The Mistress Wife

She had ended their marriage. She was responsible for the damaging limitations that had restricted Lucca’s ability to build up a relationship with his son. But in an effort to redress that wrong was she prepared to give up everything that she had worked so hard to build up over the past two years? She worked in a specialist field of botany and options for career moves were few and far between. It could well be a long time before she found an equally suitable position. On the other hand the opportunity and excuse to spend more time with Marco before he outgrew his baby years would be very welcome to her.

‘There has to be an alternative,’ Vivien mused unevenly, telling herself that it would be most unwise for her to aspire to any friendlier or less formal relationship with Lucca. Unhappily a certain amount of distance was going to be the only way she could handle any further exposure to Lucca. Anything else would break her heart all over again. And her heart was already cracked right down the middle.

What else could it be? Sudden seething emotional pain gripped her. I only wanted sex, he had told her bluntly. Yet sex, and surely far more exciting sex than she could supply, was easily available to him. How far could contempt drive a guy like Lucca? There he was, megawatt handsome and confident, and he had the most beautiful woman in the world in his life. But in spite of those exciting realities, Lucca had chosen instead to bed his wife again. What did that tell her? And what had Lucca himself said? He had asked her the cruellest question, she recalled, sinking deeper into the hold of her despairing thoughts. Do you love me this much? Or this much?

‘There is no alternative,’ Lucca delivered grimly, studying the purity of her pensive profile with bleak condemnation. Anger lay like a cold weight of ice inside him. Her physical delicacy and her aura of vulnerability seemed the very essence of sweet old-fashioned femininity. But she had been cold as charity when she’d walked out on him. In addition, he was not going to beg for time with the son she had virtually stolen from him. Either she gave ground, and a lot of it, or he would fight and he would fight dirty without a shred of conscience.

Vivien wasn’t listening. At that instant, she was acknowledging with great sadness and shame that, whether she liked it or not, Lucca had had good reason to scorn her renewed declaration of love and question the level of her commitment to any such promise. Two years ago, she had, after all, let him down very badly on that score. Her once fervent avowals of love must have seemed like lies to him after she had left him, deaf to his plea of innocence and convinced of his infidelity. She, who prided herself on her loyalty and dependability, had displayed feet of solid clay.

‘If you choose not to facilitate my need to get to know my son better, I will take this to court.’

The cold, precise edge to his accented drawl cut through her abstraction like a scythe. Her head spun round, jewelled green eyes full of dismay. ‘Court? Are you serious?’

Lucca gazed steadily back at her, the uncompromising force of his dark, intense eyes making her tummy take a nervous flip. ‘Where Marco is concerned, I’ve been out in the cold long enough. You seem to take for granted the belief that Marco should live with you rather than with me.’

‘I don’t…I really don’t!’ Vivien had turned very pale because she was shaken by his perceptiveness. It was true that she had never even considered the idea that the child she adored might reside with anyone other than her.

Lucca recognised her denial as a lie and her complacency outraged his sense of justice. ‘I no longer have Jasmine Bailey’s sordid allegations hanging over my head. Why do you find it so difficult to think of me as a parent with a potential right to custody of my own child? How do you think I felt tonight when I heard Marco had been out on the street on his own? Lost and hurt and scared? Dependent on the compassion of a stranger?’

‘I imagine you felt as absolutely dreadful about it as I did,’ Vivien breathed unsteadily, folding her arms as if to ward off that attack.

‘You’re wrong. I was furious with you. You entrusted the most precious being in my life to Bernice the party girl!’ Scorching golden eyes assailed her in angry judgement of that mistake. ‘Marco could have died and I am quite prepared to take tonight’s events into a court room and let a judge decide who most deserves care and control of a vulnerable child!’

White as milk, Vivien clasped her trembling hands tight in on themselves. Her green eyes were dark with stress and fear. ‘There’s no need to threaten me with that course—’

‘Dannazione! There is

every need. My son was born eighteen months ago and right from the start it was clear that I was to be granted only the most minor role in his life,’ Lucca bit out harshly. ‘My child was two days old before I even knew he had been born! Have you any idea how that made me feel? Time and time again my perfectly reasonable requests to see my child were rescheduled and often for the meanest of excuses! One tiny sniffle and you wouldn’t let him out of your sight!’

