The Mistress Wife

Vivien squeezed between her own bed and Marco’s cot and tucked her son in for his morning nap. Possessed of two narrow bedrooms, her diminutive home was the perfect size for a single parent of one but stretched to capacity when required to house another adult. Even so, Vivien was overjoyed to have her sibling’s company and only wished she had foreseen the possibility that she might one day require roomier accommodation. Yet who could have guessed that her sister’s designer boutique in London would fail? Her poor sister had lost everything: her trendy Docklands apartment, her smart sports car, not to mention the majority of her fashionable but fickle friends.

‘Don’t even bother asking me how my interview went!’ her sister hissed furiously when Vivien joined her again. ‘The cheeky old hag virtually accused me of lying on my CV and I told her what she could do with her lousy hotel job!’

Vivien was taken aback ‘Surely the woman didn’t accuse you of lying—’

‘She didn’t have to…she started asking me questions in French and I hadn’t a clue what she was rattling on about!’ Bernice proclaimed in outrage. ‘I claimed a working knowledge of French on my CV…I didn’t say I was practically bilingual!’

Although it was news to Vivien that the sibling three years her senior had even a working knowledge of the French language, she hurried to soothe ruffled feathers with words of sympathy.

Unimpressed, Bernice pursed her lips. ‘It’s your fault that I was humiliated!’

‘My fault?’ Vivien stilled in dismay.

‘You’re still married to an incredibly rich man and yet we’re practically starving!’ Bernice condemned with ferocious bitterness. ‘You’re always moaning about how broke you are and making me feel guilty…I’m chasing rotten jobs way below my capabilities and you’re sitting home on your bum most of the week spoiling Marco like he’s a royal prince!’

Vivien was appalled at the level of her sister’s resentment and felt horribly responsible for her own deficiencies. ‘Bernice, I—’

‘You always were weird, Vivien. Look at your life!’ her angry sister urged with contemptuous clarity. ‘You live out here in the back of beyond with your freaky dog and precious son and you never do anything or go any place worth mentioning. You work in a boring job, live a boring life and have always been the most boring person I know. I wasn’t surprised when Lucca took to adultery on the ocean waves with a sexy blonde! The wonder was that he ever married a non-entity like you!’

Beneath that tirade, Vivien had turned white as milk. Bernice slammed into the sitting room and the cottage shook with the force of the door shuddering shut. Resolutely, Vivien thrust Bernice’s hurtful words down into

her subconscious. Fondling Jock’s ears to soothe his trembling, for loud voices upset him, Vivien reminded herself that her sister was going through a very unhappy time, which would have challenged anyone’s temper to the utmost. Nobody knew better than Vivien that it was tough building a new life out of the ashes of loss and destruction. It was particularly difficult for Bernice, who had never had to make compromises and who had taken her once privileged world entirely for granted.

In comparison, Vivien had been brought up to believe that she was an incredibly lucky little girl. Her birth mother and father might have died in a car accident when she was only months old but she had been swiftly placed for adoption with the affluent and socially prominent Dillon family. Their daughter, Bernice, had been just three years old and the couple had been eager to adopt a little girl to ensure that Bernice would never want for company.

Nobody had ever been unkind to Vivien in the Dillon household but she had failed to fulfil her adoptive parents’ fond hope that she would become Bernice’s best friend. Bernice and Vivien had had nothing in common and the age gap between the two girls had only underlined the differences. Sensitive to a fault, Vivien had grown up with the guilt-making awareness that she seemed to be a source of continual disappointment to her family. The Dillons had hoped that Vivien would be a girlie girl like Bernice, who would delight in fashion, ponies and ballet before branching out into fashion, young men and a wild social whirl.

Instead, Vivien had been shy and retiring and the clumsiest little girl in the ballet class. Horses had scared her only a little less than young men and she had avoided parties like the plague. A bookworm from the instant she’d learned to read, she had been confident only in the academic world where her intelligence was rewarded with top exam grades awarded at an early age. Her achievements in that line however had merely embarrassed her parents, who felt that it was somehow not quite normal for a young woman to be quite so keen on studying.

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.’