‘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 Delfineis 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 themasdisputed? 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 themasand 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.
