The Wedding Night Debt

‘As a rich man,’ he said, ‘I thought it best to protect myself. Here’s what you signed up to. I got the company. Lock, stock and smoking barrel. Just recompense for rescuing it from imminent collapse and saving your father’s frankly unworthy skin. I’m not sure if you know just how much he skimmed off the pension funds, how much I had to inject back in so that your employees didn’t find themselves of pensionable age with nothing but a begging bowl for company? Enough for me to tell you that it was millions.’ He breathed an exaggerated sigh and looked at her from under sinfully thick lashes. It had always amazed him that such a stupendously pretty face, so stunningly guileless, could house someone so cunning. It took all sorts to make the world.

Lucy hung her head because shame was never far away when her father’s name was mentioned. She looked at her perfectly manicured nails and thought how wonderful it would feel never to wear nail polish ever again. She might have a burning-of-the-nail-polish ceremony.

She distractedly half-smiled and Dio, looking at her, frowned. So...what was the joke? he wondered.

More to the point, what was the little secret? Because that had been a secretive smile.

‘As long as you are my wife,’ he informed her, banking down the simmering rage bubbling up inside him, ‘you get whatever you want. There are no limits placed on the amount of money you can spend.’

‘You mean provided you approve of the purchases?’

‘Have you ever heard me disapprove of anything you’ve ever bought?’

‘All I buy are clothes, jewellery and accessories,’ Lucy returned. ‘And only because I need them to...play the part I have to play.’

‘Your choice.’ He shrugged. ‘You could have bought a fleet of cars as far as I was concerned.’

She made a face and his frown deepened. He considered the possibility of giving her a divorce and dismissed the idea, although the reasons for that instant dismissal were a bit vague. Was he that possessive a man that he would hold on to a woman who wanted to escape? He had wanted revenge. And it might have come in a different shape from the one he had planned, but it had still come. He had still ended up with Robert Bishop’s company, hadn’t he? So what was the point of hanging on to Lucy and an empty marriage?

But then, she wasn’t just any woman, was she? She just happened to be his wife. The wife who had promised a lot more than she had ended up delivering. What man liked being short-changed?

‘You leave me,’ he told her in a hard voice, ‘and you leave with the clothes on your back.’

Lucy blanched. She loathed the trappings of wealth but wasn’t it a fact that that was all she had ever known? How would she live? What sort of job had years of being pampered prepared her for? She had never had the opportunity to do the teacher training course she had wanted to do. She had, instead, jumped into a marriage that had turned her into a clone of someone she didn’t like very much.

‘I don’t care,’ she said in a low voice and Dio raised his eyebrows in a question.

‘Of course you do,’ he told her. ‘You wouldn’t know where to begin when it came to finding a job.’

‘You can’t say that.’

‘Of course I can. You’ve grown up in the lap of luxury and, when most other girls would have branched out into the big, bad world, you married me and continued your life of luxury. Tell me, what has prepared you for that ugly, grim thing called reality?’

He would turf her out without a penny. She could see that in his eyes. He had never cared a jot about her and he didn’t care about her now. He had wanted the company and she had been a useful tool to acquire along with the bricks and mortar.

She just recently might have dipped her toe in that grim thing he was talking about called reality, but he was right. A life of creature comforts hadn’t prepared her for striking out with nothing. It would take ages for her to find her feet in the world of work, and how would she survive in the meantime? When he told her that she would leave with nothing but the clothes on her back, she was inclined to believe him. The clothes on her back wouldn’t include the expensive jewellery in the various safes and vaults.

‘I can see that you know where I’m coming from...’ He leaned forward, arms resting loosely on his thighs. ‘If you want out, then you have two options. You go with nothing, or...’

Lucy looked at him warily. ‘Or...what?’

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_3ffb5ab6-afe8-5758-8ede-480de0b85df3)

DIO SMILED SLOWLY and relaxed back.

Sooner or later, this weird impasse between them would have had to find a resolution; he had known that. Always one to dominate the situations around him, he had allowed it to continue for far longer than acceptable.

Why?

