Kitabı oku: «The Wedding Night Debt»

CHAPTER ONE

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?...creative use 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?’