was troubling her stepfather. He’d changed, lost weight, started smoking again when he’d given up years before as a promise to Andrea. Jessica had tried to get him to talk but he’d always dismissed her concerns. Told her she was worrying unnecessarily. And she had to admit that, caught up with her romance with Chris and the excitement of his proposal, just lately she’d been preoccupied and hadn’t seen as much as she should have done.
‘How bad did it get?’
Did she have to ask? Didn’t she know the answer from the gravity of Simeon’s tone, the look in his eyes?
‘The worst. He lost everything—he would have had to move out, leave Manorfield for good, if someone hadn’t stepped in and bailed him out.’
‘Who?’
Jessica winced as she heard the way her voice croaked, the break in the middle of the short word. Again, did she have to ask? The cruel hand that had been squeezing her heart suddenly gave it a vicious, painful wrench as she felt rather than saw the sudden change in the attitude of the other man in the room and glimpsed out of the corner of her eye the way he straightened in his chair, uncrossed his legs.
‘Who bailed him out?’
‘I did.’
The answer came from Angelos as she had known it must. The terrible dark sense of inevitability that had reached out and enfolded her ever since Simeon had begun the story had deepened and tightened around her neck, it seemed, threatening to strangle her as it closed off all the air from her lungs. There could be no other possible answer really. No other reason why he was here and why Simeon had treated him with such courtesy, such respect.
It took an effort to turn her head and face him, to look straight at him when she had spent the last minutes desperately trying to do the exact opposite. She dreaded what she would see in his face, the triumph there must be in his eyes.
But in fact all she could see was a dark, opaque shadow, no features, no details visible at all. The late afternoon sun had actually come out so that Angelos was just a black figure silhouetted against the huge bay window with its leaded panes.
‘What did you do?’
‘I bought him out.’
Stark and flat, the statement still had the power to stab like a brutal sword, slashing through everything she had believed—everything she’d hoped was going to come true.
‘I bought him out—paid off all his debts, got the creditors off his back and gave him a breathing space.’
‘You bought him out? But you couldn’t—there’s no way… how…’
‘You shouldn’t live in the past, Princess,’ Angelos drawled softly, getting to his feet and crossing to the table to refill his glass. ‘People change. I am no longer the stable boy you thought you could have a sordid little fling with. In fact I never was.’
‘What…?’ Jessica began, but he ignored her interjection, cutting straight across her attempt to say something, ask just what he meant.
‘I am more than capable of buying out your stepfather and saving him from ruin three times over if I wanted to.’
‘You make it sound as if you did him a favour, but I can’t believe that. You’re not that sort of a philanthropist. You don’t do things out of generosity—selfless charity. There had to be something you got out of it too.’
‘Oh, there was. I can assure you that I got everything I wanted—everything and more.’
Now at last she could see his face in the light from the window and what she read there made her heart quail inside her chest. Her breathing snagged again as she met his cold eyed, harsh-faced expression and saw the way that his eyes burned with icy anger, with the darkest searing contempt she had ever seen.
‘And…and that was…?’ she managed, snatching in her breath on a raw painful gasp.
‘You’re standing in it, Princess.’
The long-fingered hand that held the glass gestured in an arc that took in the whole room, the long, polished wooden floor, the huge marble fireplace with another set of leather armchairs and chesterfields standing before it, the range of bookcases on every wall, crammed to the edges with reading matter. And then, with his eyes fixed on her face so she knew he saw every tiny flicker of reaction, every tremor that crossed her features, the wide-eyed stare of blank disbelief and shock, he gestured again so that this time the movement widened enough to encapsulate the whole of the house, the grounds beyond—and the miles and miles of Manorfield estate as well.
‘I’ve wanted Manorfield since the time I first saw it when I came here seven years ago. I was determined never to give up until it was mine. Marty’s gambling, his debts, played right into my hands. I bailed him out to the price of the estate.’
‘I don’t believe you—I won’t believe you. If you’d owned Manorfield then you’d have been here like a shot. Marty still lived here—he was still running the estate.’
‘Because I let him. Because it suited me. Marty was an older man—I wasn’t going to throw him out on the streets, even if he had been happy to treat me that way. And, besides, he knew what was needed here—he knew how to handle things. That also suited me. So I let him stay on.’
Angelos paused, took a slow sip of his drink and swallowed it down, his eyes still holding her shocked blue ones over the rim of the fine crystal glass.
‘If he’d lived longer, I’d have let him stay on a while. But not any more, Jessica. That concession was for Marty only—it ended when he died. Once that happened, Manorfield was mine and all mine. The will your stepfather made has no validity—none at all. There’s nothing for you to inherit, you see. He couldn’t leave you anything because he didn’t own anything—barely even the clothes that he stood up in. All the rest was mine.’
He paused, took another swallow of his drink and, as he did so, Jessica felt the first terrible tremors of shock, the trembling of her limbs that made her grateful for the fact that she was sitting down.
Tell Miss Marshall the position she’s in…
Tell Miss Marshall the position she’s in…
The words swung round and round in her head, gaining a terrible extra significance with each repetition. She knew now with a dreadful sense of inevitability just what was coming. And she knew that there was no way she could stop it.
She could only sit there and try to control her reactions as she waited for the axe to fall.
He took his time about it. And she knew that was because he was enjoying every moment of this.
‘The truth of the matter is, my dear Jessica, that you can’t inherit Manorfield or any part of it because I own it all—the house, the farms, every last single blade of grass. They are all mine. And you are left with precisely nothing. Not even a home. Because the Manor House is mine and I intend to live here from now on.’
‘No…’
Jessica could only sit and shake her head, struggling, wishing, hoping that by denying Angelos’s arrogant statement she could make it into a nightmare, make it unreal. This couldn’t be happening—it
