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He had known how much she loved the house, and the land that went with it, he’d said. And he knew that she would care for it, look after it in just the way he’d wanted. She would keep the farms running, be a fair landlady to the tenants, and of course she had always adored the horses.
‘I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather leave it to.’
She’d been overwhelmed, overjoyed, and, knowing she could never thank him, she had set herself instead to learn everything she could about the estate, working with Marty so that she would know how to handle everything when the time came. She had hoped to have so much longer to do so. Jessica had dreamed of maybe taking over the estate when Marty retired, and neither of them had ever thought that the end would come so soon.
The thought that she would be able to carry things on as her stepfather had wished had been the only consolation she had had when the sudden heart attack had taken him when she had least expected it.
‘Yes, that was quite legal,’ Simeon assured her. ‘Then.’
‘Then?’
The single word, hastily added, snagged on a raw nerve and tugged. It made her sit up straighter, a frown drawing her brows together, all her attention focused on the man at the desk.
‘Did something happen? Did Marty change his will?’
Simeon shook his head. ‘He left everything just as it was. That was the problem.’
‘The problem…Simeon, you’re going to have to explain this to me—it’s not making any sense. Marty left everything to me—so what’s the problem?’
‘The problem is that by the time he died Marty didn’t have anything to leave—to you or to anyone else.’
‘He didn’t?’
Jessica was having to struggle to try to understand just what Simeon actually meant. His words sounded as if they were coming to her down a long, echoing tunnel so that they rang distortedly in her head. And the problem was desperately aggravated by her painful awareness of the way that Angelos was sitting silently still, observing everything.
It was as if he had a sharp wire attached to her, one that kept up a constant, steady tug on every nerve, drawing her attention to him. It was a tug she fought to resist. She was having a hard enough time coping with just what Simeon was telling her. If she looked into Angelos’s face, read what he was thinking there, then she would go to pieces at once. She just knew it.
And so she forced herself to keep her face turned towards the lawyer, praying that Angelos could read nothing of her mood, or her fears, from the profile she presented to him.
‘Just what are you saying?’
‘That over the last year—eighteen months—Marty started to gamble.’
‘He always liked a flutter on the horses!’ Jessica exclaimed. ‘It was the only hobby he had. He…’
Her voice failed her as she met Simeon’s eyes, saw the expression on his face.
‘This wasn’t any sort of hobby, Jessica,’ the lawyer told her sombrely and a cold hand squeezed her heart, stilling her completely. ‘And it wasn’t anything like the way he’d been betting before. He started betting more money than he’d ever done—more than was wise. At first he won, so I suppose that made him bet more and more. But then apparently he started losing—and he’d bet more to try to win back his losses.’
Oh, Marty! Jessica had known that something 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 couldn’t…
But even when she looked at Simeon for help she knew that she was not going to get it. Marty’s solicitor was sitting at the desk, the papers in front of him, and the expression on his face, the way that he had done nothing to contradict Angelos’s coldhearted declaration left her without a single hope in her heart.
Everything that he had said was the truth. Every last appalling fact. And now she knew just why his arrival had filled her with such a sense of creeping dread. Why she had known as soon as he’d walked into the room that he was here to do something dreadful, something that would destroy every trace of her peace of mind.
The man she had called the Black Angel was back in her life—and it seemed that he had taken it over and turned it upside down. And it would never be the same again.
CHAPTER THREE
JESSICA sighed deeply, turned over for what felt like the millionth time that night and buried her face in the pillows.
‘Oh, that was horrible!’ she said aloud as she struggled to surface from the dark, clinging sleep that had held her. ‘Horrible!’
She had dreamed that the Black Angel was back in her life and that he…
She came fully awake in a rush, the total recollection of what had happened hitting her hard.
It hadn’t been a dream—a nightmare of the darkest, most terrible kind. It had all been appallingly, dreadfully real.
Twisting over and sitting up in the bed, she pushed her tangled hair back from her face and stared unseeingly at the opposite wall as she forced her reluctant mind to review all that had happened yesterday afternoon. She had thought that the day was going to be hard enough when she would have to say goodbye to Marty, but she had barely got through the ordeal of the funeral when the emotional grenade of Angelos’s announcement had exploded right in her face.
Angelos.
The thought of his name reminded her that somewhere in this house Angelos had spent his first night as owner of Manorfield. She had no idea where he’d slept; she had gone to bed, exhausted and miserable, leaving him to select a room that would be his. No doubt Peters or Trish Henderson, the housekeeper, would have made sure that that new owner had clean sheets and towels and all the comforts he needed. Jessica had been beyond that.
