The Wedding Night Debt

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

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?