Книга - The Wedding Night Debt

The Wedding Night Debt
Amanda Cinelli

CATHY WILLIAMS


She owes him a wedding night…and he will collect!Billionaire Dio Ruiz’s convenient union was meant to secure two things: vengeance, and the enticing Lucy Bishop. But from their wedding night onwards Dio found his marriage bed inconveniently empty. Now, two years later, his virgin bride wants a divorce. But freedom has a price…Hurt and humiliated to learn their vows were just a business transaction to Dio, Lucy played the perfect wife in public while their cold war waged in private. She wants to walk away—not bow to his command! Can she pay Dio’s price and survive ten days as true husband and wife?Praise for Cathy WilliamsBound by the Billionaire’s Baby 4.5* RT Book ReviewWilliams offers lively, smart dialogue and nice descriptions of quirky characters. The attraction between Susie and Sergio is apparent from the beginning, and the zany start to the story is quite refreshing.The Real Romero 4* RT Book ReviewWilliams takes readers on a luxurious ride from London to the snow-capped French Alps and, finally, to sunny Spain. Her quaint Brit-isms add legitimacy, but it’s her couple’s entertaining interactions that keep the story interesting.To Sin with the Tycoon 4* RT Book ReviewWilliams’ office romance is a Cinderella-esque tale between her very un-Prince Charming-type hero and her cautiously reserved heroine who’ve both overcome horrendous childhoods. Her authentic English settings inspire, and the relationship-building is truly well done.









‘You want your divorce? You can have it. But only after you’ve given me what I expected to get when I married you.’


‘What are you talking about?’

Dio raised his eyebrows and smiled slowly. ‘Don’t tell me that someone with a Maths degree can’t figure out what two and two makes? I want my honeymoon, Lucy.’

‘I… I don’t know what you mean…’ Lucy stammered, unable to tear her eyes away from the harsh lines of his beautiful face.

‘Of course you do! I didn’t think I was signing up for a sexless marriage when I slipped that wedding band on your finger. You want out now? Well, you can have out—just as soon as we put an end to the unfinished business between us.’

‘That’s blackmail!’ She sprang to her feet. She had looked forward to that wretched honeymoon night so much, and now here he was, offering it to her… but at a price.

‘That’s the offer on the table. We sleep together, be man and wife in more than just name only, and you get to leave with an allowance generous enough to ensure that you spend the rest of your life in comfort.’

‘Why would you want that? You’re not even attracted to me!’

‘Come a little closer and I can easily prove you wrong on that point.’

Heart thudding, Lucy noted the dark intent in his eyes, and the desire she had shoved away, out of sight, began to uncurl inside her.


CATHY WILLIAMS can remember reading Mills & Boon® books as a teenager, and now that she is writing them she remains an avid fan. For her, there is nothing like creating romantic stories and engaging plots, and each and every book is a new adventure. Cathy lives in London, and her three daughters—Charlotte, Olivia and Emma—have always been, and continue to be, the greatest inspirations in her life.


The Wedding

Night Debt

Cathy Williams






www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


To my three wonderful and inspiring daughters


Contents

Cover (#u36c176d0-686d-555c-957e-fb54a0d7fa4d)

Excerpt (#u64ad22ac-1a6e-5f6f-ba4c-b9ca3b0a42b5)

About the Author (#uf3741f26-7182-5ad8-91c7-f5e7dd0d26f7)

Title Page (#u3f51d799-5945-52d2-a35d-9aa72c03d29d)

Dedication (#u1b5c0783-7990-50d4-967e-1ff57f731d45)

CHAPTER ONE (#u9ccf9103-d471-5e9e-8cc2-e1f07a3d6946)

CHAPTER TWO (#u2c4fa7ae-a3dd-5efa-98a5-524ffca78af5)

CHAPTER THREE (#u838814d2-32c7-5724-b1db-f64ce7f0bd1f)

CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)

Extract (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)


CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_6873ac60-02ab-5a70-aaef-f60dbc6d3025)

DIVORCE. IT WAS something that happened to other people: people who didn’t take care of their marriages; who didn’t understand that they were to be nurtured, looked after, handled as delicately as you would handle a piece of priceless porcelain.

At any rate, that had always been Lucy’s way of thinking, and she wondered how it was that she was standing here now, in one of the grandest houses in London, waiting for her husband to return home so that she could broach the subject of divorcing him.

She looked at her diamond-encrusted watch and her stomach knotted in anxiety. Dio was due back in half an hour. She couldn’t remember where he had spent the past week and a half. New York? Paris? They had places in both. Or maybe he had been in their Mustique villa. Maybe he had gone there with another woman. Who knew? She certainly didn’t.

Self-pity threatened to engulf her and she stemmed the tide with ease of practice born of habit.

She’d been married for nearly a year and a half, plenty of time to get accustomed to the way her youthful dreams had crumbled to ashes.

When she glanced up, she could see herself reflected in the huge, hand-made contemporary mirror which dominated the ultra-modern drawing room. Five foot ten, slender as a reed, long blonde hair that dropped to her shoulders, vanilla-blonde and poker-straight. When she was sixteen, she had been spotted by an agency and her father had tried to shove her into a career in modelling, because why waste a pretty face? After all, women weren’t cut out for anything more challenging, not really... But she had resisted—not that it had done her any good at all, in the end, because what good had been her degree when she had ended up...here? In this vast house, wandering in and out of rooms like a wraith, playing the perfect hostess? As if perfect hostessing was any kind of career for someone who had a degree in maths.

She barely recognised the woman she had turned out to be. On a warm evening in the middle of July, she was languishing in silk culottes with a matching silk vest top, just a few discreet bits of fairly priceless jewellery and high heels. She had turned into a Stepford Wife, except without the adoring husband rolling in at five-thirty every evening and asking what was for dinner. That might have been a distinct improvement on what she actually had, which was...nothing.

Or, had been nothing. She allowed herself a little smile because things weren’t quite as sterile as they had been. Her situation had changed in the past two months and she hugged that secret pleasure to herself.

It made up for all the time she had spent dressed up like an expensive doll, administering their various properties, smiling politely when she needed to smile politely and hosting dinner parties for the great and the good. Or, at any rate, the very, very rich.

And now...a divorce would set her free.

Provided Dio didn’t kick up a fuss. Although she told herself that there was no reason for him to, she could still feel a prickle of nervous perspiration break out over her body.

When it came to the concrete jungle, Dio Ruiz was the pack leader. He was an alpha male who played by his own rules. He was the sexiest man on earth and also the most intimidating.

But he wasn’t going to intimidate her. She had spent the past few days telling herself that, ever since she had decided which turning she would take at the crossroads—the turning that would put as much distance between herself and her husband as possible.

The only slight fly in the ointment was the fact that this would be the last thing he would be expecting and Dio didn’t do well when it came to flies in the ointment, not to mention the unexpected.

She heard the slam of the front door and her stomach lurched sickeningly but she only turned around when she sensed him at the door, his powerful, restless personality permeating the room even before she looked at him.

Even now, after everything, hating him as much as she hated him, his physical beauty still managed to take her breath away.

At twenty-two, when she had first laid eyes on him, he had been the most sinfully stunning guy she had ever seen and nothing had changed on that front. He was still the most sinfully stunning guy she had ever seen. Raven-black hair framed arrogantly perfect features. His pale, silver-grey eyes, so unusual against his bronzed skin, were dramatically fringed with thick, dark lashes. His mouth was firm and sensuous. Every little bit of him relayed the message that he was not a guy to be messed with.

‘What are you doing here? I thought you were in Paris...’ Lounging in the doorway, Dio began tugging at his tie, strolling into the room at the same time.

Surprise, surprise. It wasn’t often he found himself anywhere with his wife that hadn’t been meticulously planned in advance. Their meetings were formal, staged, never, ever spontaneous. When they were both in London, their lives were hectic, a whirlwind of social events. They each had their separate quarters, readied themselves in their own private cocoons and met in the vast hall, both dressed to the nines and ready to present the united image that couldn’t have been further from the truth.

Occasionally, she might accompany him to Paris, New York or Hong Kong, always the perfect accessory.

Smart, well-bred...and most of all stunningly beautiful.

Tie off, he tossed it onto the white leather sofa and circled her, frowning, before coming to rest directly in front of her, where he began undoing the top two buttons of his shirt.

‘So...’ he drawled. ‘To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?’

Her nostrils flared as she breathed him in. He had a scent that was peculiarly unique to him. Clean, woody and intensely masculine.

