The Mistress Wife

Vivien felt sick. She had punished her husband for a sin he had not committed. Instead of having faith in the man she had married, she had abandoned faith. Lucca had been innocent, which meant that all the agonising unhappiness she had endured since then was entirely of her own making. That was a very tough reality for Vivien to accept but she had sufficient humility to soon achieve it and move on to the far more important point of facing the great wrong that she had inflicted on Lucca. Her mind was as clear as a bell on what she ought to do next.

‘I need to see Lucca…’ Vivien breathed.

‘Haven’t you listened to anything I’ve said?’ Bernice demanded. ‘What on earth would you need to see Lucca for?’

Vivien was in the grip of shock and acting on automatic pilot but, regardless, the overpowering necessity of seeing Lucca in the flesh shone like a beacon in the darkness of her turmoil. It was almost two years since she had last laid eyes on him. Lawyers had dealt with the legal proceedings and a nanny collected Marco for his visits with his father. Lucca’s immense wealth had ensured that there was no requirement for him to tolerate a more personal connection with his estranged wife.

‘I have to see him.’ Vivien was slowly, clumsily striving to consider the practicalities of travelling up to London. As it was a day on which Vivien usually worked, Rosa would soon be arriving to look after Marco and would stay until six that evening. ‘Are you going out tonight?’

Surprised by that change of subject, Bernice frowned. ‘I’ve nothing organised…’

‘Goodness knows what time I’ll get to see Lucca. I expect I’ll be very low on his list of welcome visitors. So I’ll probably be back late,’ Vivien explained anxiously. ‘I can arrange for Rosa to stay longer and put Marco to bed. Could you babysit until I get home?’

‘If you go anywhere near Lucca, you’ll be making the biggest mistake of your life!’ Bernice swore in vehement annoyance.

‘I have to tell him how sorry I am…that’s the very least of what I owe him,’ Vivien pointed out tightly.

In the strained silence that fell, a calculating light entered Bernice’s appraisal. ‘Possibly it’s not such a bad idea after all. You could use the opportunity to tell Lucca that you are hopelessly broke—’

Vivien flinched. ‘I couldn’t!’

‘Then I won’t be able to look after Marco,’ her sister countered without hesitation.

Frustration and embarrassment fought inside Vivien. ‘All right…I’ll raise the subject and see if something can be sorted out…’

Her capitulation made Bernice smile with amused triumph. ‘Fine…then just this once I’ll babysit. Let’s hope that when Lucca sees you grovelling, he feels excessively generous.’

Informed of Vivien’s arrival, Lucca rose and called a five-minute break in the meeting he was chairing.

Able to view his estranged wife through the glass partition that surrounded the reception area, Lucca stilled on the landing above. In the vast, opulent space below, Vivien looked small, slight and insignificant. Her brown top and skirt were shapeless and ill fitting and she probably owned at least three sets of the same outfit. She hated shopping and buying in triplicate helped her to avoid it. Shorn of his care and attention, she had regressed from the standards he set at shocking speed and barricaded herself back into her unfashionable shell. Her nails were unpainted, her silky blonde hair caught up rather messily in a cheap plastic clip.

In her current guise, she was not a woman likely to turn male heads at first glance. Yet she possessed a luminous beauty that not even the dullest presentation could conceal. His keen gaze lingered on the visible slice of narrow shoulder blessed with skin as opalescent as a pearl and moved on to the delicate perfection of her profile and the tantalising femininity of her slim, restive hands and slender ankles. A raw flame of desire blistered through his big, powerful frame and rage at his own lack of control surged in its wake and balled his own hands into hard fists.

Once, he recalled bleakly, he had thought her sweet and unspoilt and loyal unto death. Her warmth and modesty had enchanted him and her honesty and kindness had made a huge impression on his cynical view of the world. There had been nothing false about her. He had truly believed he had struck gold. He had believed that his marriage would work where so many others broke down. He was a man to whom failure of any kind was anathema and he had chosen his wife with great care and caution. Yet she had proved completely unworthy of the ring he had put on her finger.

Righteous derision made him look away from her and the chill of intellectual control soon cooled the fire in his blood. For what good reason had he walked straight out on an important meeting? His essential courtesy had momentarily misled him, he decided, swinging on his heel to return to the conference table. After all, he had not invited Vivien to storm his office in the middle of his working day and demand his attention.

