The Mistress Wife Read online

  Her mother had died of a heart attack when Vivien was seventeen. She had been at university when her father had passed away after many months of stress following severe financial reverses. Bernice had been hit very hard by the sale of the Dillon family home and the beautiful antiques, which she had grown up believing would one day be hers. Vivien had found it impossible to comfort her sibling for that loss.

  The shrill of the doorbell startled Vivien out of an anxious re-examination of her failings as an adoptive daughter and sister. A courier passed her a package and raced away again on his motorbike.

  ‘What is it?’ Bernice demanded from behind Vivien as the smaller woman stared down dumbfounded at the elegant gilded card bearing her estranged husband’s signature in a careless black scrawl.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Having assumed the parcel contained a present for Marco, Vivien frowned in confusion when she found a newspaper inside the quite ludicrously opulent gift bag.

  Instantly, she froze, for she recognised the photo of the voluptuous blonde promising to spill all her secrets on page five. Her tummy quivered and flipped with nausea and her palms grew damp. Why on earth would Lucca be so fantastically cruel as to send her an article about Jasmine Bailey? She thumbed clumsily to the relevant page, deaf to her sister’s piercing demand that she pass the publication to her.

  Finding the headline of LIES MADE MY FORTUNE, Vivien read the first few paragraphs of the double-page spread three times over. With a total lack of even rudimentary shame, Jasmine confessed in print that her claim to have slept with Lucca Saracino had been an elaborate and highly effective lie couched to gain her publicity and win her invites to society parties. The wild all-night bout of adulterous passion, which the glamour model had described in such disgusting detail just two short years earlier, had been a complete fabrication.

  Vivien was welded to the spot by a curious spreading numbness that appeared to be threatening her brain as much as her body. Perspiration dampened her brow. Jasmine Bailey had made up her story? It had all been a wicked lie? Her stomach felt hollow. Lucca had not betrayed his marital vows. Lucca had been true to her…and she? And she? She had believed the very worst of him and discounted his denials. She had turned her back on her husband and their marriage. That rolling agony of horrifying truth swallowed Vivien alive. It was like falling into an abyss and drowning.

  ‘I got it all wrong…I misjudged Lucca…’

  ‘You…you did what?’ her sister questioned loudly, impatience impelling her to snatch the newspaper from Vivien’s loosened grasp.

  Vivien raised a trembling hand to her brow where unbearable tension was pounding out a drumbeat of self-blame. Her mind just could not cope with the enormity of Jasmine Bailey’s confession. It had hit her like a brick on glass and shattered her. The world she had remade had been shattered with it. In the space of a moment she had gone from being a woman who believed she had been right to walk away from her unfaithful husband to a woman who had made a huge and appalling mistake that had damaged both the man she loved and their child.

  ‘Surely you’re not being taken in by this rubbish?’ Bernice queried on a cutting note of scornful dismissal. ‘Now that she’s yesterday’s news, Jasmine Bailey would say or do anything to get her name back into the headlines!’

  ‘But not that…her story tallies with exactly what Lucca said at the time, only…’ Vivien’s voice lost power and then regrouped in a choky tone as her throat convulsed on the tears she was fighting back. ‘Only I wouldn’t listen to him—’

  ‘Of course you didn’t listen!’ her sister snapped. ‘You had too much sense to listen to his lies. You knew he was a notorious womaniser even before you married him. Didn’t I try to warn you?’

  A lot of people had tried to warn Vivien off marrying Lucca Saracino. Nobody had been happy about their union. Not his family and friends and not her own either. Everyone had been astonished and then critical of the chances of such an apparent mismatch lasting. Supposed well-wishers had variously told Vivien that she was too quiet, too reserved, too old-fashioned, too academic and insufficiently exciting for a male of Lucca’s smooth sophistication. She had dutifully listened to all the concerned onlookers and her confidence had been battered low even before the wedding. At the end of the day, however, Lucca would still only have had to snap his fingers for her to have come running across a field of flames. She had loved him more than life itself and had been as lost and helpless as a child against the power of that love.

  ‘You’re virtually divorced now anyway,’ Bernice reminded the smaller, slighter woman sharply. ‘You should never have married him. You were totally unsuited.’

  Vivien said nothing. She was staring into space, momentarily lost in her own feverish thoughts. Lucca had not, after all, betrayed her in Jasmine Bailey’s arms. The tacky blonde had pretty much conned her way onto Lucca’s yacht in the first place, Vivien recalled dully. Passing herself off as a student, Jasmine had been hired by one of Lucca’s guests to act as a companion to his adolescent daughter during the cruise and help her improve her English. When Jasmine had gone public with her colourful tale of a night of stolen passion nobody had been in a position to confirm or contradict her claims. Nobody but Lucca…

  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 stre
tched, 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—’