‘Am I interrupting your plans for the evening?’ She averted her eyes from the sliver of tanned chest just visible where he had unbuttoned the shirt.

‘My plans involved reading through some fairly dull legal due diligence on a company I’m taking over. What plans did you think you might be interrupting?’

‘No idea.’ She shrugged her narrow shoulders. ‘I don’t know what you get up to in my absence, do I?’

‘Would you like me to fill you in?’

‘I don’t care one way or another, although it might have been a little embarrassing if you’d come home with a woman on your arm.’ She gave a brittle laugh, hating herself for how she sounded—hard, cold, dismissive.

It hadn’t started out like this. In fact, she had actually been stupid enough, at the very beginning, to think that he was actually interested in her, actually attracted to her.

They had gone out on a few dates. She had made him laugh, telling him about some of her university friends and their escapades. She had listened, enthralled, about the places he had seen. The fact that her father had actually approved of the relationship had been a green light because her father had made a career out of disapproving of every single boy she had ever brought home, all three of them. In fact, he had made a career out of being critical and disapproving of everything she had ever done, and every choice she had ever made, so the fact that he had been accepting, encouraging, even, of Dio had been a refreshing change.

If she hadn’t been so wet behind the ears, she might have asked herself why that was, but instead, heady with the joy of falling in love, she had chosen to overlook his sudden benevolence.

When Dio had proposed after a whirlwind romance she had been over the moon. The intense but chaste courtship had thrilled her, as had the fact that he hadn’t wanted to wait. No long engagement for him! He had been eager to slip the ring on her finger and his eagerness had made her feel loved, wanted, desired.

Sometimes, she wondered whether she would have stupidly continued feeling loved, wanted and desired if she hadn’t overheard that conversation on their wedding night. She’d been floating on a cloud, barely able to contain her excitement at the thought of their honeymoon in the Maldives and their wedding night, the big night when she would lose her virginity, because until then he had been the perfect gentleman.

He’d been nowhere to be seen and she had eventually floated away from the marquee in her father’s garden, from the music and the people dancing and getting drunk, and had drifted off towards the kitchen and past her father’s office, where she had immediately recognised the deep timbre of his voice.

A marriage of convenience...a company takeover... He had got her father’s company, which had been losing money by the bucket load, and she had been an accessory thrown in for good measure. Or maybe, when she had bitterly thought about it later, her father had insisted on the marriage because if she was married to Dio he would remain duty-bound to the family company. No doing the dirty once the signatures had been written on the dotted line! No dumping her father in the proverbial because he was no longer an asset!

She would be her father’s safety net and Dio—as her father had spitefully told her when she had later confronted him with what she had overheard—would get the sort of class that his vast sums of money would never have been able to afford him.

Lucy, in the space of a couple of hours, had grown up. She was a married woman and her marriage was over before she had even embarked on it.

Except, she couldn’t get out of it, her father had told her, not that easily. Did she want to see the family company go under? There’d been some uncomfortable stuff with some of the company profits...a little borrowed here and there...he might go to prison if it all came out. Did she want that, to see her father behind bars? It would hit the news. Did she want that? Fingers pointed? People smirking?

She had acquiesced to her sham of a marriage although, frankly, her father might have escaped a prison sentence but only by handing the prison sentence over to her.

The one thing she had resolved, however, was to be married in name only. No sex. No cosy time together. If Dio thought that he had bought her body and soul, she had been determined to prove him wrong. When she thought of the way she had fallen for his charm, had thought he’d actually been interested in inexperienced little her, she had burned with shame.

So she had quietly put her dreams into a box, shut the lid and thrown away the key...and here she was now.

‘Is there a problem with the Paris apartment?’ Dio asked politely. ‘Can I get you a drink? Something to celebrate the one-off occasion of us being in the same room alone without prior arrangement? I can’t think of the last time that happened, can you?’ But, at a push, he would have said before they’d got married, when she had been studiously courting him, even though at the time he had thought it to be the other way around.

He had set his sights on Robert Bishop and his company a long, long time ago. He had covertly kept tabs on it, had seen the way it had slid further and further into a morass of debt and, like any predator worth his salt, he had bided his time.

Revenge was always a dish best eaten cold.

He just hadn’t banked on the daughter. One glimpse of Lucy and her innocent, ethereal beauty and he had altered his plans on the spot. He had wanted her. She had touched something in him with her innocence and, cynic that he was, he had fallen hook, line and sinker.

He hadn’t banked on that complication, had thought that she would hop into bed with him, allowing him to get her out of his system before he concluded business with her father. But, after a few weeks of playing a courting game that wasn’t his thing at all, he had concluded that he wanted more than just a slice of her.

Only thing was...nearly a year and a half later and their marriage was as dry as dust. He still hadn’t touched that glorious body, leaving him with the certainty that, whilst he had thought he had the upper hand, she and her conniving father had actually played him for a fool. Instead of swinging the wrecking ball to the company and setting the police on Robert Bishop—who had been embezzling for years—he had ended up saving the company because he had wanted Lucy. He had wanted her at his side and in his bed and, if saving the company came as part of the deal, then so be it. Course, he had saved it and made money from it, ensuring that Robert Bishop was firmly locked out with just enough pocket money to teach him the joys of frugality, but still...

He had been unwittingly charmed by her open, shy, disingenuous personality. When she had looked at him with those big, grave brown eyes, her face propped in the palm of her hand, her expression enraptured, he had felt as though he had found the secret of eternal life and it had gone to his head like a drug.

She’d led him on. God knew if her slime of a father had kick-started the idea but that didn’t matter.

What mattered was that they had got what they wanted while he had certainly missed out on what he had banked on getting.

She was shaking her head at the offer of a drink and he ignored her, fetching himself a glass of whisky and a glass of wine for her.

‘Relax,’ he said, pressing the glass on her and then retreating to the bay window where he sipped his drink and watched her in absolute silence. She had made it crystal clear on their wedding night that theirs was not a real marriage. No sex, no chit-chat, no getting to know one another. So he’d taken over her father’s company but that didn’t mean that she came as part of the package deal and, if he thought he’d been short-changed, then that was too bad.

He hadn’t asked how she knew, what her father had said or what she had been told. He’d been duped and that was the end of the story.

The thought of having any kind of soul-searching conversation about the quality of their marriage had never crossed Dio’s mind. He had made no effort to talk things through. And no one could ever accuse her of not being the ‘perfect wife’. She certainly looked the part. Willowy, blonde, with a devastating prettiness that conveyed an air of peculiar innocence underneath the polished exterior. It was a quality that no model or socialite could replicate. She looked like someone waiting for life to happen and people fell for it. She was the greatest business asset a man could have. The woman, Dio had often thought, had missed her career as an Oscar-winning actress.

‘So, if you’re not in Paris, it’s because something’s wrong with the apartment. You should know by now that I don’t get involved with the nitty-gritty details of my houses. That’s your job.’

Lucy stiffened. Her job. That said it all. Just what every young girl dreamed of...a marriage completely lacking in romance which could be described as a job.

‘There’s nothing wrong with the Paris apartment. I just decided that...’ she took a deep breath and gulped down some wine ‘... I decided that we needed to have a talk...’

‘Really? What about? Don’t tell me that you’re angling for a pay rise, Lucy? Your bank account is more than healthy. Or have you seen something you’d really like? House in Italy? Apartment in Florence? Buy it.’ He shrugged and finished the remainder of his whisky. ‘As long as it’s somewhere that can be used for business purposes, then I don’t have a problem.’

‘Why would I want to buy a house, Dio?’

‘What, then? Jewellery? A painting? What?’

His air of bored indifference set her teeth on edge. This was worse than normal. Usually, they could manage to be polite for the five minutes they were forced to spend in one another’s company—cooped up in a taxi, maybe, or else waiting for his driver to take them to some opening or other; or else back in one of their grand houses, removing coats and jackets before disappearing to opposite ends of the house.

‘I don’t want to buy anything.’ Restively she began walking, stopping to look absently at some of the expensive artefacts in the room. As with all their houses, this one was the last word in what money could buy. The paintings were breath-taking, the furniture was all hand-made, the rugs were priceless silk.

No expense was ever spared and it was her job to ensure that all these high-end properties with their priceless furnishings ran like clockwork. Some were used by him, if he happened to be in the country at the time; occasionally they both found themselves in one at the same time. Often he arranged for clients to have use of them and then she had to oversee all the arrangements to make sure that his client left satisfied, having experienced the last word in luxury.

