The Mistress Wife

Vivien fiddled with one trailing sleeve, hands so restless she wished she could fold them up and put them away. ‘I know you have to be wondering why I’ve come back to see you…’

‘You couldn’t find you way back to the train?’

Chagrined colour laced her tense pallor and her chin came up. ‘This is serious—’

‘Sì…’ A slanting smile that was somehow an insult formed on Lucca’s beautifully moulded mouth as he extended a brandy goblet. ‘Here we are practically divorced and all of a sudden you’re in my face. Quite unexpectedly, I’m very much in demand. You say this is serious. Is it?’

Vivien stood very straight, green eyes strained. ‘Please don’t be like this…I don’t know how to get through to you when you’re in this kind of mood.’

Lucca sent her a shimmering glance, dense black lashes low over dangerous golden eyes. ‘Perhaps if you had known that this day would come you might have acted differently during our separation—’

‘If I had had foreknowledge of that hateful woman’s confession today, there would never have been a separation!’ Vivien protested with strong feeling.

‘Two years ago you took a stranger’s word over mine and that was the end of our marriage,’ Lucca fenced back, cold as ice that burned.

Frantic though Vivien was to remind him of just how things had been between them at the time, she was afraid to add fuel to the flames of his hostility. ‘There was a distance between us then…you know there was. We hardly saw each other those last weeks. You were in New York, then you were on the yacht—’

‘You could have been with me,’ Lucca slotted in lethally.

Vivien knotted her restless hands together and then moved them apart in a gesture of frustration. ‘You worked such long hours—’

‘I warned you about that when I married you,’ Lucca interposed crushingly.

‘I had to have my studies to keep me busy. Lucca, please give me your whole attention for a couple of minutes so that I can say what I need to say,’ Vivien pleaded.

Lucca contrived to look eaten alive with boredom without either speaking or moving a muscle.

Her fingers knotted tight by her sides. ‘I made a mistake…a hideous, horrible mistake and I admit that. I also understand that you’re very angry.’

Lucca parted perfect masculine lips.

‘Shut up…don’t say anything!’ Vivien hurried into adding. ‘I know I have a lot of making up to do and that sorry doesn’t cover it. But I also know that when I was with you I was happier than I had ever been in my life before.’

Lucca expelled his breath in a slow measured hiss of self-restraint. How was he supposed to believe that?

High spots of pink bloomed over Vivien’s taut cheekbones. ‘I would do just about anything to get that happiness back.’

Anger flared like distant lightning in his steady scrutiny. ‘You had it and you threw it away again, cara. What you’re feeling now is not my problem.’

Vivien flinched. His dark-as-night eyes were hard as diamonds that cut glass. But although innate caution urged her to cut and run before she spelt out her intentions any more clearly, she could not bear to remain silent. The least she owed him was her honesty. ‘I accept that…but I’ve also learned a lot about myself in the last few hours. I haven’t been happy since I left you.’

‘That’s sad, but good to know,’ Lucca confided without a shade of remorse, remembering how she had looked on their Tuscan honeymoon: adoring green eyes full of joy, soft full mouth curved into a shy smile of contentment. An intimate recollection of her slim, eager body splayed across linen sheets followed and ignited his all-male libido.

Vivien collided with brilliant eyes as dark as jet. When the darkness of his intent gaze suddenly flamed gold, her heart lurched as though Lucca had aimed a kick at it. Her breath trapped in her dry throat, she stared back, her heartbeat pounding behind her ribs, her slight figure held taut with unbearable tension. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice, only the fear that gripped her was also laced with helpless longing. The desire she had made herself forget during their separation had flared up again inside her as though someone had tossed a flaming torch on a bale of hay.

Her voice emerged husky and breathless as she forced herself to concentrate long enough to say w

hat she knew she needed to say. ‘I still have feelings for you and I’m asking you to give our marriage another chance. I want you back.’

Intense satisfaction of the darkest kind engulfed Lucca when he was already on an angry high of lust. ‘You want me back?’

So tense that her muscles were hurting, Vivien jerked her chin in affirmation. ‘Yes. I want you back,’ she repeated, fighting to remain unbowed by his lack of reaction, fighting not to feel diminished by her own humble admission.

The buzz of fierce sexual awareness had thickened the atmosphere.

‘It’s not mutual,’ Lucca delivered, studying her ripe full mouth with fixed attention.

The rage locked inside him had expanded and was now threatening to explode. It had been a long time since he was that angry. Two years, in fact. Two years since his marriage had crashed and burned. Two years since she had sacrificed their relationship and their future child’s security with a resolute determination that had shattered his expectations of his once adoring little wife.