Her response to Jasmine Bailey’s confession in print was, however, very typical of her and he could have predicted it, Lucca conceded grimly. He knew Vivien well. Indeed, he had once prided himself on the reality that he excelled at everything at which she was useless. For all her apparent outward calm, Vivien could react with staggering impulsiveness and wildly undisciplined emotion. She was always uniformly blind to the darker motivations of others. She was a leading authority on rare ferns but she could neither recognise nor protect herself from the arts of calculation and manipulation. She would struggle to find a redeeming quality in even the most dislikeable human being.

But Lucca had no desire to be redeemed in her eyes. He did not wish to see her either and regarded her spontaneous arrival at his office as a piece of foolishness, likely to plunge her into embarrassment. To stage her descent on the same day that Jasmine Bailey confessed her lies to the world was exceptionally bad timing. Had Vivien no sense whatsoever? He had often thought not. If the press realised where she was, the paparazzi would arrive in hordes. Angling his wide shoulders back beneath his superbly tailored grey suit jacket, Lucca strode back to his meeting.

Unaware that she had been under observation, Vivien took a seat. She was flustered and uneasy at the covert stares she was attracting. On the train, she had tried to contact Lucca by phone and failed. Once she had had a private number for his mobile phone but that number was no longer operational. He had been ‘unavailable’ when she’d phoned the Saracino building. When she had asked for the means to contact him in person, she had been coolly told that only Lucca could give out that information. Dismayed by the confidential wall holding her at bay, she had rung off again without requesting an appointment. Told on arrival that Lucca was exceptionally busy, she prepared herself for a long wait and comforted herself with the reflection that at least Lucca was in the building and not abroad on business as he might well have been.

At five that evening Lucca closed his meeting and instructed a member of his staff to show Vivien into his office. Having waited for almost three hours without a word of encouragement and with steadily shrinking expectations, Vivien was hugely relieved to be escorted out of the reception area. But she was a jelly of nerves at the very thought of seeing Lucca again after so long. She did not know what she was going to say to him. She had no idea how to bridge the enormous chasm between them. His supposed infidelity had formed a giant barrier between her and her emotions and now that barrier was gone and with it the script of how she was to behave.

Flustered and unsure of herself, Vivien walked through the door.

Lucca stood centre stage in his cool, contemporary office, effortlessly dominating his surroundings. Six feet three inches tall and gifted with the superb build of a natural athlete, he was an exceptionally good-looking guy with an overwhelmingly physical impact. All the oxygen Vivien needed to breathe seemed to vanish from the atmosphere. Her mouth ran dry and her heart thumped. Colliding with his stunning dark eyes was like falling on an electric fence. She was embarrassed and rather ashamed that at such a crucial moment she could still be so immediately aware of his magnetic attraction

‘So…’ murmured Luca, whose machinations in business had once led to him being described as smooth as black ice and twice as treacherous. His gorgeous accent sizzled along the single drawn-out word and sent a reflexive shiver down her taut backbone. ‘What brings you up from the country?’

CHAPTER TWO

DISCONCERTED entirely by that greeting, Vivien was reduced to gaping at Lucca in bewilderment. ‘But you know why I’m here!’

An aristocratic ebony brow ascended in polite disagreement, for he had exquisite manners. ‘How could I know?’

‘You sent me that newspaper,’ Vivien reminded him rather tautly, for her extreme nervous tension was being heightened by an awful sense of foolishness.

Lucca shifted a fluid brown hand and spread dismissive fingers in a tiny, almost infinitesimal movement. ‘So?’

Vivien tried and failed to swallow past the lump lodged in her throat. ‘Naturally I came straight here to see you.’

Lucca vented a soft, amused laugh that nonetheless contrived to create a chill somewhere deep down inside Vivien. ‘Naturally? Would you care to explain how this sudden uninvited visit of yours could possibly be described as natural?’

Recognising the dangerous tension in the atmosphere, Vivien was daunted. Her own nature was too open for her to comprehend Lucca’s darker and infinitely more complex temperament. She considered their meeting of overwhelming importance. His cool detachment disorientated her. ‘It’s like you’re not really listening to me. Don’t be like that, don’t act like this is a game in which the highest score wins!’