‘In that case,’ Dio drawled, ‘why don’t you get to the point and say what you have to say? I’m having a night in because I need to get through some work.’

‘And of course, if you’d known that I would be waiting here like a spare part,’ Lucy retorted, ‘you would have made sure you didn’t bother returning.’

Dio shrugged, allowing her to draw her own conclusions.

‘I feel...’ Lucy breathed in deeply ‘...that circumstances between us have changed since...since dad died six months ago...’

He stilled and dropped his empty glass on the side table next to him, although his silver-grey eyes remained on her face. As far as he was concerned, the world was a more pleasant place without Robert Bishop in it. Certainly a more honest one. Whether his wife would agree with him, he didn’t know. She had been composed at the funeral, her eyes hidden behind over-sized sunglasses and, since then, life had carried on as normal.

‘Explain.’

‘I don’t want to be shackled to you any more, and there’s no longer any need.’ She did her best to get her thoughts in order but the cool intensity of his gaze was off-putting.

‘You also happen to be shackled to a lifestyle that most women would find enviable.’

‘Then you should let me go and you should find one of those women,’ she retorted, her cheeks burning. ‘You’d be happier. I’m sure you would because you must know that I’m...not happy, Dio. Or maybe,’ she added in a lowered voice, ‘you do know and you just don’t care.’ She sat and crossed her legs but she couldn’t meet his eyes. He still did things to her, could still make her feel squirmy inside, even though she had done her best over time to kill that weak feeling. It was inappropriate to be attracted to a man who had used you, who had married you because you happened to be a social asset. That didn’t make sense. Yes, when he had pretended to be interested in her, she could understand how she had been hot for him, so hot that she had spent her nights dreaming about him and her days fantasising about him. But not when she had found out the truth, and certainly not now, after all this time of cold war.

‘Are you telling me that you want out?’

‘Can you blame me?’ She answered a question with a question and finally met those cool, pale grey eyes. ‘We don’t have a marriage, Dio. Not a real one. I don’t even understand why you married me in the first place, why you took an interest in me at all.’ Except, of course, she did. Robert Bishop had been happy enough to tell her. Dio had wanted more than just his company; he had wanted social elevation, although why he should care she had no idea.

It was something she had never asked her husband. It was humiliating to think that someone had married you because you could open a few doors for them. She had been a bonus to the main deal because she had looked right and had had the right accent.

‘You could have bought my father out without marrying me,’ she continued, braving the iciness of his eyes. ‘I know my father tried to shove me down your throat because he thought that, if you married me, he wouldn’t end up in prison like a common criminal. But you could have had your pick of women who would have flung themselves in your path to be your wife.’

‘How would you have felt if your dear daddy had ended up in jail?’

‘No one wants to see any relative of theirs in prison.’

It was an odd choice of words but Dio let it go. He was shocked at the way this evening was turning out but he was hiding it well.

Had she really thought that she could play games with him, reel him in, get the ring on her, only to turn her back on his bed on their wedding night? And then, as soon as her father died, turn her back on him a second time?

‘No, a relative in prison tends to blight family gatherings, doesn’t it?’ He rose to pour himself another drink because, frankly, he needed one. ‘Tell me something, Lucy, what did you think of your father’s...how shall I put it?...creativeuse of the company’s pension pot?’

‘He never told me in detail...what he had done,’ she mumbled uncomfortably. Indeed, she had known nothing of her father’s financial straits until that overheard conversation, after which he had been more than willing to fill her in.

Lucy thought that Dio might have been better off asking her what she had thought of her father. Robert Bishop had been a man who had had no trouble belittling her, a man who had wanted a son but had been stuck with a daughter, a chauvinist who had never accepted that women could be equal in all walks of life. Her poor, pretty, fragile mother had had a miserable existence before she had died at the tender age of thirty-eight. Robert Bishop had been a swaggering bully who had done his own thing and expected his wife to stay put and suck it up. He had womanised openly, had drunk far too much and, behind closed doors, had had fun jeering at Agatha Bishop, who had put up with it with quiet stoicism because divorce was not something her family did. Cancer had taken her before she’d been able to put that right.

Lucy had spent her life avoiding her father—which had been easy enough, because she had been farmed out to a boarding school at the age of thirteen—but she had never stopped hating him for what he put her mother through.

Which wasn’t to say that she would have wanted to see him in prison and, more than that, she knew her mother would have been mortified. There was no way she would have sullied her mother’s reputation, not if she could have helped it. She would rather have died than to have seen her mother’s friends sniggering behind their backs that Agatha Bishop had ended up with a crook.

Looking at her, Dio wondered what was going through that beautiful head of hers. There was a remoteness there that had always managed to feed into his curiosity. No woman had ever been able to do that and it got on his nerves.

‘Well, I’ll fill in the gaps, shall I?’ he said roughly. ‘Your father spent years stealing from the pension fund until there was nothing left to steal. I assume he had a drinking problem?’

Lucy nodded. At boarding school and then university she had not had much time to observe just how much of a drinking problem he had had but it had been enough, she knew, to have sent his car spinning off the motorway at three in the morning.

‘The man was an alcoholic. A functioning alcoholic, bearing in mind he was crafty enough to get his greedy hands on other people’s money, but the fact of the matter was that he nicked what didn’t belong to him to the point that his entire company was destined to sink in the quicksand if I hadn’t come along and rescued it.’

‘Why did you?’ she asked curiously. She assumed that he must have come from a working class background, if what her father had implied was true, but certainly, by the time he had crash-landed into her life, he was a self-made millionaire several times over. So why bother with her father’s company?

Dio flushed darkly. Such a long and involved story and one he had no intention of telling her.

‘It had potential,’ he drawled, his beautiful mouth curving into a smile that could still make her heart beat a little faster. ‘It had tentacles in all the right areas, and my intuition paid off. It’s made me more money than I know what to do with. And then,’ he continued softly, ‘how many failing companies come with the added bonus of...you? Have you looked in the mirror recently, my darling wife? What red-blooded male could have resisted you? And your father was all too happy to close the deal and throw you in for good measure...’

He saw the way her face reddened and the way her eyes suddenly looked as though they were tearing up. For a split second, he almost regretted saying what he had said. Almost.

‘Except,’ he carried on in that same unhurried voice, ‘I didn’t get you, did I? You went out with me; you smiled shyly as you hung onto my every word; you let me get so close, close enough for me to need a cold shower every time I returned to my house, because you had turned retreating with a girlish blush into an art form... And then, on our wedding night, you informed me that you weren’t going to be part of any deal that I had arranged. You led me on...’

‘I... I...never meant to do that...’ But she could see very clearly how the situation must have looked to a man like Dio.

‘Now, I wonder why I find that so hard to believe?’ he murmured, noticing with some surprise that he had finished his second drink. Regretfully, he decided against a third. ‘You and your father concocted a little plan to make sure I was hooked into playing ball.’

‘That’s not true!’ Bright patches of colour appeared on her cheeks.

‘And then, once I had played ball, you were free to drop the act. So now you’re talking about divorce. Your father’s no longer in danger of the long arm of justice and you want out.’ He tilted his head to one side as another thought crept in. For the first time, he wondered what she got up to in his many absences.

He could have put a tail on her but he had chosen not to. He had simply not been able to imagine his frozen ice-maiden doing anything behind his back. Except she hadn’t always been that ice maiden, had she? There was more to her than that cool detachment. He had seen that for himself before she had said ‘I do’... So had she been getting up to anything behind his back?

Was it a simple case of her wanting to divorce him, having given a sufficiently adequate period of mourning for her dear old daddy? Or was there some other reason lurking in the background...?

And, just like that, rage slammed into him with the force of a sledgehammer.

Had she been seeing some man behind his back? He couldn’t credit it but, once the nasty thought took hold, he found he couldn’t jettison it.

‘I want out because we both deserve something better than what we have.’

‘How considerate of you to take my feelings into account.’ Dio raised his eyebrows in a phoney show of gravity that made her grit her teeth. ‘I never realised you had such a thoughtful, pious streak in you.’

First thing in the morning, he would have her followed, see for himself where this was all coming from. He certainly had no intention of asking her whether there was some guy in the background. In this sort of situation, nothing could beat the element of surprise.

‘There’s no need to be sarcastic, Dio.’

