by Lynne Graham
CHAPTER FIVE
SEATED IN HER CHAIR, Gillian flipped open the jewellery box that had been delivered and gasped out loud. ‘Oh, my word, Letty... Come here and see!’
Letty rustled over in her bridal gown and was almost blinded by the flashing white fire of the diamond tiara, earrings and necklace laid out in the wide velvet-lined box. She flipped up the note enclosed in the box, in which Leo informed her that the set had belonged to his mother and he would be pleased if she wore the pieces. ‘A little extravagant for me,’ she began uncertainly.
‘Nonsense, this is going to be a big fancy wedding attended by a lot of well-heeled people,’ her mother told her roundly. ‘And when a man hands over the family heirlooms before the wedding, you say “Thank you very much indeed” and wear them!’
Letty reddened and lifted out the tiara to anchor it into the thick mass of her upswept hair. Unlike the fake one she had worn on her hen night, it fixed in with ease. Adorned in the diamonds, she studied herself in the mirror, her hands trembling a little as her fingers dropped from attaching the last earring. In truth she barely recognised herself. She had had her hair and make-up done earlier that day at a local salon but, because she didn’t own a full-length mirror, she could only see herself from the waist up.
Even so, she still cherished the image she had seen when she’d picked her dress from the designer studio Leo had instructed the wedding planner to escort her to. It was a simply glorious dress and she had fallen for it before it had even been removed from the hanger. It reminded her of an Edwardian tea dress except it was much more finely tailored, the styling accentuating her small waist and smoothing over the generous breasts and hips she preferred to conceal. Except when you got the goods out for Leo, a snide little voice reminded her at the optimum wrong moment because she had been training herself very thoroughly to totally bury and disremember that little incident in the limousine.
After all, Leo had been around the block a few times and he was not innocent. Since she had not seen him since then, he evidently wanted to overlook that wanton little episode and so did she, so forget, she instructed herself impatiently. In terms of their agreement, what was a meaningless little kerfuffle in a car to do with anything?
The previous week, Letty had signed a prenuptial document that ran to many pages of impenetrable legalese. But she had read and digested and ensured that she understood every word of it because she wasn’t the kind of woman who signed anything on trust. She had agreed that Leo’s infidelity would not be grounds for a divorce and that clause had had a sobering effect on her because it etched his future betrayal in stone for her. No sacred bond on offer from Leo, she recalled cynically. If their marriage did break down, however, she would retain some access to the children and a financial settlement that ran to lottery win figures. Nothing whatsoever was being left to chance in their marriage. In addition, she would have to have a child fathered by Leo for her baby to qualify for the Romanos name and inheritance.
Literally tormented by nerves, Letty climbed out of the limousine, winter sunshine glittering over the beautiful beaded lace on her gown and firing up the diamonds. She had never felt so self-conscious in her life and only the sight of her mother and Jenna, her closest friend from university, waiting with the children in the church porch settled her down again.
Popi and Sybella were resplendent in dresses that matched the bridesmaid, Jenna’s, the little girls twirling with pleasure in their floaty skirts and chattering while Cosmo, quite indifferent to his smart little outfit and any sense of occasion, was clambering all over a stone bench. Leo had been amazed that she wanted to include the children in the bridal party while Letty had seen their inclusion as a necessity. While Leo might be too empathetically dim to appreciate the fact that what they were really trying to achieve with their marriage was the creation of a new family to make his nieces and nephews feel secure, Letty was not.
The walk down the aisle in the big packed church full of staring strangers disturbed Letty because she was uncomfortable being the cynosure of attention. She kept her hand resting lightly on her mother’s shoulder and focused on Leo, utterly, effortlessly and flawlessly gorgeous, awaiting her at the altar. If only it had been their real wedding, she found herself thinking and she flushed, hastily squashing that foolish notion, assuming that all the frilly trappings of the day were confusing her. Certainly, Leo in a morning suit was a sight to behold with his sleek dark angel beauty, his perfect features bronzed and composed, those dark eyes steady and serious, not softened or bright with the love he might have felt for a genuine bride. Inwardly, Letty swore at the tenor of her thoughts.