Quite frankly, Angelos could have slept on the floor for all she cared. It seemed that whenever he appeared in her life he brought chaos and destruction with him and yesterday’s announcement meant that everything she had dreamed of for her future had been snatched away from her. Then, when she had believed it just couldn’t get any worse, it had turned out that it could.
Jessica’s eyes clouded as she recalled how Simeon had gone into long, complicated details about exactly how much debt Marty had managed to run up in the last two crazy years of his life. The size of his debts had appalled her, leaving her mind reeling at the thought that anyone could gamble those sorts of amounts on any one race, let alone do it again and again and again.
The end result was that she was left with nothing. Angelos had not been exaggerating when he had declared that he now owned everything, right down to every last blade of grass. Everything that Marty had talked about leaving to her had been swallowed up by his gambling. Jessica told herself that she ought to be grateful that she at least had her clothes, because there was little else she did own.
And now Angelos had moved in. He had had his case in the car and, as soon as Simeon had left, he had brought it into the house, obviously meaning to set himself up as lord of the manor without a moment’s hesitation.
That was when Jessica had had enough. It had been the sight of that case that made her give into the need to escape and hide away in the sanctuary of her bedroom. There, at least, she was safe from the oppressive, intrusive presence of the Black Angel.
But for how long?
Throwing back the duvet, Jessica forced herself out of bed and went to the window. Usually the long smooth lawn that stretched away from the house towards the lake, with the shrubberies on either side, made her heart lift just to see it. Even in the dark days after Marty’s death she had still loved this view because it was something she felt she still shared with her stepfather and could go on remembering him by. But this morning everything was spoiled. The peaceful, beautiful scene no longer brought the accustomed sense of ease but instead added another twist of the knife in her already aching heart.
She had lost so much in the past years. First her mother, shockingly, then Marty, and now she had lost Manorfield—and with it her home. After today she would have nowhere to live. Angelos would surely want her out as soon as possible. He had planned on getting his hands on Manorfield. Now that he had, he wouldn’t want her around.
After all, hadn’t he made it plain that a large part of the cruel delight he’d taken in letting her know that he had acquired the estate was accentuated by the fact that he had taken it from her? And, by doing so, he had had his final revenge for the way she had treated him seven years before.
No, she was not going to dwell on the past. She would think of better things—more positive things. And there were those in her life. For one thing, Chris was coming back today. She was meeting him for lunch.
Just the thought lifted her heart, straightened her shoulders, made her feel she could face the day.
Face Angelos.
With Chris at her side she’d be able to face the future.
And part of that future was to get herself downstairs smartish. The last thing she wanted was for Angelos to think that she was hiding away in her room, sulking, or, even worse, afraid to come out and face him.
She’d face him all right. He might have walked back into her life and shattered it, taking so much that she had thought was in her future and grabbing it for himself. But it was only money, only property. She had other things to look forward to in her future. She was getting married in a month. And then she would be out of here—sooner if possible. Out of here and leaving the Black Angel far behind her.
So she was going to get dressed and go down and face him. Head on.
And she was going to look her best. She wasn’t going to let him see how much he had devastated her.
With her shoulders squared, jaw tight with resolve, Jessica headed for the shower.
He was in the study—in Marty’s study. She spotted him through the open door as she marched down the long curving staircase that led into the hall. He was sitting at the big oak desk, a pile of papers in front of him and his head bent over one file. A terrible, sour taste rose into Jessica’s mouth at the sight of this—this usurper—in the place where she had so often seen her stepfather. In Marty’s chair, at Marty’s desk.
The thought that perhaps in the last few months of the older man’s life he might have been sitting at that desk wrestling with the problems that his debts had forced on him, wondering how to cope—driven to accept Angelos’s help—made the bitter taste even worse so that it was almost like acid burning on her tongue.
And so, in spite of the fact that Angelos lifted his dark head as she walked past the door and tossed some sort of greeting her way, she carefully ignored him. Keeping her eyes fixed straight ahead, hands firmly in the pockets of the beige trousers she wore with a soft green shirt, she headed for the kitchen and a much wanted cup of coffee.
She would need a strong dose of caffeine in her system before she could face him. Without it, she knew she would hiss and spit if she had to speak to him face to face. So she headed straight for the old-fashioned whistling kettle, filling it and slamming it back down on to the stove as a way of expressing her feelings without speaking.
‘Coffee,’ she said aloud to herself, reaching for a mug from a hook.
‘I’ll have one of those.’
The voice from behind her made her jump, though deep down she knew she’d been expecting it. But, although every nerve in her body tightened and twisted at the knowledge of his presence, she clamped down hard on the jittery feeling that clutched at her stomach and forced her voice to stay calm as she responded.