‘Who’s being sarcastic? Here’s what I’m thinking, though...’ He allowed a few seconds, during which time he pretended to give what was coming next some careful thought. ‘You want out—but you do realise that you will leave with nothing?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I had a very watertight pre-nup made up before we married, which you duly signed, although I’m not entirely sure whether you read it thoroughly or not. My guess is that you were so eager to get me on board that signing anything would have just been a formality. Am I right?’

Lucy vaguely remembered signing something extremely long and complicated and very boring. She decided that she wouldn’t take issue with his accusation that she’d been eager to get him on board; with his accusation that she had been in cahoots with her father to lure him into buying the company with her in the starring role of sacrificial lamb. She wasn’t going to get involved in any sort of argument with him because he would emerge the winner. He had the sharpest brain of any person she had ever known in her life.

She would get out, never see him again. For a fleeting second, something wrenching and painful tugged inside her and she shoved the feeling away.

‘As a rich man,’ he said, ‘I thought it best to protect myself. Here’s what you signed up to. I got the company. Lock, stock and smoking barrel. Just recompense for rescuing it from imminent collapse and saving your father’s frankly unworthy skin. I’m not sure if you know just how much he skimmed off the pension funds, how much I had to inject back in so that your employees didn’t find themselves of pensionable age with nothing but a begging bowl for company? Enough for me to tell you that it was millions.’ He breathed an exaggerated sigh and looked at her from under sinfully thick lashes. It had always amazed him that such a stupendously pretty face, so stunningly guileless, could house someone so cunning. It took all sorts to make the world.

Lucy hung her head because shame was never far away when her father’s name was mentioned. She looked at her perfectly manicured nails and thought how wonderful it would feel never to wear nail polish ever again. She might have a burning-of-the-nail-polish ceremony.

She distractedly half-smiled and Dio, looking at her, frowned. So...what was the joke? he wondered.

More to the point, what was the little secret? Because that had been a secretive smile.

‘As long as you are my wife,’ he informed her, banking down the simmering rage bubbling up inside him, ‘you get whatever you want. There are no limits placed on the amount of money you can spend.’

‘You mean provided you approve of the purchases?’

‘Have you ever heard me disapprove of anything you’ve ever bought?’

‘All I buy are clothes, jewellery and accessories,’ Lucy returned. ‘And only because I need them to...play the part I have to play.’

‘Your choice.’ He shrugged. ‘You could have bought a fleet of cars as far as I was concerned.’

She made a face and his frown deepened. He considered the possibility of giving her a divorce and dismissed the idea, although the reasons for that instant dismissal were a bit vague. Was he that possessive a man that he would hold on to a woman who wanted to escape? He had wanted revenge. And it might have come in a different shape from the one he had planned, but it had still come. He had still ended up with Robert Bishop’s company, hadn’t he? So what was the point of hanging on to Lucy and an empty marriage?

But then, she wasn’t just any woman, was she? She just happened to be his wife. The wife who had promised a lot more than she had ended up delivering. What man liked being short-changed?

‘You leave me,’ he told her in a hard voice, ‘and you leave with the clothes on your back.’

Lucy blanched. She loathed the trappings of wealth but wasn’t it a fact that that was all she had ever known? How would she live? What sort of job had years of being pampered prepared her for? She had never had the opportunity to do the teacher training course she had wanted to do. She had, instead, jumped into a marriage that had turned her into a clone of someone she didn’t like very much.

‘I don’t care,’ she said in a low voice and Dio raised his eyebrows in a question.

‘Of course you do,’ he told her. ‘You wouldn’t know where to begin when it came to finding a job.’

‘You can’t say that.’

‘Of course I can. You’ve grown up in the lap of luxury and, when most other girls would have branched out into the big, bad world, you married me and continued your life of luxury. Tell me, what has prepared you for that ugly, grim thing called reality?’

He would turf her out without a penny. She could see that in his eyes. He had never cared a jot about her and he didn’t care about her now. He had wanted the company and she had been a useful tool to acquire along with the bricks and mortar.

She just recently might have dipped her toe in that grim thing he was talking about called reality, but he was right. A life of creature comforts hadn’t prepared her for striking out with nothing. It would take ages for her to find her feet in the world of work, and how would she survive in the meantime? When he told her that she would leave with nothing but the clothes on her back, she was inclined to believe him. The clothes on her back wouldn’t include the expensive jewellery in the various safes and vaults.

‘I can see that you know where I’m coming from...’ He leaned forward, arms resting loosely on his thighs. ‘If you want out, then you have two options. You go with nothing, or...’

Lucy looked at him warily. ‘Or...what?’


CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_3ffb5ab6-afe8-5758-8ede-480de0b85df3)

DIO SMILED SLOWLY and relaxed back.

Sooner or later, this weird impasse between them would have had to find a resolution; he had known that. Always one to dominate the situations around him, he had allowed it to continue for far longer than acceptable.

Why?

Had he thought that she would have thawed slowly? She’d certainly shown no signs of doing anything of the sort as the months had progressed. In fact, they had achieved the unthinkable—a functioning, working relationship devoid of sex, a business arrangement that was hugely successful. She complemented him in ways he could never have imagined. She had been the perfect foil for his hard-nosed, aggressive, seize-and-conquer approach to business and, frankly, life in general. He hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he had had to haul himself up by his boot straps, and the challenges of the journey to success had made him brutally tough.

He was the king of the concrete jungle and he was sharp enough to know that pretenders to the throne were never far behind. He was feared and respected in equal measure and his wife’s ingrained elegance counterbalanced his more high-voltage, thrusting personality beautifully.

Together they worked.

Maybe that was why he had not broached the subject of all those underlying problems between them. He was a practical man and maybe he had chosen not to rock the boat because they had a successful partnership.

Or maybe he had just been downright lazy. Or—and this was a less welcome thought—vain enough to imagine that the woman he still stupidly fancied would end up coming to him of her own accord.

The one thing he hadn’t expected was talk of a divorce.

He poured himself another drink and returned to the chair, in no great hurry to break the silence stretching between them.

‘When we got married,’ Dio said slowly, ‘it didn’t occur to me that I would end up with a wife who slept in a separate wing of the house when we happened to be under the same roof. It has to be said that that’s not every man’s dream of a happy marriage.’

‘I didn’t think you had dreams of happy marriages, Dio. I never got the impression that you were the sort of guy who had fantasies of coming home to the wife and the two-point-two kids and the dog and the big back garden.’

‘Why would you say that?’

Lucy shrugged. ‘Just an impression I got.’ But that hadn’t stopped her from falling for him. She had got lost in those amazing eyes, had been seduced by that deep, dark drawl and had been willing to ignore what her head had been telling her because her heart had been talking a lot louder.

‘I may not have spent my life gearing up for a walk down the aisle but that doesn’t mean that I wanted to end up with a woman who didn’t share my bed.’

Lucy reddened. ‘Well, both of us has ended up disappointed with what we got,’ she said calmly.

Dio waved his hand dismissively. ‘There’s no point trying to analyse our marriage,’ he said. ‘That’s a pointless exercise. I was going to talk to you about options...’ He sipped his drink and looked at her thoughtfully. ‘And I’m going to give you a very good one. You want a divorce? Fine. I can’t stop you heading for the nearest lawyer and getting divorce papers drawn up. Course, like I said, that would involve you leaving with nothing. A daunting prospect for someone who has spent the last year and a half never having to think about money.’

‘Money isn’t the be all and end all of everything.’

‘Do you know what? It’s been my experience that the people who are fond of saying things like that are the people who have money at their disposal. People who have no money are usually inclined to take a more pragmatic approach.’ Having grown up with nothing, Dio knew very well that money actually was the be all and end all of everything. It gave you freedom like nothing else could. Freedom to do exactly what you wanted to do and to be accountable to no one.

‘I’m saying that it doesn’t always bring happiness.’ She thought of her own unhappy, lavish childhood. From the outside, they had looked like a happy, privileged family. Behind closed doors, it had been just the opposite. No amount of money had been able to whitewash that.

‘But a lack of it can bring, well, frustration? Misery? Despair? Imagine yourself leaving all of this so that you can take up residence in a one-bedroom flat where you’ll live a life battling rising damp and mould on the walls.’

Lucy gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘Aren’t you being a bit dramatic, Dio?’

‘London is an expensive place. Naturally, you would have some money at your disposal, but nothing like enough to find anywhere halfway decent to live.’

‘Then I’d move out of London.’

‘Into the countryside? You’ve lived in London all your life. You’re accustomed to having the theatre and the opera and all those art exhibitions you enjoy going to on tap... But don’t worry. You can still enjoy all of that but, sadly, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. You want your divorce? You can have it. But only after you’ve given me what I expected to get when I married you.’