‘You look fantastic,’ Leo told her as she reached the altar.
Of course, he had to say something like that, it was expected of him, and it was almost as if someone had yelled ‘Showtime!’ in Letty’s ear. She switched on her approximation of a bright bridal smile because Leo had made it clear that their agreement was private, and the rest of the world were to be left to believe that they were a normal couple. As if she would ever have captured a guy with Leo’s looks and wealth in the real world, Letty found herself thinking with helpless cynicism, reckoning that it was little wonder that people were curious and staring while they wondered how she had contrived such a miraculous feat.
The beautiful words of the ceremony were something she tried not to dwell on or feel even slightly bitter about because, all else aside, this was not how Letty had once vaguely imagined her wedding day would be: with a groom by her side who loved and cared for her as she cared for him, a true partnership of hearts and souls. She reminded herself sternly of the benefits that the wedding had already brought to her family and would bring to Leo’s orphaned nieces and nephews. It was foolish to crave some starry-eyed ideal, she told herself firmly, because that craving was a fantasy—a fantasy that Leo would definitely never deliver.
‘Diávolos...’ Leo whispered the curse in her ear as they progressed back down the aisle. ‘That’s the worst bit over.’
Letty laughed. Yes, that sentiment was very much Leo. He had as much sensitivity as a brick thrown at a window. Airy, feminine, finer feelings about weddings were foreign to him. Cosmo clutched at her skirts and she bent down and lifted him up, pressing a kiss to his troubled little face. ‘You don’t like the crowds, do you?’ she gathered, holding him close, enjoying the sweet baby smell he still retained.
‘I warned you that this might be too much for them,’ Leo declared.
‘They need the memory of being part of this,’ Letty told him gently and only then registered that she was having her first conversation with Leo since that shameful little episode in the limousine. Her face warmed but she buried the recollection deep again. She had been brazen and silly and she had embarrassed herself, but that was human and it would be pointless to punish herself about something she could not change.
Leo was hoisting Sybella to his shoulder when a tall, slender blonde in a blue dress approached them. ‘What on earth are your nannies doing, Leo?’ she demanded imperiously. ‘The kids should be out of sight and out of mind at such an occasion.’
Reluctant to offend a stranger, Letty swallowed back a sharp retort.
‘We want them with us today,’ Leo stated smoothly in direct contradiction of his words to Letty only seconds earlier. ‘Katrina, meet Letty... Letty, this is my father’s wife, Katrina.’
Grateful then that she hadn’t snapped out a tart response, Letty absorbed the reality that Leo’s stepmother, Katrina, was much younger than she had expected and English into the bargain. She smiled.
But the pretty blonde wasn’t even bothering to look her way. Indeed, all her attention, her curiously avid attention, was for Leo. ‘I just can’t believe the size of the sacrifice you’re making for those kids...actually getting married,’ she said in an incredulous tone. ‘Your father and I were astonished.’
Katrina’s very blue eyes were locked on Leo, her fa
scination with him so strong it was tangible. Dear heaven, his stepmother was in love with him, Letty registered with shocked distaste. Luckily the photographer wanted a few shots at that point and Katrina was forced to back off while the nannies reclaimed the children. In the crush around the porch steps she watched a white-haired older man with a hint of Leo’s cast of feature join Katrina, undoubtedly his father.
‘I didn’t realise your stepmother was much closer to your age than your father’s,’ Letty admitted simply on the drive to the hotel where the reception was being staged.
Leo compressed his lips. ‘She’s fourteen years older than me. She was twenty when my father married her. I was six. Ana was a baby. After her arrival in our lives I don’t have one good memory of my childhood. She doesn’t like kids, but she wanted one of her own to cement her position in the family. When she failed to conceive, she resented Ana and me even more.’