‘You really shouldn’t sneak up on me like that when I’m in the kitchen.’ Damn it, her voice was calm—but it must be obvious that that was only achieved by the way she had clenched her teeth so tight that already her jaw was beginning to ache. ‘You’re lucky I didn’t drop this mug.’
‘It wouldn’t have mattered.’
She couldn’t see but she could well imagine the careless shrug with which he dismissed the piece of china she held in her hand. Her fingers tightened round the handle as she fought with the need to swing round and fling it at his arrogant head.
Instead she made herself turn slowly, reluctantly. Her skin was already shivering with awareness of his presence and the knowledge of the fact that he was so very close behind her only made that burning sensitivity so much worse. He had the appalling knack of seeming to fill a room, even one as big as the old-fashioned Manor House kitchen. It was as if his presence expanded to fill the space, dominating it, sucking all the oxygen from the atmosphere and leaving her gasping for breath. Overnight she had told herself that her imagination had to have been working overtime, that there was no way he could be so big, so powerful, so dark. His eyes couldn’t be so deep and brilliant, his hair such a glossy black.
But, standing before her now, with the elegant business suit discarded in favour of a coffee-coloured long-sleeved T-shirt and darker brown trousers, he was all that and more. She had once thought him devastating, totally destructive to her peace of mind. She had known so little then! The man he had become was a hundred—a thousand—times more dangerous.
‘It’s only a mug.’
‘And you can afford so many other mugs, of course.’
The look Angelos turned on her was one of total exasperation.
‘I don’t happen to think that a mug is worth making a fuss about.’
‘Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you? Or were you perhaps thinking that you’d expect me to pay for a replacement, seeing as you now own Manorfield and everything that’s in it, lock stock and barrel and I’m just here under sufferance?’
This time the look that flashed from those black eyes was brilliant with cold anger and she actually heard his teeth snap together as he too bit back the first response that had sprung to his mouth.
‘Don’t be damn stupid, Jessica. And stop trying to provoke an argument. It’s too early in the morning.’
‘So do I need to make an appointment to speak to you now? Or to argue with you at least? Well, perhaps you’ll tell me when it is the right time—because we have a lot to argue about.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. It doesn’t have to be this way.’
‘It doesn’t?’ Jessica scorned. ‘From where I’m standing, this is exactly how it has to be. After all, you moved in and stole everything…’
‘Not stole!’ Angelos stated with vicious emphasis. ‘I stole nothing. I came by everything legally.’
‘Oh, yes, perfectly legally. By throwing outrageous sums of money at it—and at a man who couldn’t say no.’
‘Your stepfather was deeply grateful for my assistance.’
‘Oh, I’ll just bet he was! Considering you had him cornered, with no possible other way out. You saw a way to get what you’d always wanted, at a price you could afford to pay, and so you moved in for the kill. You didn’t give a damn about the people you’d trampled on—the people Marty really wanted his estate to go to.’
‘You?’
He inserted it, swift and sharp as a stiletto in the ribs, and with it came just the same sort of burning pain, so that she had to fight against the wince of distress that would betray her. Somehow she managed to transform the involuntary hand movement that came up between them in a nervous, defensive gesture, into one that dismissed his slashing question, brushing it aside in angry impatience.
‘The people who mattered to Marty.’
What had she said now that had made his face change so much, turning the glittering jet ice of his eyes into a flame of pure savagery, with a burning hatred that made her take an involuntary step back, away from the danger zone?
‘You just used the wealth you had to snatch it away at the cheapest possible—’
‘You don’t know what it cost me,’ he snarled from between gritted teeth.
‘I have some idea of what the estate is worth.’
This time it was Angelos’s hand that came up between them in an expressive, angry gesture, long fingers spread wide, broad palm acting as a barrier between them.
‘I wasn’t talking about money.’
‘What else is there to talk about where this is concerned? What I’m wondering is where you got the money from.’
‘Where the hell a penniless stable boy got the cash to buy out your stepfather, hmm?’ Angelos questioned cynically, his beautiful mouth twisting in bitter scorn. ‘You clearly don’t think it could possibly have been acquired legally.’
‘I never said that!’
She tried to meet his accusing eyes squarely but her gaze skittered away from his at the memory of just how the ‘penniless stable boy’ she had believed him to be had ended up out on the streets because of her.
‘You didn’t have to say anything.’ Angelos gave the words a dangerous softness, one that made all the tiny hairs on her skin lift in a shivering response to some unseen but instinctively sensed peril. ‘It was there on your face, in your eyes. But you needn’t worry, my dear Jessica. Every euro I earned—every penny I paid for Manorfield—was worked for and earned legally. I wasn’t always a penniless stable hand—maybe the truth is that I was never a penniless one.’