The Mistress Wife

‘But you could think about it…’ Vivien persisted unevenly.

‘I don’t need to think about it!’ Lucca bit out in raw, harsh dismissal.

Trembling and striving to conceal her anguish, Vivien dropped her head.

‘On the other hand,’ Lucca grated, ‘while our marriage was a mistake—’

‘Don’t say that,’ she urged, appalled by that brutal declaration given without hesitation as though it were established fact.

‘I still wouldn’t throw you out of bed…’

Totally taken aback by that unanticipated completion and unable to immediately understand it, Vivien looked up, the tip of her tongue snaking out to wet her dry lower lip. ‘Sorry…?’

With the expertise of a male to whom no move was a challenge around a woman, Lucca reached out and closed his arms round her slight figure to propel her forward and demonstrate his meaning with action. Vivien blinked up at him like a mesmerised owl. He bound her to him with strong hands and plundered her ripe mouth with a hot, hard sexual intensity that smashed down her every barrier.

Reeling from the surprise of that passionate onslaught, she swayed. Clamping her to the hard, muscular heat of his lean, powerful frame, he backed her up against the wall behind her.

‘Lucca…’ she mumbled unsteadily with no thought of resisting him, for he never, ever talked about feelings and had always used his raw sexuality as a means of communication. So, when he touched her again for the first time in two years, she believed she had broken through his barriers and that he was accepting her back into his life.

‘Want me?’ he growled.

‘Always…’

In answer he kissed her as though he were devouring her. It was incredibly sexy. Her head swam and her lungs burned from lack of oxygen, but she held him to her with eager, greedy hands. Mad excitement and joy were coursing through her in a seductive tidal wave. Her body was molten liquid in response, flaming with the feverish heat she had never dreamt she would feel again. A dulled, nagging ache pulsed at the very heart of her, making her shift forward into instinctive closer contact.

An almost imperceptible shudder ran through Lucca’s big, powerful frame. He wanted to lift her up against him and sink into the tight, sweet promise of her tiny body again and again and again until he had finally sated the blaze of blistering desire that inflamed him. But in the room next door another woman was waiting for him. A woman, he reminded himself doggedly, whom he could take without fuss or promises or complications. A split second later, however, he reached a decision. There was no reason why he should not celebrate his approaching freedom by taking his soon-to-be ex-wife back to his bed one more time purely to demonstrate just what she had carelessly thrown away…

Closing his lean brown hands over Vivien’s slim, clinging arms, he urged them down from his shoulders to her sides and forced a little space between them. ‘This is not good timing for me.’

Her glowing eyes clung to his lean, darkly handsome features. She could not conceal her dizzy happiness. ‘What does timing have to do with anything? I just want to be with you.’

Brilliant dark eyes shimmering, Lucca stilled. Outrage filled him. How could she think for one moment that it would be that easy to get him back? He would never forgive her. He was finished with her. Had she honestly believed that all she had to do was say sorry and they would kiss and make up like little kids after a childish argument? If she thought that, she was out of her mind! Cold, dark fury ran like bars of steel through Lucca and, at his coldest, he was also at his most merciless.

‘I think we could be talking at cross purposes, cara,’ Lucca murmured very drily. ‘I’m not interested in reinstating our former marriage. How many times do I have to tell you that that’s out of the question and very much in the past?’

Vivien had fallen as still as an accident victim. The colour was slowly draining from her delicate pointed face, leaving her waxen pale. She felt like someone trying to wade blindfolded through a swamp because she could not understand why he should suddenly be studying her as though she were a rather pathetic specimen under a lab scope. ‘But only thirty seconds ago, you were…you were k-kissing me,’ she stammered in bewilderment.

Lucca watched her and almost winced. She was so literal, so straightforward, seeing black and white and no shades of grey. Around him, she was an accident waiting to happen. That awareness only increased his anger. The blame for their wrecked marriage was hers, not his.

‘That was sex,’ he told her with cruel casualness.

Predictably, Vivien reddened and made restive movements, that three-letter word being one that she was always ludicrously keen to avoid. ‘Obviously, yes…but—’

‘I can fancy a quick tumble without any desire to embrace holy matrimony again,’ Lucca filled in with derisive cool. ‘As I recall, you were surprisingly hot between the sheets.’

At that unsought accolade, calculated to underline her loss of dignity, Vivien slapped him so hard her wrist went numb. She felt no shame or regret either. She would not allow him to speak to her like that. Hopefully too he would remember being slapped longer than he would remember her pitifully immediate surrender to his first contemptuous kiss. White as death, but her narrow spine rigid and her green eyes unseeing, she sidestepped him. She must not, could not allow herself to break down and make an even bigger fool of herself in his presence.

‘No woman has ever dared to hit me before…’ Hard jaw line squared, Lucca stepped in front of her to prevent her fast walk in the direction of the door.

‘It shows,’ Vivien told him half under her breath, striving not to let her evasive gaze come to rest on the angry red imprint of her fingers across one smooth, hard Latin cheekbone. ‘Whatever I did in the past, and however much I’ve annoyed you today, I had good intentions and no wish to hurt or offend. I don’t deserve to be spoken to as though I’m the dirt below your feet—’

‘I didn’t—’

‘Nor will I allow you to make me feel ashamed of trying to save our marriage—’

‘But you didn’t bloody well try for five minutes two years ago!’ Lucca slung back with an icy condemnation that stopped Vivien in her tracks.

She was already fighting to contain the anguish inside her. She had lost him finally and for ever. There was to be no going back, no second chance. He despised her. And could she really blame him? Everything that had gone wrong, it seemed, was solely her fault. Only, even in the midst of her utter misery, she knew that that was not strictly true. She might have been much happier with him than she had been without him but their marriage had been far from perfect and any compromises made had been hers alone.