‘She doesn’t resent you now,’ Letty pointed out, not being a woman to ignore a controversial topic, in spite of the warning signs that Leo’s harsh diction and grim expression put out. ‘In fact I’d say she’s in love with you.’
Leo’s big shoulders tensed and his teeth gritted but he said nothing, deeming it a topic better left untouched.
‘No comment?’ Letty looked at him in disbelief. ‘I suggest that your stepmother is in love with you and you have nothing to say at all?’
‘I wouldn’t call it love,’ Leo countered between clenched teeth, feeling that he had no choice other than to be honest about the situation since Letty was too astute to be fooled and left ignorant. ‘Katrina began flirting with me when I was sixteen and by the time I was twenty-one she was trying to seduce me!’
‘Oh, my goodness!’ Letty exclaimed with shocked distaste, registering that she had had to pressure him to surrender that truth about his father’s wife because naturally such a sordid secret must have put a huge burden on Leo. ‘Did you tell your father?’
‘Of course not... It would have destroyed him!’ Leo framed harshly. ‘He adores her. Whatever faults I have, I am at least loyal and I care about my father even though he has been pretty hopeless as a parent. Katrina, however, disgusts me.’
‘I shouldn’t have pried,’ Letty muttered ruefully, watching the anger she had ignited fade from his taut, lean dark features while noting the pain he was striving to bury about his disturbing past. ‘But I sort of felt I had to know the family background so that I didn’t put my foot in it.’
‘Don’t worry. We won’t see much of either of them. My father and Katrina live in New York,’ Leo informed her. ‘He’s devoted to her. Whatever she wants, she gets. I remember a huge row many years ago about the diamond set you’re wearing. Katrina wanted them but they belonged to my mother and her jewellery was left to her children in her will. Katrina couldn’t get past the law.’
‘Is that why I’m wearing it today?’
‘Only one of the reasons. You’re my wife. You’re a Romanos now and you are entitled to wear my mother’s diamonds.’
‘You’ve never told me anything about your mother either,’ Letty remarked.
‘I have few memories of her. She died having Ana. In those days, we lived on her family’s island... My mother was an heiress from a far wealthier family than my father,’ Leo stated wryly. ‘Ios, the island, now belongs to me, along with everything else that was my mother’s. Her inheritance was protected by an unbreakable family trust. Katrina was not best pleased to marry my father and learn that he wasn’t as rich a man as she had naively assumed.’
‘Serves her right if that’s all she cared about,’ Letty said roundly.
‘I’ve always believed that she was his mistress before she was his wife. My mother may have died before her time, but I suspect that if she had lived my father would have divorced her for Katrina because he was and still is besotted with her.’
‘There must be a huge age gap between them.’
‘Twenty-odd years.’
Letty raised a brow but knew that it worked for some couples even though it clearly hadn’t worked for Leo’s father and stepmother. ‘I wonder if your mother knew your father had a mistress.’
Leo took the easy way out of that unanswerable question by shrugging a broad shoulder, but his expression was grim, belying that show of casual acceptance. ‘It’s how the marriages in my family have always worked. Marriage is for children, inheritance, property protection. It’s got very little to do with sex.’
Letty blinked. ‘Maybe for very rich people,’ she qualified uneasily and then she finally wondered in dawning dismay if possibly he was into some sort of kink that the average wife was unlikely to deliver. That prospect hadn’t occurred to her before but, the more she thought about it, the more she thought that to be a possible explanation for his instinctive mental separation of sex and marriage.
After all, there had to be some very good reason why he thought that way. Ancestors with mistresses being an accepted way of life for the men? The stepmother from hell? The stepmother who had been his father’s mistress? An unrepentantly unfaithful father, who must have hurt his mother? Wasn’t that a more probable truth? That Leo suffered from that clichéd view of women as either angels or whores? A belief system that had been born in the early death of his mother and the arrival of a shamelessly unscrupulous stepmother?
‘I know you don’t understand my attitude,’ Leo commented, startling her with that perception. ‘We’ll discuss it over dinner tonight.’