Had he thought that she would have thawed slowly? She’d certainly shown no signs of doing anything of the sort as the months had progressed. In fact, they had achieved the unthinkable—a functioning, working relationship devoid of sex, a business arrangement that was hugely successful. She complemented him in ways he could never have imagined. She had been the perfect foil for his hard-nosed, aggressive, seize-and-conquer approach to business and, frankly, life in general. He hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he had had to haul himself up by his boot straps, and the challenges of the journey to success had made him brutally tough.

He was the king of the concrete jungle and he was sharp enough to know that pretenders to the throne were never far behind. He was feared and respected in equal measure and his wife’s ingrained elegance counterbalanced his more high-voltage, thrusting personality beautifully.

Together they worked.

Maybe that was why he had not broached the subject of all those underlying problems between them. He was a practical man and maybe he had chosen not to rock the boat because they had a successful partnership.

Or maybe he had just been downright lazy. Or—and this was a less welcome thought—vain enough to imagine that the woman he still stupidly fancied would end up coming to him of her own accord.

The one thing he hadn’t expected was talk of a divorce.

He poured himself another drink and returned to the chair, in no great hurry to break the silence stretching between them.

‘When we got married,’ Dio said slowly, ‘it didn’t occur to me that I would end up with a wife who slept in a separate wing of the house when we happened to be under the same roof. It has to be said that that’s not every man’s dream of a happy marriage.’

‘I didn’t think you had dreams of happy marriages, Dio. I never got the impression that you were the sort of guy who had fantasies of coming home to the wife and the two-point-two kids and the dog and the big back garden.’

‘Why would you say that?’

Lucy shrugged. ‘Just an impression I got.’ But that hadn’t stopped her from falling for him. She had got lost in those amazing eyes, had been seduced by that deep, dark drawl and had been willing to ignore what her head had been telling her because her heart had been talking a lot louder.

‘I may not have spent my life gearing up for a walk down the aisle but that doesn’t mean that I wanted to end up with a woman who didn’t share my bed.’

Lucy reddened. ‘Well, both of us has ended up disappointed with what we got,’ she said calmly.

Dio waved his hand dismissively. ‘There’s no point trying to analyse our marriage,’ he said. ‘That’s a pointless exercise. I was going to talk to you about options...’ He sipped his drink and looked at her thoughtfully. ‘And I’m going to give you a very good one. You want a divorce? Fine. I can’t stop you heading for the nearest lawyer and getting divorce papers drawn up. Course, like I said, that would involve you leaving with nothing. A daunting prospect for someone who has spent the last year and a half never having to think about money.’

‘Money isn’t the be all and end all of everything.’

‘Do you know what? It’s been my experience that the people who are fond of saying things like that are the people who have money at their disposal. People who have no money are usually inclined to take a more pragmatic approach.’ Having grown up with nothing, Dio knew very well that money actually was the be all and end all of everything. It gave you freedom like nothing else could. Freedom to do exactly what you wanted to do and to be accountable to no one.

‘I’m saying that it doesn’t always bring happiness.’ She thought of her own unhappy, lavish childhood. From the outside, they had looked like a happy, privileged family. Behind closed doors, it had been just the opposite. No amount of money had been able to whitewash that.

‘But a lack of it can bring, well, frustration? Misery? Despair? Imagine yourself leaving all of this so that you can take up residence in a one-bedroom flat where you’ll live a life battling rising damp and mould on the walls.’

Lucy gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘Aren’t you being a bit dramatic, Dio?’

‘London is an expensive place. Naturally, you would have some money at your disposal, but nothing like enough to find anywhere halfway decent to live.’

‘Then I’d move out of London.’

‘Into the countryside? You’ve lived in London all your life. You’re accustomed to having the theatre and the opera and all those art exhibitions you enjoy going to on tap... But don’t worry. You can still enjoy all of that but, sadly, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. You want your divorce? You can have it. But only after you’ve given me what I expected to get when I married you.’

It took a few seconds for Lucy’s brain to make the right connections and catch up with what he was telling her but, even so, she heard herself ask, falteringly, ‘What are you talking about?’

Dio raised his eyebrows and smiled slowly. ‘Don’t tell me that someone with a maths degree can’t figure out what two and two makes? I want my honeymoon, Lucy.’

‘I... I don’t know what you mean...’ Lucy stammered, unable to tear her eyes away from the harsh lines of his beautiful face.