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. Of course 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 guilt assailed 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, recognising how engrained her need to save money had become. Lysander was poised by the giant stone fireplace in the Great Hall. She came to an abrupt halt, apprehension gripping her, for she still had no idea what her ultimate decision would be.
‘Where did you sneak off to?’ Lysander demanded icily.
Ophelia bristled like a cat stroked the wrong way. ‘I didn’t sneak anywhere! I had to have a chance to think things over.’
Bronze eyes dark and hard as granite, Lysander focused on her with punitive force. She had yet to learn that he fought fire with greater fire. She couldn’t win against him. Nobody ever did and many had tried. His attention lingered on the luscious curve of her lips and the ripe swell of her pale breasts above the silk bodice of her wedding gown. He remembered the feel and the taste of her. Sexual heat pooled in his groin and sizzling anticipation burned the edge off his anger.
Ophelia felt horribly uncomfortable and guilty even though she knew that she had done nothing wrong. ‘You have every right to be livid. I’m very sorry about this situation.’
His cold contemptuous gaze cloaked, Lysander studied the brandy swirling in the fine glass between his fingers. Of course she wasn’t sorry. He had no doubt that she planned to hold the house like a gun to his head to achieve the highest possible sale price. He wondered how generous and sweet she would feel when she realised how powerless she really was. She had overlooked a powerful counterbalance: she was his wife. While she might not be behaving like a wife as yet, she would soon learn her boundaries.
The tense silence pounded in Ophelia’s eardrums and played havoc with her nerves. When she could stand it no longer she broke into speech. ‘After my mother was jilted, my grandmother became obsessed with the idea of getting her own back on your family. Perhaps I didn’t take her feelings seriously enough,’ she conceded heavily. ‘But then I didn’t see how she could do any real damage and I had no idea that she was capable of going to these lengths-’
‘It’s too late for lies.’ His rich dark accented drawl roughened the tenor of that warning. ‘You must’ve known there were two wills. You played a starring role in your grandmother’s revenge because she made it financially worth your while to do so.’
Ophelia was shattered that he could suspect her of having been a party to her grandmother’s deception from the outset. ‘That’s not true. For a start, she didn’t confide in me and I-’
‘You’re wasting your time trying to act innocent-’