Letty was disconcerted by that suggestion, not having expected Leo to be so open on such topics. Ironically, in spite of her curiosity, she was in no hurry to hear his views, preferring to stuff the whole thorny question of his marital infidelity under a large mental rock and leave it buried there. What she didn’t know couldn’t unsettle her, after all. Ignorance would be preferable.
They arrived at the hotel. Letty drank champagne, greeted a never-ending line of guests, exchanged pleasantries and smiled. Her aunt, Elexis, her grandfather’s daughter, cornered Letty when she emerged from the cloakroom after a quick touch-up of her make-up. Elexis was as thin as a playing card and a very attractive woman with a chic blonde bob.
‘You look very like photos I’ve seen of your father, Julian,’ the blonde commented on the subject of her late half-brother. ‘Did you ever even get to meet him?’
Letty chose to ignore the rather offensive tone of that question.
‘Several times when I was a child. My mother had an on-off relationship with him in the early years, before she realised that he would never settle down and stay clean,’ Letty admitted quietly. ‘But he was her first love and it was hard for her to step away from him.’
‘You sound like a romantic. Leo won’t like that,’ Isidore’s daughter proclaimed.
Letty simply smiled. ‘I believe that you’re getting married in the spring,’ she said, keen to change the subject because she felt a little awkward about the fact that Leo had, years earlier, considered marrying Elexis.
‘Yes, I can’t wait. Anatole adores me,’ Elexis told her smugly. ‘You see, I wanted more from Leo than he was willing to give me. I wanted fidelity and I know for a fact that he’s not willing to pledge that.’
‘How do you know?’ Letty asked in as mild a tone as she could manage.
‘His current mistress is a guest at your wedding...and you didn’t know?’ Elexis queried in unkind surprise. ‘Mariana Santos—that’s her over there with the lady in the lime-green hat. Mariana, Spain’s most acclaimed supermodel.’
‘Fancy that...’ Letty said noncommittally, determined not to react although she had felt the blood draining out of her face as her aunt spoke. Even before the brittle blonde had dropped her bombshell about Leo’s mistress, Letty had suspected from her tart defensive tone that Elexis had wanted Leo much more than he had ever wanted her and that her ego had been stung by his walking away from her. The blonde’s final
words made that reality clear.
As Elexis drifted off, seemingly happy to have stuck the knife in Leo’s bride, Letty’s attention strayed towards Mariana Santos, a gorgeous brunette with a curvier figure than was usual for a model, her hourglass shape artfully revealed by a turquoise dress with a plunging neckline. Her tummy curdled and she glanced away, annoyed that Leo could be that insensitive. If Elexis knew the identity of his current lover, others had to know as well and it was disrespectful, at the very least, to include such a woman on the guest list. It was not that she felt jealous or possessive of Leo, Letty assured herself as she lifted her chin, a combative glint in her green eyes, it was simply a question of what was right and appropriate.
She looked away from the voluptuous model again, reminding herself that Leo’s sex life was none of her business. Even so, the awareness that he had invited his lover to their wedding stung like salt on an open wound. Get over yourself, she told herself sternly. The wedding ring on her finger had never been intended as a promise that Leo belonged to her in any way. Their marriage was a fake steadily turning into a farce, she ruminated. So far, she had met Leo’s infatuated stepmother, the jealous and spiteful Elexis and now she had Mariana Santos covertly sending the bridegroom a look of burning longing.
Leo had a toxic effect on women, she decided. A little taste of Leo and it seemed women tended to become strongly attached to him and then pine for him. Her nose wrinkled and she thanked her lucky stars that she was not so easily impressed. If that was true, why was she stressing about his obvious compelling attraction in the eyes of other women? It shouldn’t bother her, should it? She should be able to ignore those other women and not care. Letty swallowed hard, unable to fathom her own reactions and annoyed that the indifference she needed to project towards Leo with regard to his extra-marital interests was nowhere to be found. If she was annoyed, why was she annoyed?