CHAPTER ONE
‘I WASN’T sure whether or not you would want to see this…’ Speaking in the uneasy tone of one apologising in advance for a potential offence, Lucca’s cousin, Alfredo, settled a tabloid newspaper down on the elegant glass desk.
At first glimpse of the smirking blonde displaying her bountiful curves in the centre of a page topped by garish headlines, Lucca Saracino froze, his lean, powerful face hardening. It was Jasmine Bailey, the bimbo whose lies had contributed to the destruction of his marriage. Now yesterday’s news as far as the rich and famous were concerned, Jasmine was plumbing even sleazier depths with the no-holds-barred revelations of exactly how low she had had to sink to achieve her original fifteen minutes of fame. In that uninhibited telling, the former topless model freely confessed that she had concocted her story about having shared a wild night of passion with the Italian billionaire, Lucca Saracino, on his luxury yacht.
‘You should sue her!’ Alfredo, a stockily built young man in his early twenties, urged with all the eager but unsophisticated zeal of a recent law graduate keen to prove his mettle.
Such an exercise would be futile, Lucca reflected, wide, sensual mouth assuming a sardonic curl. He would gain nothing from dragging a cheap little scrubber and his own long-lost reputation through the courts. More to the point, his divorce was about to be made final. Vivien, his soon-to-be ex-wife, had judged him guilty with a speed and lack of trust that would have shocked any male with a sense of fair play. Lifting her virginal little head high, Vivien had donned the mantle of saintly, suffering piety and vacated the marital home. Encouraged by her sour and money-hungry sister, Bernice, Vivien had walked out on their marriage in spite of the fact that she’d been carrying their first child. She had refused to listen to his declaration of innocence. The woman who wept buckets over Lassie films had shown him a face of stone.
‘Lucca…?’ Alfredo prompted in the brooding silence that every other member of Lucca’s personal staff would have read as a tacit warning.
With difficulty, Lucca suppressed an exasperated rebuke. Allowing his gormless cousin to work for him even temporarily had been an act of charity on his part. Alfredo was desperate to add some business experience to his unimpressive CV. Lucca had found him clever but impractical, conscientious but uninspired, well meaning but tactless. While others soared, Alfredo would always plod and often infuriate.
‘I owe you a big apology,’ the younger man continued awkwardly, standing square in front of the desk and evidently determined to say his piece. ‘I didn’t believe the Bailey woman had set you up. My parents didn’t either. We all thought you had been playing away!’
Every low suspicion of the level of that side of the family’s faith in him now fully confirmed, Lucca veiled grim dark golden eyes.
‘And absolutely nobody blamed you in the slightest,’ Alfredo hastened to assert. ‘Vivien just didn’t fit the bill—’
‘Vivien is the mother of my son. Don’t speak of her with anything other than the respect that is her due,’ Lucca murmured in icy reproof.
Alfredo flushed and hurried to offer profuse apologies instead. Impatient with his essential stupidity, Lucca dismissed him from his presence. Rising from his seat, he strode over to the imposing windows that proffered a spectacular view of London, but his forbidding gaze was turned inward and his thoughts were relentlessly bitter.
His infant son, Marco, was growing up without him in a mean little home where Italian was not spoken. There had been nothing civilised about the breakup of his marriage or the separation that had followed. Lucca had had to fight hard for what little he saw of the child he adored. He had been branded an unfaithful husband by Jasmine Bailey’s sleazy allegations. His lawyers had made it plain to him that he had no hope whatsoever of winning guardianship of his son from an estranged wife with an irreproachable reputation. It utterly outraged Lucca’s sense of justice that Vivien, who had wrecked their marriage with her distrust, should have effortlessly retained custody of his child.
He knew himself to be at best an occasional visitor on the outskirts of Marco’s life and he was afraid that his son forgot him altogether between visits. How could so young a child remember an absentee father between one month and the next? There was no way either that Vivien would be reminding Marco of the parent she had deprived him of possessing. But now there was also no way that she would be able to retain occupancy of the moral high ground…
As that tantalising reality pierced Lucca’s brooding reflections it was like a shot of adrenalin slivering through his lean, powerful frame with life-giving force. His luxuriant lashes lowered on eyes that suddenly glowed tiger-bright with scorching satisfaction. He pondered the very real possibility that Vivien might miss out on seeing Jasmine Bailey’s confession. An academic who took little interest in the everyday world, Vivien rarely read newspapers.
Lucca buzzed his secretary, instructed her to obtain a pristine new copy of the relevant paper and have it delivered to Vivien with a gift card bearing his compliments. Petty? He didn’t think so. Pride demanded that he draw her attention to the proof of his innocence.
It would spoil Vivien’s day and worse. Vivien had led a sheltered life. Naïve as she was, she bruised easily. She had the sort of conscience that kept her awake at night and would suffer the tortures of the damned when she was forced to face the truth that she had misjudged her husband. Natural justice might finally be operating on his behalf but nothing could make the punishment fit the crime, could it?
