CHAPTER NINE

      DONALD HAMILTON leafed frantically through the file Gwenna had presented him with. Finally he thrust it down on the table. His complexion had taken on an unhealthy grey hue, his shock palpable. ‘Did Angelo Riccardi put all that stuff together for you?’

      ‘Yes,’ Gwenna breathed. ‘Please don’t tell me any lies. I need to hear the truth.’

      ‘It looks a lot worse than it is,’ Donald declared defensively. ‘Let me explain how it happened—’

      ‘It wasn’t something that just happened. Don’t talk as though it was something that you had no control over,’ Gwenna broke in tautly. ‘You forged my mother’s will so that I was left penniless. That’s what it comes down to!’

      ‘You’re making too much of this,’ the older man argued vehemently. ‘It all started out quite innocently. When you were a baby, I tried to persuade your mother, Isabel, into a business partnership. I hoped that together we could build houses on the Massey estate.’

      ‘Build?’ Gwenna parroted. ‘But it’s against the law to develop a site that’s been listed as being of historical significance.’

      ‘It was over twenty years ago and the estate wasn’t listed then,’ he reminded her doggedly. ‘I wanted to make some money for us all. Isabel was as poor as a church mouse, but she went crazy when I suggested the property deal. Playing lady of the manor, even if the big house was in ruins, was very important to your mother.’

      ‘I know,’ Gwenna acknowledged reluctantly.

      ‘By the time you were born, my relationship with Isabel was only a friendship,’ Donald Hamilton contended.

      That was not how Gwenna remembered it. The affair had waxed and waned according to her father’s mood. Her mother’s bitterness had escalated when she had finally begun to appreciate that the man she had loved for so long had never cared for her the way she cared for him.

      ‘My first marriage was a disaster and I wanted a divorce. Developing the Massey estate seemed like my only escape route,’ the older man continued with determination. ‘I needed to make a lot of money. I had a wife to keep, I had you and your mother to support and, by then, I’d also met another woman.’

      Gwenna could not say that she was surprised by that admission. ‘Didn’t that happen to you rather too often? Off with the old, on with the new?’

      Her father grimaced. ‘I don’t expect you to understand but Fiorella was different. She was an Italian, very glamorous. I hoped to marry her but that affair blew up in my face—’

      Gwenna frowned. ‘I don’t see what all this has got to do with my mother’s will.’

      ‘I’m trying to explain why I did what I did.’

      Unimpressed by what struck her as a clumsy attempt to somehow excuse the inexcusable, Gwenna stared at the damning file, which lay on the coffee table. Beneath the table, Piglet sighed in his sleep. She was beginning to wonder why she had even bothered coming to see her father. She felt empty. Nothing he could say was going to make her feel better about the fact that he had stolen her birthright and held onto it for so many years at her expense. She had felt so guilty about his first marriage breaking up. He had allowed her to believe that her adoption had led to his divorce. Yet he had just admitted that he had wanted out of that marriage.

      Things she had closed her eyes to, comparisons that it hurt to make, were now crowding in on her. Her stepsisters had grown up in a lovely big house with their mother and her father, while Gwenna had been exiled to a down-market boarding-school that she’d hated. During the holidays, her presence in her father’s marital home had been barely tolerated by her stepfamily. Gwenna had scrimped and saved and worked part-time through all her college courses. From the age of eighteen, she had lived in a cramped and shabby little flat that was basically just the roof space above a glorified shed of a shop and she had run the nursery for a meagre wage. Yet a mere word of approbation from her father had been sufficient to keep her walking on air for days afterwards.

      ‘Gwenna…’ Donald Hamilton spoke with unusual urgency. ‘You have to listen to me.’

      ‘If you want me to listen, tell me something relevant. The story of your romance with some glamorous Italian woman isn’t,’ she muttered with distaste.

      ‘In this case, it is,’he insisted. ‘One day three men walked into my office in broad daylight and told me I’d been messing around with a very important man’s daughter, who already had a husband. I was warned that if I wanted to stay alive and prosper I had to get out of Fiorella’s life.’

      ‘Really?’ Gwenna only registered that her father had been indulging in an affair with a married woman and she thought it served him right if he had for once been called to account for his behaviour. ‘Maybe my mum would have had a happier life if she’d had a father capable of pulling the same stunt.’

      ‘For heaven’s sake, Gwenna. They put a gun to my head— I thought I was going to die!’ Donald Hamilton protested furiously. ‘They were violent criminals.’

      ‘I’m sure,’ Gwenna sighed, wondering where the tall tale would go next.

      ‘I was managing Fiorella’s money and she was a wealthy woman. Her father’s thugs demanded that I hand over all of that money. They escorted me to the bank and waited while I made arrangements to withdraw her cash. But she’d already spent a good deal of it and the men threatened to come back and visit me a third time if I didn’t cover the amount that had been spent. I had to pay up. They bled me dry. Needless to say I cut loose fast from Fiorella, but I was financially ruined.’

      ‘I’m sorry…I don’t believe any of this and I don’t know how you can expect me to.’

      ‘Your mother’s solicitor worked in the same practice as I did. He was elderly, overdue for retirement. It was easy to remove papers from his safe,’ the older man admitted. ‘I approached a loan company in London and pretended I owned the Massey estate. Using it as security, I borrowed a large sum of money. I had to have some way of meeting my obligations at home. Remember you and your mother were my dependants then.’

      Gwenna frowned, finally grasping the connection, even if she didn’t credit the preceding story. ‘How could you do that to my mother? Was she just one more person to be used and fleeced? Is there anyone you won’t use?’

      ‘When your mother died, there was still an outstanding loan against the estate and I had to cover up the evidence of that. What choice did I have? I may have forged that will but I did it with the best of intentions. I had such wonderful plans.’

      A ragged laugh fell from her lips. ‘Mum wanted me to have the estate, not you.’

      ‘I gave you a home. I adopted you,’ her father reminded her without hesitation. ‘I hoped to develop the estate and you would have benefited from that too, if it had come off.’

      ‘I don’t think so. I was just a means to an end and a cheap way to keep the nursery going.’ Gwenna lifted the file and got