His accusations, she registered in a sudden awful moment of insight into her own behaviour, had a horrible edge of truth. She had always loathed the Saturdays when she had had to hand her baby over to the nanny, who, acting as go-between, took him off to spend a few hours with Lucca. Initially Marco had cried pitifully at being divided from his mother and, although that had passed, Vivien had still hated the pain of having to part with him in the first place. She had felt as though Marco were being cruelly snatched from her and had worried herself sick while he’d been away from her for she had had the greatest difficulty in picturing Lucca the womaniser as a caring father.

In point of fact, she had resented the legal requirement to share her son with the same male who she believed had betrayed her by taking another woman into his bed. She was shocked by that belated realisation that, without ever appreciating what she was doing, she had been trying to punish Lucca by restricting access to Marco. Steeped in genuine regret, Vivien stared back at Lucca with hollowed miserable eyes. ‘I’m so sorry…’

His stunning dark golden gaze challenged hers. ‘Then don’t waste my time now and don’t force me to take you to court to fight for Marco.’

That blunt warning shook Vivien. He was serious. He was willing to fight for custody of Marco and possibly even eager for the excuse to do so. Furthermore, she only had herself to blame for the depth of his sense of injustice for she had not been generous with the amount of time she had allowed him to spend with his son.

‘Obviously, I don’t want that either,’ she muttered tautly. ‘I’m willing to make compromises. Exactly what do you want from me?’

A chilling smile of triumph slashed Lucca’s cool, sensual mouth. His lean, hard-boned face was stunningly handsome but strikingly hard and unyielding. ‘Reparation.’

CHAPTER SIX

AROUND a day and a half later, Vivien tidied her hair in her bedroom. The once-cluttered room was a good deal emptier than it had been the day before when a removal firm had arrived to pack the clothes, toys, books and nursery goods she would be taking with her. Lucca’s promise of furnished accommodation had been welcome because Bernice was remaining in the house.

Reparation, Lucca had called the debt he said she owed him. She had been appalled by his threat to challenge her custody of Marco and in that same instant her choice had been made. When Lucca had made it clear that he was even prepared to use Marco’s ordeal in the street to represent her as being an unfit parent, she had been utterly devastated.

There never had been any middle ground with Lucca, she acknowledged unhappily. Either one was with him or one was against him. It did not take great imagination to guess where a soon-to-be ex-wife who had sinned against him figured on that scale. Yet to those he cared about Lucca was the very truest of friends, who would offer every possible support in adversity without any expectation of return. But Lucca also made a very cold and implacable enemy. Once she had held special status in his world but not any more, she conceded dully, painfully aware of what she had stupidly surrendered of her own accord.

She had no idea how his justifiable annoyance at seeing so little of Marco had translated into the passionate sexual encounter that he had allowed to take place between them. She found it impossible to believe that Lucca could have found her too tempting to resist. She was no Helen of Troy and scarcely so beautiful that she could deprive any mortal man of his wits. Of course, Lucca never had been either easily understood or predictable. Humiliatingly, he had calmly dismissed what they had shared as just sex. Was that the truth? Or simply what he preferred to believe? Wasn’t it still possible that that passion could spark again into something that might be built on firmer foundations? Even a new beginning?

With a guilty little quiver at her reluctance to let go of her own most precious dream, Vivien shut down that dangerous high-risk thought train. Ostensibly, she was moving to London at Lucca’s request solely for his benefit and her son’s. Conscience told her that she did owe Lucca some compensation for the effect the breakdown of their marriage had had on his relationship with Marco. But at the same time she was also clinging fast to those promising words, ‘friendly and informal’. Lucca was about to become part of her life again. She would see him, get the chance to talk to him and maybe the differences that lay between them could be slowly dissolved.

From such small and humble beginnings, acorns had grown into giant oaks, and, when it came to Lucca Saracino, she loved him enough to take the rough with the smooth and be patient. All she longed for was just one more chance at getting it right with him. She would do absolutely anything to get that chance. Her eyes stung with embarrassing tears and she blinked them back. Mortified by her own desperate fervour, she laid down the hairbrush and hurried downstairs. A car was coming to collect her and Marco.

Bernice strolled out of the kitchen with a glass of wine. ‘So you’re still going ahead with this?’

Beneath her sibling’s censorious appraisal, Vivien tensed. ‘Yes.’