‘Please come out, Jock…’ Vivien begged the three-legged Scottie dog hiding under the sideboard.
Jock, rather optimistically named after a genial cartoon character, stayed put. He had been denied
the chance to get his teeth into the leg of the washing-machine repairman and therefore cruelly prevented from fulfilling his duty to protect his mistress from a male interloper. Dogs were not supposed to sulk but Jock went off in a huff if he was denied the delights of chasing male individuals from the premises.
Marco gave a gurgle of delight and began crawling under the sideboard to join his favourite playmate. Vivien scooped her son up. Huge brown eyes fringed by silky black lashes as long as fly swats reproached her for her interference. Marco made a determined squirming motion in an effort to escape his mother’s restraining arms and when that failed loosed a noisy shout of annoyance.
Vivien steeled herself for a battle. ‘No…’ she told Marco quietly and steadily, all too painfully aware after a recent very public humiliation at the supermarket that it was time that she learned how to handle her son’s fits of temper.
No? In visible disbelief, Marco gazed back at the fair-haired woman with her big anxious green eyes. No? His nanny, Rosa, used that unpleasant word to him, and his father too. But he knew his mother adored him, and loved to please him. Indeed at the age of eighteen months he had all the controlling instincts of a tyrant, who had already discovered that he needed only the most basic of weapons to triumph over all opposition: when thwarted, he threw unmanageable tantrums until he got what he wanted. He began to draw in a deep, deep breath in preparation for screaming and raging his way to a crushing victory.
Barely five feet two inches tall and of slender build, Vivien laid her solid little son down inside the playpen. Marco was strong and when he flailed around in a temper, she found it very difficult to hold him. Once he had fallen off her lap and bumped his head. After that scare she had begun putting him down for his own safety.
‘He’s a spoilt brat!’ her sister, Bernice, had condemned with a shudder of distaste that had cut Vivien’s tender maternal heart to the quick.
‘Demanding little chap, isn’t he?’ Fabian Garsdale, her friend and colleague in the botany department, had remarked with an air of shocked disapproval when he’d witnessed such a display. ‘Have you thought of applying a spot of good old-fashioned discipline?’
‘You must try really hard to be firm with him,’ Rosa, Marco’s part-time nanny, had advised when pressed to explain why her charge rarely subjected her to the same temperamental episodes. ‘Marco can be very strong-willed.’
Vivien performed a handstand beside the playpen. If she was quick off the mark, simply distracting Marco worked a treat. Mid-wail, her son paused for breath and then chortled with delighted surprise at the sight of his mother upside down. He sat up to get a better view and his glorious smile shone forth.
Flipping back upright again, Vivien swept him into her arms, hugged him tight and blinked back the moisture in her eyes. All the fierce agonising love that she had once felt for Lucca had been transferred to their son. Without Marco, she was convinced that she would have gone out of her mind with grief over her broken marriage. It had been her baby’s needs that first forced her to confront unpleasant realities and carve out a new life for them both. But the devastating pain of Lucca’s betrayal was still locked up inside her and she had to live with it daily. She had always felt things too deeply and had learnt as a child to conceal the embarrassing intensity of her feelings behind a quiet façade. To do otherwise made people uncomfortable.
The noise of a car pulling rather too fast into the gravel driveway outside announced Bernice’s return. Jock emerged from below the sideboard, uttered a single bark, looked nervously at the sitting-room door and then went into retreat again. A moment later, the door bounced back in protest on its hinges to frame a tall, leggy brunette, who would have been quite stunningly lovely had it not been for the angry hardness of her blue eyes and the clenched set of dissatisfaction marring her mouth.
Indifferent to Bernice’s, entrance for his aunt never gave him attention unless it was to lament his vocal output or his infuriatingly immature behaviour, Marco gave vent to a large sleepy yawn and rested back heavily in his mother’s arms.
Bernice sent the curly-headed toddler a look of irritation. ‘Shouldn’t the kid be having his nap?’
‘I was just about to take him up.’ Wondering sympathetically if her sister had suffered yet another disappointment in the employment stakes, Vivien went upstairs and tried not to worry about her own increasingly strained finances.
After all, it would be downright cruel to preach economy yet again to Bernice, who was already utterly miserable struggling to survive without champagne breakfasts and the like. Vivien was also guiltily conscious that her own personal reluctance to take anything other than the barest minimum financial assistance from Lucca after their separation was ultimately responsible for her overdraft at the bank. She had put pride ahead of common sense and was now paying the literal price.
At least, the cottage was small and, now that all the repairs had been done, economical to run. Of course, Bernice said it was only fit for dolls. But in the dark days of late pregnancy when Vivien had been alone and struggling to bear a life that did not contain even occasional glimpses of Lucca, the little house had seemed like a sanctuary. Embellished by a mature tree in the front garden, the cottage lay in pretty countryside not too far from the Oxford college where Vivien currently worked three days a week as a tutor in the botany department.