‘Don’t make assumptions, cara. You’re not inside my head and can have no idea what I’m thinking.’

‘I know that you have to be very, very angry with me—’

‘No, you’re wrong,’ Lucca traded. ‘Anger over a long haul is unproductive. Even dinosaurs move on eventually.’

Vivien was too wound up to hold back the frantic words bubbling to her lips. ‘I know you hate me and have to blame me for everything that’s gone wrong…and that’s OK, only what I deserve,’ she conceded humbly.

‘Don’t waste my time with this,’ Lucca urged, cold as ice.

Vivien raised anguished green eyes to his lean, strong face and willed him to listen to her and recognise her sincerity. ‘Sorry is a very inadequate word and may even be horribly aggravating in these circumstances but I have to say it—’

‘Why?’ Brilliant dark eyes lit by a tiny inner flame of gold rested on her in blatant challenge. ‘I’m not interested in hearing your apologies.’

‘You sent me that newspaper…’ Vivien reminded him again, but this time half under her breath.

Lucca shrugged a wide shoulder in a gesture of magnificent disregard.

In the silence that stretched, Vivien sucked in a deep, shuddering breath and pressed on. ‘You wanted me to know that I’d misjudged you. You wanted me to see the proof that you were innocent.’

‘Or maybe I wanted to make you squirm,’ Lucca suggested silkily. ‘Or maybe my pride demanded I have the last word. Whatever my motivation, it’s not important now.’

‘Of course, it’s important!’ Vivien was no longer able to restrain her teeming emotions. ‘Jasmine Bailey destroyed our marriage—’

‘No,’ Lucca slotted in with lethal quietness. ‘All the honours of that achievement go to you. If you had trusted me, we would still be together.’

Vivien fell back a step as if he had struck her. He had stripped the facts down to their bones and reached his own cruelly straightforward baseline. ‘It’s not that simple.’

‘I think it is.’

‘But you let me leave you!’ Vivien protested in desperation. ‘How hard did you try to persuade me that that horrible woman was lying?’

‘Guilty until proven innocent…is that how you rationalise what you did? You shifted the burden of proof back onto me. But there was no way I could prove that Bailey had concocted her story. I slept alone that night and every night during that week in the Med but only I can know that for a fact,’ Lucca pointed out, wide sculpted mouth grim. ‘Bimbos target rich men. You knew that when you married me. The first line of defence in our marriage should have been trust and you fell at the starting gate.’

‘I might have had more trust if you had been more vigorous in your denials!’ Vivien argued, half an octave higher in volume, for she was aghast at his complete lack of emotion and utterly crushed by his disinterest. ‘But it seems that you were too proud to try and convince me that I’d made a mistake and misjudged you—’

His intense gaze flashed gold and veiled. ‘Get a grip, cara. This visit is an embarrassment for us both and it gives me no pleasure to tell you that.’

‘You won’t let me say sorry, will you?’ Vivien grasped unhappily.

She was so earnest, so straightforward, so disastrously naïve, Lucca acknowledged. She was asking for trouble, inviting it in by calling open season. When he had married her, he reflected bitterly, he had planned to protect her from every evil. It had never occurred to him that he would find himself exiled to the enemy camp and the only escape route would entail compromising his own ideals. Sunlight distracted him from his brooding introspection as he studied her upturned face. The fine-grained perfection of her creamy skin illuminated green eyes with the depth and clarity of jewels and a wide, soft, vulnerable mouth as juicy and inviting as a ripe cherry. His body reacted with infuriating immediacy and hardened.

Vivien connected unwarily with riveting black eyes that turned her bones to water. She felt hot, weak and dizzy, her physical response to his aggressive masculinity instant and familiar. Black lashes as lush as his infant son’s snapped down over his gaze, narrowing them to a vibrant glimmer, and he stepped back with measured cool.

‘I don’t know why you’ve come to see me,’ Lucca stated with a cutting lack of expression.

‘Yes, you do…you know absolutely why!’ Vivien reasoned tautly, cheeks hotly flushed with agonised self-consciousness. She was struggling to concentrate rather than cringe at the suspicion that he had noticed her humiliating reaction to his proximity.