It took a few seconds for Lucy’s brain to make the right connections and catch up with what he was telling her but, even so, she heard herself ask, falteringly, ‘What are you talking about?’

Dio raised his eyebrows and smiled slowly. ‘Don’t tell me that someone with a maths degree can’t figure out what two and two makes? I want my honeymoon, Lucy.’

‘I... I don’t know what you mean...’ Lucy stammered, unable to tear her eyes away from the harsh lines of his beautiful face.

‘Of course you do! I didn’t think I was signing up for a sexless marriage when I slipped that wedding band on your finger. You want out now? Well, you can have out just as soon as we put an end to the unfinished business between us.’

‘That’s blackmail!’ She sprang to her feet and began restively pacing the room. Her nerves were all over the place. She had looked forward to that wretched honeymoon night so much...and now here he was, offering it to her, but at a price.

‘That’s the offer on the table. We sleep together, be man and wife in more than just name only, and you get to leave with an allowance generous enough to ensure that you spend the rest of your life in comfort.’

‘Why would you want that? You’re not even attracted to me!’

‘Come a little closer and I can easily prove you wrong on that point.’

Heart thudding, Lucy kept a healthy distance, but she was looking at him again, noting the dark intent in his eyes. The desire she had shoved away, out of sight, began to uncurl inside her.

She’d been foolish enough to think that he had been interested in her, attracted to her, and had discovered that it had all been a lie. He had strung her along because he had decided that she would be a useful addition to his life.

There was no way that she would sleep with him as some sort of devil’s bargain. She had watched the car crash of her parents’ marriage and had vowed that she would only give her body to a man who truly loved her, that she would only marry for the right reasons. Her parents had had a marriage of convenience, the natural joining of two wealthy families, and just look at where they had ended up. The minute she had realised that her marriage to Dio had not been what she had imagined was the minute she’d made her decision to withhold the better part of herself from him, to remain true to her principles.

She watched, horrified, as he slowly rose from his chair and strolled towards where she was standing by the window. With each step, her nerves shredded a little bit more.

‘A matter of weeks...’ he murmured, delicately tracing his finger along her cheek and feeling her quiver as he touched her.

She was the only woman in the world he had never been able to read.

There had been times during their marriage when he had surprised her looking at him, had seen something in her eyes that had made him wonder whether his dear wife was slightly less immune to him than she liked to portray, but he had never explored the possibility. There was such a thing as pride, especially to a man like him.

He was willing to explore the possibility now because he knew that, if she left and he never got to touch her, she would become unfinished business and that would be a less than satisfactory outcome.

‘Weeks...?’ Transfixed by the feel of his skin against hers, Lucy remained rooted to the spot. Her breasts ached and she could feel her nipples tightening, sensitive against her lacy bra. Liquid was pooling between her legs and, although she remained perfectly still, she wanted to squirm and rub her legs together to relieve herself of the ache between them.

‘That’s right.’ Plenty long enough to get her out of his system. She was his and he intended to have her, all of her, before he allowed her her freedom.

At which point, he would close the door on a part of his past that had gnawed away at him for as long as he could remember.

His erection was hard enough to be painful and he stepped a bit closer, close enough for her to feel it against her belly. He knew that she had from the slight shudder that ran through her body. Her eyes were wide, her mouth parted.

An invitation. One that he wasn’t going to resist. He hadn’t been this physically close to his wife since he had tied the knot with her and he wasn’t about to waste the opportunity.

Lucy knew he was going to kiss her. She placed her hand flat on his chest, a pathetic attempt to push him away before he could get too close, but she didn’t push him away. Instead, as his mouth found hers, treacherous fingers curled into his shirt and she sighed, losing herself in the headiness of feeling his tongue probing into her mouth, his tongue moving, exploring, with hers, sparking a series of explosive reactions in her body.

Like a match set to tinder, she felt her whole body combusting. Their brief courtship had been so very chaste. This wasn’t chaste. This was unrestrained hunger and his hunger matched her own.

She felt him slip his hand underneath the silk top to cup her breast and, when he began to rub her nipple through the lacy bra, she wanted to pass out.

Or else rip off his shirt so that she could spread trembling, eager fingers against his broad, hard chest.

He pulled back. It took her a couple of seconds to recognise his withdrawal and then horror at what she had allowed to happen filtered through her consciousness and washed over her like a bucket of freezing cold water.

‘What the heck do you think you’re doing?’

Dio smiled. ‘Giving you proof positive that we could have a couple of weeks of very pleasant carnal adventures...’ Keen eyes noted the hectic flush in her cheeks and the way she had now prudishly folded her arms across her chest, as if she could deny the very heated, very satisfactory, response she had just given him.

He hadn’t been mistaken when it came to those little looks he had surprised her giving him after all.

‘I have no intention of...of sleeping with you for money!’

Dio’s lips thinned. ‘Why not? You married me for money. At least sleeping with me would introduce the element of fun.’

‘I did not marry you for money!’

‘I have no intention of going down this road again. I’ve given you your options. You can decide which one to go for.’ He spun round on his heels, heading for the door.

‘Dio!’

He stilled and then took his time turning to face her.

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why does it matter whether you sleep with me or not? I mean surely there have been...women in your life over the past year or so more than willing to jump into bed with you... Why does it matter whether I do or not?’

Dio didn’t answer immediately. He knew what she thought, that he spent his leisure time between the sheets with other women. There had been no need for her to vocalise it. He had seen it in her face on the few occasions when he had happened to be in conversation with another woman, an attractive woman. He had seen the flash of resentment and scorn which had been very quickly masked and he had seen no reason to put her straight.

He didn’t think that there was any need to put her straight now. Not only had he not slept with any other woman since his marriage, but he had not been tempted. There wasn’t a human being on earth who wasn’t driven to want what was out of reach and his wife had been steadfastly out of reach for the past eighteen months. During that period, he had not found his eyes straying to any of the women who had covertly made passes at him over the months, happy to overlook the fact that there was a wedding ring on his finger.

‘I just can’t,’ Lucy breathed into the silence. ‘I... I’m happy to leave with a small loan, until I find my feet.’

‘Find your feet doing what?’ Dio asked curiously.

‘I... I have one or two things up my sleeve...’

Dio’s eyes narrowed as hers shifted away. He was picking up the whiff of a secret and he wondered, again, what was going on behind his back. What had been going on behind his back? Had the mouse been playing while the cat had been away?

‘What things?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ she said evasively. ‘It’s just that... I think we’d both be happier if we brought this marriage to an end, and if I could borrow some money from you...’

‘Lucy, you would need a great deal of money to begin to have any life at all in London.’

‘Money which you are not at all prepared to lend me, even though you have my word that you would be repaid.’

‘Unless you’re planning a big job in the corporate world or have a rich backer,’ he said dryly, ‘then I can guarantee that any loan I make to you would not be paid back. At least, not while I have my own teeth and hair.’

‘How do you think it would look if your wife was caught with a begging bowl, looking for scraps from strangers?’

‘Now who’s being dramatic?’ When he had met her all those months ago, she had been blushing and shy but he had had glimpses of the humour and sharp intelligence behind the shyness. Over the past year and a half, as she had been called on to play the role of perfect wife and accomplished hostess, her self-confidence had grown in leaps and bounds.

He also knew that, whatever she felt for him, she wasn’t intimidated by him. Maybe that, too, was down to the strange configuration of their lives together. How could you be intimidated by someone you weren’t that interested in pleasing in the first place?

‘You will, naturally, walk away with slightly more than the clothes on your back,’ Dio admitted. ‘However, you would still find it a challenge to have a lifestyle that in any way could be labelled comfortable. Unless, of course, there’s a rich patron in the background. Is there?’

Asking the question was a sign of weakness but Dio couldn’t help himself.

She shrugged. ‘I’m not into rich men,’ she told him. ‘I’ve always known that and having been married to you has confirmed all my suspicions.’

‘How’s that?’ Frankly, he had never heard anything so hypocritical in his life before, but he decided to let it pass.

‘Like you said, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. I know you say that it’s the most important thing in life...’

‘I can’t remember saying that.’

‘More or less. You said it moreorless. And I know you think that I wouldn’t be able to last a week unless I have more money than I can shake a stick at but—’

‘But you’re suddenly overcome with a desperate urge to prove me wrong...’ His gaze dropped to her full mouth. Something about the arrangement of her features had always turned him on. She wasn’t overtly sexy, just as she wasn’t overtly beautiful, but there was a whisper of something other-worldly about her that kept tugging his eyes back to her time and time again.

