The Mistress Wife

hed, smoother than silk sliding on silk. ‘Next time, I’ll do the ditching.’

Her glowing happiness died as if someone had switched off an interior light. She turned her head away.

Lucca studied her forlorn aspect with the intensity of a highly suspicious male. She looked so quiet and acted so shy and undemanding. He would have been prepared to swear that she had not a devious bone in her tiny body. But somehow, when it came to getting her own way, she was the equivalent of an armoured battering ram. She could be terrifyingly effective and he had never yet worked out how she achieved her results.

Her unsung triumphs were many more than she would ever guess. When he had first asked her out, he had only wanted an affair, but he had been hooked into an exclusive arrangement straight off and choosing a diamond ring by the next full moon. Shattered by the speed of his own capitulation, he had planned to stay engaged for years and years. However, her refusal to move in with him had sent wedding bells flying to the top of his agenda. When he’d said he was too busy to take a honeymoon, she’d said that if he was returning to work immediately, so must she and, oh, yes, by the way…she would have to do a two-week-long stint with students at some remote cottage in the chilly Scottish Highlands. He had arranged the honeymoon the same day. All those subtle feminine victories in mind, Lucca levered himself back from her, sprang off the bed and strode into the bathroom.

He was about to get in the shower when Vivien entered the bathroom.

‘So do it now,’ she told him curtly.

Lucca frowned in sincere incomprehension. ‘Do…what?’

‘Ditch me.’ Sea-green eyes challenged him. ‘Go ahead…I’m waiting.’

‘But I don’t want to ditch you!’ Lucca spelt out, sardonic as he could be.

‘Then, Lucca…I’ll do it for you,’ Vivien countered, sweeter than saccharine in tone. ‘You’re ditched.’

‘Dannazione! What are you playing at?’ Lucca raked at her with wrathful incredulity.

‘I don’t like threats. Don’t you dare talk about ditching me just because I made the mistake of letting you into my bed again!’ Vivien warned him hotly.

With another bitten-back swear word, Lucca yanked a towel from the rail and knotted it round his lean hips. He thrust spread fingers through his cropped black hair, which would have been as luxuriantly curly as his son’s had he not kept it short. ‘I was teasing you…’

Fingernails biting painful crescents into her palm, Vivien stood her ground. ‘If I drove you to the edge of a cliff and abandoned you above a thousand-foot drop, would you consider that “teasing“?’

Dark blood flared over his fabulous cheekbones. ‘Who told you I didn’t like heights?’

‘Your sister.’ Vivien winced, her lovely face taking on a guilty cast. ‘I’d never have let you know I knew if you hadn’t said what you did. Especially not after you were so incredibly brave climbing up onto the balcony.’

Lucca endeavoured to hang onto his grim expression and failed. She had hit back at him and now she was beating herself up for it. A wicked grin chased the bleak aspect and tugged at the corners of his beautiful mouth. ‘Are you going to tell people? Hold it over me every time I annoy you?’

Vivien slowly shook her fair head. ‘I wouldn’t do that to you.’

Lucca closed his hands over hers and tugged her close. ‘For just a minute or two, being with you again spooked me, bella mia.’

As in once burned, twice shy? As in, I can’t stick this woman? As in, What on earth am I doing with her again? A frantic need to know exactly what he had meant by that word ‘spooked’ gripped Vivien. But it was not the time to subject him to an interrogation.

‘It’s been a very emotional evening,’ she conceded.

Slumberous heat flamed in his golden appraisal. ‘We need to relax,’ he told her, untying the wrap she had put on and trailing it off.

‘Lucca!’ she gasped.

‘If you think that is shocking…’ gorgeous eyes glinting, he dropped his towel ‘…wait until you see what I can get up to in the shower.’

Around dawn he eased out of bed without waking her and pulled on his clothes. Hooking his jacket over his finger, he surveyed her peaceful profile. Fabian Garsdale was surely out of the picture now. He strolled across the landing, surveyed his sleeping son with immense pride and went downstairs. Jock whined from behind the kitchen door. Lucca hesitated and then suppressed a groan.

Jock was just waiting to pounce. It took some pretty nifty footwork to prevent the little terrier getting in a nip and, frustrated by his lack of success, Jock pulled his falling-over stunt. Lucca located the biscuit tin and extracted a chocolate biscuit, which he wafted above the still animal. Scrambling up, Jock displayed amazing powers of recovery and snatched at the biscuit. When the biscuit remained out of reach, he uttered a bark of furious protest.

‘We have to come to a deal,’ Lucca told his tormentor, squatting down to meet defiant black eyes set in a shock of long, dusty dark hair. Lucca was reminded of an aggressive floor mop. ‘A deal that involves bribery and corruption in return for my safe passage. Here…’

Bristling with distrust, Jock accepted the biscuit and bore it off under the table. Lucca had never had a pet as a child. He regarded Vivien’s dysfunctional dog in much the same way as he would have regarded any new project or challenge. But when Jock abandoned the biscuit to noisily mark Lucca’s departure with a flurry of unimpressed barking, Lucca started laughing.

‘’You can go back to sleep now…enjoy a lie-in to recuperate, cara mia, ‘Lucca teased with the all-male satisfaction of a guy who had just ravished a woman within an inch of her life.

Her body indolent after that overdose of pleasure, Vivien lifted languid arms and wound them round his neck. ‘Lie-ins are wonderful. Can I assume that you’re planning to get Marco up and give him his breakfast?’