The Mistress Wife

Vivien reddened as though he had slapped her and pure anguish filled her, forming a tight, hard, intolerable knot somewhere below her ribs. Was he willing to do or say anything to get rid of her? ‘No…that’s truly not why I came to see you, Lucca.’

‘Yet a mercenary motive makes more sense than any other,’ Lucca fielded with supreme scorn. ‘You’re lucky you can’t be prosecuted for embarrassing me—’

‘Embarrassing you?’

‘As ex-wives go you look very poor and my enemies must think I keep a very tight hold on my cash reserves.’

‘I don’t have a mercenary motive!’ Vivien protested in growing consternation at his attitude. ‘Is it so hard for you to accept that I was and still am genuinely devastated by what Jasmine Bailey confessed in that newspaper today?’

Lucca elevated a brow. ‘No, I can accept that. Which of us enjoys being proven wrong? However, I really cannot understand why you felt the need to share your reaction with me in person.’

Vivien breathed in jerkily. ‘You don’t…?’

‘We’re virtually divorced—’

‘We’re not…stop saying that!’

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‘But our marriage is over, dead, buried so deep it will never see the light of day again except on our son’s birth certificate,’ Lucca extended, his honeyed drawl thick with raw, biting derision. ‘Wake up and stop playing the Sleeping Beauty, who’s been stood up by the Prince. Two years have gone by. I hardly remember my time with you. It’s not even as though we were together that long.’

Every word was like a dagger plunged between Vivien’s ribs, poisoned and deadly, slicing in fast and hurting her more than she could bear. Part of her wanted to scream at him in tormented rebuttal but the other part of her wanted to curl up and die somewhere dark and silent and private. Every single memory of that same period they had been together remained as fresh as yesterday to her. It might have ended in tears but she had not allowed herself to become bitter and she had cherished the special memories she still had. In comparison, Lucca was telling her what no woman wanted to hear: he was spelling out the reality that theirs had only been one relationship amongst many in his past and he had moved on. Had it been two years? How had she contrived to overlook just how much time had passed?

Vivien looked peaky enough to be on the brink of fainting and her transparent pallor pierced the deep polar freeze with which Lucca had encased his responses. Had he set out to be deliberately cruel? He did not think so. He had only told her the truth, only pointed out that her behaviour was unwise and irrational. Even so, he asked her to sit down and when she refused offered her a drink.

‘I don’t…’ she muttered and looked fixedly down at her watch in an attempt to reinstate her self-discipline because inside herself she felt incredibly bruised and sensitive.

‘Yes, I know that, but perhaps just this once you could take a brandy,’ Lucca suggested rather curtly, disliking the tenor of his own concern. ‘When did you last remember to eat?’

‘Breakfast.’

He said nothing. She did not stop to eat when she was involved in anything that absorbed her concentration. He remembered the way his staff used to look after her in his absence, serving meals on trays when she was deep in her research and producing finger foods when her appetite needed tempting. She was extremely clever when it came to the rare plants she studied but not by any stretch of the imagination a woman of a practical bent.

Vivien lifted her head, green eyes haunted by the spectres of the past she had had and lost again. ‘You don’t want me to express my very great regret because you can’t forgive me,’ she whispered tightly. ‘I understand that and right now I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself.’

Taken aback by the intensity she exuded, Lucca pressed the brandy he had poured into her taut grasp. ‘I’ll call a limo for you. Did you travel here by train?’

‘Yes, but I don’t need a limo.’ She tipped the crystal glass to her lips, let the alcohol burn a fiery passage down past her dry and aching throat and pool like molten fire in the hollow pit of her tummy. While he watched with increasing fascination, she gulped the brandy down as though it were a soft drink and walked to the door. She was so deep in her own thoughts that she bumped into a chair and had to steady herself on it with one hand.

‘I insist that you wait for a limo to take you to the station,’ Lucca decreed.

‘I don’t listen when you insist any more.’ Vivien held her fair head high on her slender neck and her slight shoulders hurt with the tension of her rigid carriage.

Our marriage is over, dead, buried so deep it will never see the light of day again.

‘Vivi…be sensible.’

The use of that affectionate abbreviation of her name hurt like the sting of a bee, at first only a sharp, tiny, needling sensation that would ultimately be followed by greater pain. Her lovely face pale but seemingly serene, she walked out through the reception area and stepped into the sanctuary of the lift, horribly ill at ease beneath the prying, curious eyes trained on her. Already she was remembering other occasions when Lucca had called her by that name.

‘Vivi…don’t nag,’ he would reprove when she had endeavoured to persuade him to aim at spending one evening a week with her. An evening that would just be for them, not a night when they socialised with others or a night when he worked so late that she fell asleep alone in their bed. ‘Quality time is what you save for children and thankfully we don’t have any yet.’

‘Vivi…the scent of your skin drives me wild,’ he used to groan, kissing her awake with the seductive expertise for which he was famed and, even though she had so often been tired and sad, the only earthly paradise she had ever known had been the magic she had discovered in his arms.

‘Vivi…life will be so sweet for you now that you have me,’ he had promised with dazzling confidence and conviction on their wedding night and she had blindly trusted and believed it would be exactly as he’d said it would be.

The lift came to a halt and jolted Vivien back to the present and the noise and bustle of the busy ground floor. On the street, she caught a glimpse of her own ghostly reflection in a shop window and a laugh that was no laugh at all was torn from her.

Typically, it had not even occurred to her to think about her own appearance. When she had left Lucca, she had decided that such frivolous considerations were no longer necessary. But now she was aghast at her pale, plain reflection and the deeply unsexy baggy silhouette of her linen top and skirt. She should have dressed up for Lucca’s benefit. Perhaps he would have listened then. An Italian to the backbone, from the skin out he exuded designer elegance.