She had screwed up his clear-cut plans to buy her father’s company at a fire sale price before chucking him to his fate, which would undoubtedly have involved wolves tearing him to pieces. He had been charmed by that other-worldly something, had allowed it somehow to get to him, and he had tempered all his plans to accommodate the feeling.

She had, over time, become the itch he couldn’t scratch. He might have had her signed up to a water-tight pre-nup but, even so, he would never have seen her hit the streets without any financial wherewithal.

In this instance, though, he was determined to have that itch scratched and, if it meant holding her to ransom, then he was pretty happy to go down that road.

Especially now that he knew that the attraction was returned in full.

‘I’m just trying to tell you that there’s no rich anyone in the background.’ Did he imagine that she fooled around the way he did? ‘And there never will be anyone rich in my life again.’

‘How virtuous. Is it because of those free lunches not coming for free? Do you honestly think that hitching your life to a pauper would be fertile ground for happily united bliss? If so then you really need to drag your head out of the clouds and get back down to Planet Earth.’ He abandoned the decision to go back to work, not that he would have been able to concentrate. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry. If we’re going to continue this conversation, then I need to eat.’

‘You were about to leave,’ Lucy reminded him.

‘That was before I became intrigued with your radical new outlook on life.’

He began heading towards the kitchen and she followed helplessly in his wake.

This felt like a proper conversation and it was unsettling. There were no crowds of people around jostling for his attention. No important clients demanding polite small talk. And they weren’t exchanging pleasantries before heading off in opposite directions in any one of their grand houses.

She knew the layout of the kitchen well. On those occasions when they had entertained at home, she had had to supervise caterers and familiarise them with the ins and outs of the vast kitchen. When he was out of the country, as he often was, this was where she had her meals on her own, with the little telly on, or else the radio.

However, it was a bit different to see him here, in it.

For a few seconds, he stared around him, a man at sea trying to get his bearings.

‘Okay. Suggestions?’ He finally turned to her.

‘Suggestions about what?’

‘Thoughts on what I can eat.’

‘What were you planning to eat if you hadn’t found me here?’ Lucy asked jerkily, moving from doorway to kitchen table and then sitting awkwardly on one of the chairs while he continued to look at her in a way that made her blood sizzle, because she just had to see that mouth of his to recall his very passionate kiss. Her lips still felt stung and swollen.

‘I have two top chefs on speed dial,’ he drawled, amused when her mouth fell open. ‘They’re usually good at solving the “what to eat?” dilemma for me. Not that it’s a dilemma that occurs very often. If I’m on my own, I eat out. Saves hassle.’

‘Go ahead and order what you want from your two top chefs,’ Lucy told him. ‘Never mind me. I...er...’

‘Ate already?’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘And I don’t believe you. Don’t tell me,’ he said, ‘that you feel uncomfortable being in a kitchen with me and breaking bread? We’re a married couple, after all.’

‘I don’t feel uncomfortable,’ Lucy lied. ‘Not in the slightest!’

‘Then where are your suggestions?’

‘Do you even know where to find anything in this kitchen?’ she asked impatiently.

Dio appeared to give that question a bit of thought then he shook his head. ‘I admit the contents of the cupboards are something of a mystery, although I do know that there’s some very fine white wine in the fridge...’

‘Are you asking me to cook something for you?’

‘If you’re offering, then who am I to refuse?’ He made for a chair and sat down. ‘It doesn’t offend your feminist instincts to cook for me, does it? Because, if it does, then I’m more than happy to try and hunt down one or two ingredients and put my cooking skills to the test.’

‘You don’t have cooking skills.’ From some past remembered conversation, when she had still had faith in him, she recalled one of his throwaway remarks that had made her laugh.

‘You’re right. So I don’t.’

This wasn’t how Lucy had imagined the evening going. She had more figured on dealing with shock at her announcement followed by anger because she knew that, even if he heartily wanted to get rid of her, he would have been furious that she had pre-empted him. Then she had imagined disappearing off to bed, leaving him to mull over her decision, at which point she would have been directed to a lawyer who would take over the handling of the nitty-gritty.

Instead she felt trapped in the eye of a hurricane...

She knew where everything was and she was a reasonably good cook. It was something she quite enjoyed doing when she was on her own, freed from the pressure of having to entertain. She expertly found the things she needed for a simple pasta meal and it would have been relaxing if she hadn’t been so acutely aware of his eyes following her every movement.

‘Need a hand?’ he asked as she clanged a saucepan onto the stove and she turned to him with a snappy, disbelieving frown.

‘What can you do?’

‘I feel I could be quite good at chopping things.’ He rose smoothly to join her by the kitchen counter, invading her space and making her skin tingle with sexual awareness.

Stupid, she thought crossly. But he had thrown down that gauntlet, brought sex into the equation, and now it was on her mind. And she didn’t want it to be. She had spent the past months telling herself that she hated him and hating him had made it easy for her to ignore the way he made her feel. It had been easy to ignore the slight tremble whenever he got too close, the tingling of her breasts and the squirmy feeling she got in the pit of her stomach.

He’d never been attracted to her, she had thought. He’d just seen her as part of a deal. He’d used her.

But now...

He wanted her; she had felt it in his kiss, had felt his erection pressing against her like a shaft of steel. Just thinking about it brought her out in a fine film of perspiration.

She shoved an onion and some tomatoes at him and told him where to find a chopping board and a knife.

‘Most women would love the kind of lifestyle you have,’ Dio murmured as he began doing something and nothing with the tomatoes.

‘You mean flitting from grand house to grand house, making sure everything is ticking over, because Lord help us if an important client spots some dust on a skirting board?’

‘Since when have you been so sarcastic?’

‘I’m not being sarcastic.’

‘Don’t stop. I find it intriguing.’

‘You told me that most women would envy what I have and I told you that they wouldn’t.’

‘You’d be surprised what women would put up with if the price was right.’

‘I’m not one of those women.’ She edged away, because he was just a little too close for comfort, and began busying herself by the stove, flinging things into the saucepan, all the ingredients for a tomato-and-aubergine dish, which was a stalwart in her repertoire because it was quick and easy.

Dio thought that maybe he should have tried to find out what sort of woman she was before remembering that he knew exactly what sort of woman she was. The sort who had conspired with her father to get him where they had both wanted him—married to her and thereby providing protection for her father from the due processes of law.

If she wanted to toss out hints that there were hidden depths there somewhere, though, then he was happy enough to go along for the ride. Why not? Right now he was actually enjoying himself, against all odds.

And the bottom line was that he wanted her body. He wanted that itch to be scratched and then he would be quite happy to dispose of her.

If holding her to ransom was going to prove a problem then what was the big deal in getting her into his bed using other methods?

‘So, we’re back to the money not being the be all and end all,’ he murmured encouragingly. ‘Smells good, whatever you’re making.’

‘I like cooking when I’m on my own,’ she said with a flush of pleasure.

‘You cook even though you know you could have anything you wanted to eat delivered to your doorstep?’ Dio asked with astonishment and Lucy laughed.

He remembered that laugh from way back when. Soft and infectious, with a little catch that made it seem as though she felt guilty laughing at all. He had found that laugh strangely seductive, fool that he had been.

‘So...’ he drawled once they were sitting at the kitchen table with bowls of steaming hot pasta in front of them. ‘Shall we raise our glasses to this rare event? I don’t believe I’ve sat in this kitchen and had a meal with you since we got married.’

Lucy nervously sipped some of the wine. The situation was slipping away from her. How many women had he sat and drank with in the time during which they had been supposedly happily married? She hadn’t slept with him but that didn’t mean that she wasn’t aware that he had a healthy libido. One look at that dark, handsome face was enough to cement the impression.

She had never, not once, asked him about what he did behind her back on all those many trips when he was abroad, but she could feel the questions eating away at her, as though they had suddenly been released from a locked box. She hated it. And she hated the way that fleeting moment of being the object of his flirting attention had got to her, overriding all the reasons she had formulated in her head for breaking away from him. She didn’t want to give house room to any squirmy feelings. He had turned on the charm when they had first met and she knew from experience that it didn’t mean anything.

‘That’s because this isn’t really a marriage, is it?’ she said politely. ‘So why would we sit in a kitchen and have a meal together? That’s what real married couples do.’

Dio’s mouth tightened. ‘And of course you would know a lot about what real married couples do, considering you entered this contract with no intention of being half of a real married couple.’

