Chapter Two #2
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.’