‘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.