‘I don’t think it’s going to get either of us anywhere if we keep harping back to the past. I think we should both now look to the future.’

‘The future being divorce.’

‘I’m not going to get into bed with you for money, Dio,’ Lucy told him flatly. For a whisper of a second, she had a vivid image of what it would be like to make love to him—but then, it wouldn’t be love, would it? And what was the point of sex without love?

‘So you’re choosing the poverty option.’ He pushed his bowl to one side and relaxed back in the chair, angling his big body so that he could extend his legs to the side.

‘If I have to. I can make do. I...’

‘You...what?’ His ears pricked up as he detected the hesitancy in her voice.

‘I have plans,’ Lucy said evasively. And she wasn’t going to share them with him, wasn’t going to let her fledgling ambitions be put to the test by him.

‘What plans?’

‘Nothing very big. Or important. I just obviously need to think about the direction my life is going in.’ She stood up and briskly began clearing the table. She made sure not to catch his eye.

Dio watched her jerky movements as she busied herself around the kitchen, tidying, wiping the counters, doing everything she could to make sure the conversation was terminated.

So she wanted out and she had plans.

To Dio’s way of thinking, that could only mean one thing. A man. Maybe not a rich one, but a man. Lurking in the background. Waiting to get her into bed if he hadn’t already done so.

The fake marriage was going to be replaced by a relationship she had probably been cultivating behind his back for months. Maybe—and the red mist descended when he considered this option—she had been cultivating this relationship from way back when. Maybe it had been right there on the back burner, set to one side while she’d married him and had done what she had to do for the sake of her father.

It might have come as a shock that she would face walking away empty handed but clearly, whatever her so-called plans were, they were powerful enough to override common sense.

Faced with this, Dio understood that first and foremost he would find out what those plans were.

Simple.

He could either follow her himself or he could employ someone to do it. He preferred the former option. Why allow someone else to do something you were perfectly capable of handling yourself?

The past year or so of their sterile non-relationship faded under the impetus of an urgent need that obliterated everything else.

‘I’m going to be in New York for the next few days,’ Dio said abruptly, standing up and moving towards the kitchen door where he stood for a few seconds, hand on the door knob, his dark face cool and unreadable. ‘While you’re still wearing a wedding ring on your finger, I could insist that you accompany me, because I will be attending some high level social events. But, under these very special circumstances, you’ll be pleased to hear that I won’t.’

‘New—New York?’ Lucy faltered. ‘I can’t remember New York being in the diary until next month...’

‘Change of plan.’ Dio shrugged. He stared at her, working out what he planned to do the following day and how. ‘You can stay here and spend the time thinking about the proposition I’ve put to you.’

‘I’ve already thought about it. I don’t need to do any more thinking.’

Over his dead body. ‘Then,’ he said smoothly, ‘you can stay here and spend the time contemplating the consequences...’


CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_8237b4fb-5fb5-5d90-ba90-56be0c55ea81)

LUCY HAD HAD better nights.

Spendhertimecontemplatingtheconsequences? The cool, dismissive way he had said that, looking at her as if he had complete authority over her decisions, had set her teeth on edge.

Their sham of a marriage had worked well for him. She knew that. Her father had told her that Dio wanted someone classy to be by his side and she had fitted the bill. Whilst he had been alive, he had never ceased reminding her that it was her duty to play the part because, if she didn’t, then it would be within her husband’s power to reveal the extent of the misappropriated money—and if he went down, her father had told her, then so too would the memory of her mother. The dirty linen that would be washed in public would bring everyone down. That was how it worked.

That had been Lucy’s Achilles’ heel so she had played her part and she had played it to perfection.

The day after their wedding, Dio had taken himself off to the other side of the world on business and, during the week that he had been away, she had obeyed instructions and had overhauled her image with the aid of a top-notch personal shopper.

Like a puppet, she had allowed herself to be manoeuvred into being the sort of woman who entertained. He had returned and there and then the parameters of their personal life had been laid down.

He had said nothing about her physical withdrawal. The closeness that had been there before her father’s revelation had disappeared, replaced by a cool remoteness that had only served to prove just how right she had been in reading the situation.

He had used her.

What he had wanted was what he had got. He had wanted someone to whom the social graces came as second nature. He mixed in the rarefied circles of the elite and she could more than hold her own in those circles because she had grown up in them.

As far as she knew, the sort of woman he was attracted to was probably completely the opposite to her.

He was probably attracted to dark-haired, voluptuous sirens who didn’t hang around the house in silk culottes and matching silk vests. He probably liked them swearing, cursing and being able to drink him under the table, but none of them would have done as a society wife. So he had tacked her on as a useful appendage.

And now he wanted her.

With divorce on the horizon, he wanted to lay claim to her because, as far as he was concerned, she was his possession, someone he had bought along with the company that had come with her.

He’d even set a time line on whatever physical relationship he intended to conduct!

Did it get any more insulting?

He knew that he’d be bored with her within a month!

She burned with shame when she thought about that.

She hated him and yet her sleep was disturbed by a series of images of them together. She dreamt of him making love to her, touching her in places she had never been touched before and whispering things in her ear that had her squirming in a restless half-sleep.

She awoke the following morning to an empty house. Dio had disappeared off to New York.

She’d used these little snippets of freedom to her benefit and now, as she got dressed, she felt that she should be a little more excited than she was.

It irritated her to know that, thanks to Dio, the glorious day stretching ahead of her was already marred with images of his dark, commanding face and the careless arrogance of what he had told her the evening before.

She made a couple of calls and then she headed out.

* * *

Dio, in the middle of a conference call, was notified of her departure within seconds of her leaving the house.

His personal driver—who had zero experience in sleuthing but could handle a car like a pro and could be trusted with his life—phoned the message through and Dio immediately terminated his conference call.

‘When she stops, call me,’ he instructed. ‘I’m not interested in whether she’s leaving the house. I’m interested in where she ends up.’

Suddenly restless, he pushed himself away from his desk and walked towards the floor-to-ceiling glass panes that overlooked the busy hub of the city.

He’d had a night to think about what she had told him and he was no nearer to getting his head around it.

So, she wanted out.

She was the single one woman who had eluded him despite the ring on her finger. To take a protesting bride to his bed would have been unthinkable. There was no way he would ever have been driven to that, however bitter he might have been about the warped terms of their marriage. And he could see now that pride had entered the equation, paralysing his natural instinct to charm her into the place he wanted her to be.

With the situation radically changed, it was time for him to be proactive.

And he was going to enjoy it. He was going to enjoy having her beg for him, which he fully intended she would do, despite all her protests to the contrary.

And, if he discovered that there was a man on the scene, that she had been seeing someone behind his back...

He shoved his hands in his pockets and clenched his jaw, refusing to give in to the swirl of fury that filled every pore and fibre of his being at the thought of her possible infidelity.

When he had embarked on Robert Bishop’s company buyout, this was not at all what he had envisaged.

He had envisaged a clean, fatal cut delivered with the precision of a surgical knife, which was no less than the man deserved.

Never one to waste time brooding, Dio allowed his mind to play back the series of events that had finally led to the revenge he had planned so very carefully.

Some of what he had known, he had seen with his own eyes, growing up. His father fighting depression, stuck in a nowhere job where the pay was crap. His mother working long hours cleaning other people’s houses so that there would be sufficient money for little treats for him.

The greater part of the story, however, had come from his mother’s own lips, years after his father’s life had been claimed by the ravages of cancer. Only then had he discovered the wrong that had been done to his father. A poor immigrant with a brilliant mind, he had met Robert Bishop as an undergraduate. Robert Bishop, from all accounts, had been wasting his time partying whilst pretending to do a business degree. Born into money, but with the family fortunes already showing signs of poor health, he had known that although he had an assured job with the family business he needed more if he was to sustain the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed.

Meeting Mario Ruiz had been a stroke of luck as far as Robert Bishop had been concerned. He had met the genius who would later invent something small but highly significant that would allow him to send his ailing family engineering concern into the stratosphere.

And as for Mario Ruiz?

Dio made no attempt to kill the toxic acid that always erupted in his veins when he thought of how his father had been conned.

Mario Ruiz had innocently signed up to a deal that had not been worth the paper it was written on. He had found his invention misappropriated and, when he had raised the issue, had found himself at the mercy of a man who’d wanted to get rid of him as fast as he could.

He had seen nothing of all the giddy financial rewards that should have been his due.