‘But possibly I don’t wish to engage on that subject,’ Lucca fenced in a tone as smooth as black velvet. ‘Why don’t you tell me instead how Marco is doing?’

Vivien blinked and then the tense anxiety etched on her face was softened by the warm beginnings of a loving smile. ‘He’s doing wonderfully well…he learns everything so fast, you know—’

Even that hint of a smile increased Lucca’s anger. ‘No, I don’t know.’

‘Sorry?’ Vivien didn’t understand. She had hoped that talking about their son, currently the only shared element in their lives, might take some of the chill out of the atmosphere.

‘I said that no, I don’t know how fast Marco learns because I don’t see enough of my son to make that kind of judgement. Obviously, he’s always doing or saying something new and different by the time I see him again.’

Vivien shrank at that icy clarification. ‘I suppose he must do.’

‘Evidently, it hasn’t occurred to you either that I also missed out entirely on his first smile, his first step and his first word.’

Over-sensitive tears lashed and stung the back of Vivien’s eyes and she had to keep them very wide to prevent them from spilling out and betraying her.

‘I suppose that I should count myself lucky that he seems to recognise me from one visit to the next,’ Lucca completed with the same cold, flat intonation.

For the first time, Vivien was confronted by his bitterness where their child was concerned. In shock, she swallowed so hard she hurt her throat and had to look away until she had control of herself again. Understanding how he must have felt at being excluded and essentially left unaware of all the most important moments in his toddler son’s life, how could she blame him for his hostility? It seemed beneath her to remark that he was talking like a much fonder father than she would ever have expected him to become. One of her least favourite recollections was Lucca’s annoyance when she had fallen pregnant.

‘I wish I knew what to say,’ she began awkwardly.

‘Not the overworked, ever-cheerful English cliché for the occasion…please,’ Lucca derided. ‘Perhaps it is now sinking in on you that, like most divorced couples, we don’t have much to talk about.’

‘We’re not divorced yet—’

‘As good as, cara mia,’ Lucca contradicted with an insolent insouciance that flayed her to the bone. ‘Before you leave—I’m sure you don’t want to be late—is there anything else you wish to discuss?’

Feeling harassed and unable to get her thoughts into any kind of useful order and horrendously loaded with guilt and unbearable regret, Vivien recalled her reluctant promise to her sister.

‘Money…’ she said abruptly.

Lucca frowned in surprise.

Vivien turned a beetroot colour and shifted uneasily off one foot onto the other. ‘I mean, I’m having a little trouble managing at present. I’m also well aware that it was my choice to accept only minimal financial assistance from you after we separated—’

‘We didn’t separate,’ Lucca interposed. ‘You walked out on our marriage.’

Vivien gritted her teeth together, for she did not require that reminder, nor did she wish to recall how very much she had once valued her ability to remain almost independent of his wealth. ‘Situations change. I was supposed to be writing a book this year and the department agreed to let me reduce my hours as a tutor. Unfortunately, the publisher decided the subject was too esoteric for the general public and pulled out. I won’t be able to return to full-time work in the botany department until the next academic year.’

‘I gather you had no contract with the publisher…’

Vivien nodded grudging confirmation and wondered how on earth she had let herself be persuaded into discussing something so remote from the emotions surging through her in great waves of frustrated grief.

‘My lawyers will contact yours and work out an appropriate arrangement. It’s not a problem. Did you think it would be a problem? Is that why you took the opportunity to approach me with fervent apologies today?’ Lucca demanded in a sudden switch of subject that caught her quite unprepared.

Vivien dealt him a startled glance. ‘Of course, it isn’t—’

‘Perhaps you thought I would be a mean bastard and refuse to step into the breach?’ Lucca flashed her a shimmering look of contempt.

‘No, I didn’t think that!’ But her pride, she was willing to admit, had shrunk from the prospect of admitting just how much she now needed the monetary help that she had once declined.

‘In spite of the fact that I was not the guilty party in the breakdown of our marriage, I was never petty. It was you who threw my generosity back in my face,’ Lucca condemned with harsh emphasis. ‘Although it was my right to contribute to my son’s upkeep, your selfish intransigence prevented me from advancing more than a tiny sum.’

