lean hips. He looked expensively, casually devastating and she felt an entirely inappropriate hollow start up in her as she reacted with an entirely irrelevant female response.
One thing, though, had not changed—the piercing gaze aimed at her from his unreadable dark eyes.
Though her tee shirt was baggy and her cut offs revealed nothing of her legs but her calves, she felt suddenly underdressed.
For a moment he said nothing and nor did she. Then, abruptly, Arielle deposited the tray on the table and proceeded to unload it. As she did, he pulled out an iron chair and sat himself down.
‘That coffee smells good, but is there no juice?’ he asked, reaching for the basket with the baguette and croissants and helping himself.
Without a word, Arielle went back inside. In the kitchen she lifted four oranges from their bowl on the dresser, juiced them manually, poured the results into a glass and carried it back out. Silently, she put the glass down in front of him.
He glanced at her, busy with buttering his bread, then reached for the jar of apricot jam.
‘Merci,’ he said absently as he examined the jam jar. ‘This looks home-made.’
Arielle sat down. ‘A neighbour makes it. She grows a lot of apricots. I swap it for marmalade, as I grow a lot of oranges. As you can tell from the fresh juice.’
He lifted the glass and drank from it. ‘That’s good,’ he said and nodded.
‘I’m so glad it meets your approval,’ Arielle said sweetly.
His glance pierced her. ‘Considering they are my orange trees that is just as well,’ he said.
She made no attempt to answer. After breakfast would come a conversation she could not avoid. She felt as if claws of emotions had gripped her stomach—fear and dread.
She reached for a croissant, poured herself a coffee with hot milk, then dipped the croissant in it.
‘I take mine black,’ Lycos Dimistrios said, demolishing another slice of baguette and jam.
‘Help yourself,’ she invited, with the same acidic sweetness.
One dark eyebrow lifted. ‘Just to the coffee?’ he rejoined tauntingly.
Arielle’s mouth tightened. She ignored him as he filled his cup and took a mouthful. Instead, she stared out over the gardens. Emotion rose like a tidal wave within her, but she fought it down. She found herself blinking, trying to fight the feelings.
‘Tell me,’ he said, his voice penetrating her grief. ‘Why do you believe the Mas Delfine is yours? That it was stolen from you by your stepbrother?’
She turned to look at him.
‘It was my stepmother who stole it. She persuaded my father to leave it to her. He died eighteen months ago.’
Her voice was steady, but it was hard for her to say it out loud, even now, and to acknowledge a betrayal of trust that was still hard to believe.
A faint frown appeared on Lycos Dimistrios’s brow.
‘You told me it belonged to your own mother. French law gives you a right to inherit. So, what happened?’
She took a breath, abandoning her croissant, and looked straight across at him—this marauder who’d turned up here to take from her what was hers by right. ‘The mas…’ she began, ‘…was my mother’s and her mother’s before her. It’s been in my family for over two hundred years. But when my mother met my father there were debts on the property. My mother hoped my father would pay off the debts once they were married, but instead he made her a different offer. He suggested she actually sell him the mas, before she married him, because the sale price would clear the debts. He pointed out that he would then leave the mas to the children they would have. So, my mother agreed. My father became the legal owner of the property and my mother was confident that, naturally, it would one day pass to me as their only child.’
She reached for her coffee, needing its support. She was doing her best to keep her voice steady, unemotional, but she could feel the old tide of anger and hurt rising up inside her.
‘But when my mother died three years ago, my father remarried. To my stepbrother’s mother, Naomi. When my father died, eighteen months ago, I discovered…’ her voice wobbled, and she had to fight it, ‘…that he had left everything to Naomi in his will. Everything.’
She steadied her voice with an effort.
‘My father was English. His estate was English. The will had been proved under English law. I fought and fought it. But he owned the mas. As he’d bought it outright from my mother, it was his to dispose of as he wished. And he wished for Naomi to have it.’
Lycos frowned.
‘Why?’
Anger burned in Arielle’s eyes, a familiar and bitter feeling.
‘Because she is a manipulative gold-digger who ran rings around my father and got everything he possessed! She dotes on her son and she’s given him the mas. Now he intends to sell it—’
She caught herself.
‘And now he has sold it.’ Her voice was hollow.
She saw his dark head shake.
‘Not quite.’ He said in a dry voice.
Arielle stared at him as he continued to speak.
‘He didn’t sell it to me. I won it from him last night in a game of cards. It was all he had left to stake.’