It had been such an incredible story that Dio might well have doubted the full extent of its authenticity had it not been for the reams of paperwork later uncovered after his mother had died, barely months after his father had been buried.

Ruining Robert Bishop had been there, driving him forward, for many years...except complete and total revenge had been marred by the fresh-faced, seductive prettiness of Lucy Bishop. He had wavered. Allowed concessions to be made. Only to find himself the revenge half-baked: he had got the company but not the man, and he had got the girl but not in the way he had imagined he would.

Well, he just couldn’t wait to see how this particular story was going to play out. Not on her terms, he resolved.

He picked up the call from his driver practically before his mobile buzzed and listened with a slight frown of puzzlement as he was given his wife’s location.

Striding out of his office, he said in passing to his secretary that he would be uncontactable for the next couple of hours.

He wasn’t surprised to see the look of open-mouthed astonishment on his secretary’s face because, when it came to work, he was always contactable.

‘Make up whatever excuses you like for my cancelled meetings, be as inventive as the mood takes you.’ He grinned, pausing by the door. ‘You can look at it as your little window of living dangerously...’

‘I live dangerously every time I walk through that office door,’ his austere, highly efficient, middle-aged secretary tartly responded. ‘You have no idea what you’re like to work for!’

Dio knew the streets of London almost as comprehensively as his driver did but he still had to rely on his satnav to get him to the address he had been given.

Somewhere in East London. He had no idea how Jackson had managed to follow Lucy. Presumably, he had just taken whatever form of public transport she had taken and, because he was not their regular evening driver, she would not have recognised him.

It was a blessing that he had handed the grunt work over to his driver because he had just assumed that his wife would drive to wherever she wanted to go, or else take a taxi.

Anything but the tube and the bus.

He couldn’t imagine that her father would ever have allowed her to hop on the number twenty-seven. Robert Bishop had excelled in being a snob.

He wondered whether this was all part of her sudden dislike of all things money and then he wondered how long the novelty of pretending not to care about life’s little luxuries would last.

It was all well and good to talk about pious self-denial from the luxury of your eight-bedroomed mansion in the best postcode in London.

His lips curled derisively as he edged along through the traffic. She had been the apple of her father’s eye and that certainly didn’t go hand in hand with pious self-denial.

He cleared the traffic in central London, but found that he was still having to crawl through the stop-start tedium of traffic lights and pedestrian crossings, and it was after eleven by the time he pulled up in front of a disreputable building nestled amongst a parade of shops.

There was a betting shop, an Indian takeaway, a laundrette, several other small shops and, tacked on towards the end of the row, a three-storeyed old building with a blue door. Dio was tempted to phone his driver and ask him whether he had texted the wrong address.

He didn’t.

Instead, he got out of his car and spent a few moments looking at the house in front of him. The paint on the door was peeling. The windows were all shut, despite the fact that it was another warm, sunny day.

His mind was finding it hard to co-operate. For once, he was having difficulty trying to draw conclusions from what his eyes were seeing.

He could hear the buzzing of the doorbell reverberating inside the house as he kept his hand pressed on the buzzer and then the sound of footsteps. The door opened a crack, chain still on.

‘Dio!’ Lucy blinked and wondered briefly if she might be hallucinating. Her husband had been on her mind so much as she had headed off but the physical reactions of her body told her that the man standing imperiously in front of her was no hallucination.

From behind her, Mark called out in his sing-song Welsh accent, ‘Who’s there, Lucy?’

‘No one!’ They were the first words that sprang into her head but, as her eyes tangled with Dio’s, she recognised that she had said the wrong thing.

‘No one...?’ Dio’s voice was soft, silky and lethally cool. The chain was still on the door and he laid his hand flat on it, just in case she got the crazy idea of trying to shut the door in his face.

‘What are you doing here? You said that you were going to New York.’

‘Who’s the man, Lucy?’

‘Did you follow me?’

‘Just answer the question because, if you don’t, I’ll break the door down and find out myself.’

‘You shouldn’t be here! I... I...’ She felt Mark behind her, inquisitively trying to peer through the narrow sliver to see who was standing at the door, and with a sigh of resignation she slowly slid the chain back with trembling fingers.

Dio congratulated himself on an impressive show of self-control as he walked into the hallway of the house which, in contrast to the outside, was brightly painted in shades of yellow. He clenched his fists at his sides, eyes sliding from Lucy to the man standing next to her.

‘Who,’ he asked in a dangerously low voice, ‘the hell are you, and what are you doing with my wife?’

The man in front of him was at least three inches shorter and slightly built. Dio thought that he would be able to flatten him with a tap of his finger, and that was exactly what he wanted to do, but he’d be damned if he was going to start a brawl in a house.

Growing up on the wrong side of the tracks, however, had trained him well when it came to holding his own with his fists.

‘Lucy, shall I leave you two to talk?’

‘Dio, this is Mark.’ She recognised the glitter of menace in her husband’s eyes and decided that, yes, the best thing Mark could do would be to evaporate. Shame he wouldn’t be able to take her with him, but perhaps the time had come to lay her cards on the table and tell Dio what was going on. Before he started punching poor Mark, who was fidgeting and glancing at her worriedly.

She felt sick as she looked, with dizzy compulsion, at the tight, angry lines of her husband’s face.

‘I’d shake your hand,’ Dio rasped, ‘but I might find myself giving in to the urge to rip it off, so I suggest you take my wife’s advice and clear off, and don’t return unless I give you permission.’

‘Dio, please...’ she pleaded, putting herself between her husband and Mark. ‘You’ve got the wrong end of the stick.’

‘I could beat him to a pulp,’ Dio remarked neutrally to her, ‘without even bloodying my knuckles.’

‘And you’d be proud of that, would you?’

‘Maybe not proud, but eminently satisfied. So...’ He pinned coldly furious silver eyes on the guy behind her. ‘You clear off right now or climb out from your hiding place behind my wife and get what’s coming to you!’

With a restraining hand on Dio’s arm, Lucy turned to Mark and told him gently that she’d call him as soon as possible.

Dio fought the urge to deal with the situation in the most straightforward way known to mankind.

But what would be the point? He wasn’t a thug, despite his background.

His head was cluttered with images of the fair-haired man, the fair-haired wimp who had hidden behind his wife, making love to Lucy.

The heat of the situation was such that it was only when the front door clicked shut behind the loser that Dio noticed what he should have noticed the very second he had looked at Lucy.

Gone were the expensive trappings: the jewellery, the watch he had given to her for her birthday present, the designer clothes...

He stared at her, utterly bemused. Her hair was scraped back into a ponytail and she was dressed in a white tee-shirt, a pair of faded jeans and trainers. She looked impossibly young and so damned sexy that his whole body jerked into instant response.

Lucy felt the shift in the atmosphere between them, although she couldn’t work out at first where it was coming from. The tension was still there but threaded through that was a sizzling electrical charge that made her heart begin to beat faster.

‘Are you going to listen to what I have to say?’ She hugged her arms around her because she was certain that he would be able to see the hard tightening of her nipples against the tee-shirt.

‘Are you going to spin me fairy stories?’

‘I’ve never done that and I’m not going to start now.’

‘I’ll let that ride. Are you having an affair with that man?’

‘No!’

Dio took a couple of steps towards her, sick to his stomach at the games going on in his head. ‘You’re my wife!’

Lucy’s eyes shifted away from his. Her breathing was laboured and shallow and she was horrified to realise that, despite the icy, forbidding threat in his eyes, she was still horribly turned on. It seemed that something had been unlocked inside her and now she couldn’t ram it back into a safe place, out of harm’s way.

Dio held up his hand, as though interrupting a flow of conversation, although she hadn’t uttered a word.

‘And don’t feed me garbage about being my wife in name only, because I sure as hell won’t be buying it! You’re my wife and I had better not find out that you’ve been fooling around behind my back!’

‘What difference would it make?’ she flung at him, her eyes simmering with heated rebellion. ‘You fool around behind mine!’

‘In what world do you think I’d fool around behind your back?’ Dio roared, little caring what he said and not bothering to filter his words.

The silence stretched between them for an eternity. Lucy had heard what he had said but had she heard correctly? Had he really not slept with anyone in all the time they had been married? A wave of pure, undiluted relief washed over her and she acknowledged that resentment at her situation, at least in part, had been fuelled by the thought that he had been playing around with other women, having the sex she had denied him.

She would have liked to question him a bit more, tried to ascertain whether he was, indeed, telling the truth; if he was, more than anything else she would have loved to have ask him why





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