Beneath that onslaught, Vivien had grown so pale and tense that her fine facial bones were clearly delineated by her pale skin. ‘I had no idea you felt like that about supporting Marco.’

His handsome jaw line squared to an aggressive angle. Again he shrugged, cold eyes black as polished jet dismissing her as a creature of no import. ‘Dio mio. Why should you have? Our only communication since you left has been through lawyers. Do you want a cheque now?’

Vivien reddened as though he had slapped her and pure anguish filled her, forming a tight, hard, intolerable knot somewhere below her ribs. Was he willing to do or say anything to get rid of her? ‘No…that’s truly not why I came to see you, Lucca.’

‘Yet a mercenary motive makes more sense than any other,’ Lucca fielded with supreme scorn. ‘You’re lucky you can’t be prosecuted for embarrassing me—’

‘Embarrassing you?’

‘As ex-wives go you look very poor and my enemies must think I keep a very tight hold on my cash reserves.’

‘I don’t have a mercenary motive!’ Vivien protested in growing consternation at his attitude. ‘Is it so hard for you to accept that I was and still am genuinely devastated by what Jasmine Bailey confessed in that newspaper today?’

Lucca elevated a brow. ‘No, I can accept that. Which of us enjoys being proven wrong? However, I really cannot understand why you felt the need to share your reaction with me in person.’

Vivien breathed in jerkily. ‘You don’t…?’

‘We’re virtually divorced—’

‘We’re not…stop saying that!’

‘But our marriage is over, dead, buried so deep it will never see the light of day again except on our son’s birth certificate,’ Lucca extended, his honeyed drawl thick with raw, biting derision. ‘Wake up and stop playing the Sleeping Beauty, who’s been stood up by the Prince. Two years have gone by. I hardly remember my time with you. It’s not even as though we were together that long.’

Every word was like a dagger plunged between Vivien’s ribs, poisoned and deadly, slicing in fast and hurting her more than she could bear. Part of her wanted to scream at him in tormented rebuttal but the other part of her wanted to curl up and die somewhere dark and silent and private. Every single memory of that same period they had been together remained as fresh as yesterday to her. It might have ended in tears but she had not allowed herself to become bitter and she had cherished the special memories she still had. In comparison, Lucca was telling her what no woman wanted to hear: he was spelling out the reality that theirs had only been one relationship amongst many in his past and he had moved on. Had it been two years? How had she contrived to overlook just how much time had passed?

Vivien looked peaky enough to be on the brink of fainting and her transparent pallor pierced the deep polar freeze with which Lucca had encased his responses. Had he set out to be deliberately cruel? He did not think so. He had only told her the truth, only pointed out that her behaviour was unwise and irrational. Even so, he asked her to sit down and when she refused offered her a drink.

‘I don’t…’ she muttered and looked fixedly down at her watch in an attempt to reinstate her self-discipline because inside herself she felt incredibly bruised and sensitive.

‘Yes, I know that, but perhaps just this once you could take a brandy,’ Lucca suggested rather curtly, disliking the tenor of his own concern. ‘When did you last remember to eat?’

‘Breakfast.’

He said nothing. She did not stop to eat when she was involved in anything that absorbed her concentration. He remembered the way his staff used to look after her in his absence, serving meals on trays when she was deep in her research and producing finger foods when her appetite needed tempting. She was extremely clever when it came to the rare plants she studied but not by any stretch of the imagination a woman of a practical bent.

Vivien lifted her head, green eyes haunted by the spectres of the past she had had and lost again. ‘You don’t want me to express my very great regret because you can’t forgive me,’ she whispered tightly. ‘I understand that and right now I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself.’

Taken aback by the intensity she exuded, Lucca pressed the brandy he had poured into her taut grasp. ‘I’ll call a limo for you. Did you travel here by train?’

‘Yes, but I don’t need a limo.’ She tipped the crystal glass to her lips, let the alcohol burn a fiery passage down past her dry and aching throat and pool like molten fire in the hollow pit of her tummy. While he watched with increasing fascination, she gulped the brandy down as though it were a soft drink and walked to the door. She was so deep in her own thoughts that she bumped into a chair and had to steady herself on it with one hand.