The Wedding Night Debt

He had used her.

What he had wanted was what he had got. He had wanted someone to whom the social graces came as second nature. He mixed in the rarefied circles of the elite and she could more than hold her own in those circles because she had grown up in them.

As far as she knew, the sort of woman he was attracted to was probably completely the opposite to her.

He was probably attracted to dark-haired, voluptuous sirens who didn’t hang around the house in silk culottes and matching silk vests. He probably liked them swearing, cursing and being able to drink him under the table, but none of them would have done as a society wife. So he had tacked her on as a useful appendage.

And now he wanted her.

With divorce on the horizon, he wanted to lay claim to her because, as far as he was concerned, she was his possession, someone he had bought along with the company that had come with her.

He’d even set a time line on whatever physical relationship he intended to conduct!

Did it get any more insulting?

He knew that he’d be bored with her within a month!

She burned with shame when she thought about that.

She hated him and yet her sleep was disturbed by a series of images of them together. She dreamt of him making love to her, touching her in places she had never been touched before and whispering things in her ear that had her squirming in a restless half-sleep.

She awoke the following morning to an empty house. Dio had disappeared off to New York.

She’d used these little snippets of freedom to her benefit and now, as she got dressed, she felt that she should be a little more excited than she was.

It irritated her to know that, thanks to Dio, the glorious day stretching ahead of her was already marred with images of his dark, commanding face and the careless arrogance of what he had told her the evening before.

She made a couple of calls and then she headed out.

* * *

Dio, in the middle of a conference call, was notified of her departure within seconds of her leaving the house.

His personal driver—who had zero experience in sleuthing but could handle a car like a pro and could be trusted with his life—phoned the message through and Dio immediately terminated his conference call.

‘When she stops, call me,’ he instructed. ‘I’m not interested in whether she’s leaving the house. I’m interested in where she ends up.’

Suddenly restless, he pushed himself away from his desk and walked towards the floor-to-ceiling glass panes that overlooked the busy hub of the city.

He’d had a night to think about what she had told him and he was no nearer to getting his head around it.

So, she wanted out.

She was the single one woman who had eluded him despite the ring on her finger. To take a protesting bride to his bed would have been unthinkable. There was no way he would ever have been driven to that, however bitter he might have been about the warped terms of their marriage. And he could see now that pride had entered the equation, paralysing his natural instinct to charm her into the place he wanted her to be.

With the situation radically changed, it was time for him to be proactive.

And he was going to enjoy it. He was going to enjoy having her beg for him, which he fully intended she would do, despite all her protests to the contrary.

And, if he discovered that there was a man on the scene, that she had been seeing someone behind his back...

He shoved his hands in his pockets and clenched his jaw, refusing to give in to the swirl of fury that filled every pore and fibre of his being at the thought of her possible infidelity.

When he had embarked on Robert Bishop’s company buyout, this was not at all what he had envisaged.

He had envisaged a clean, fatal cut delivered with the precision of a surgical knife, which was no less than the man deserved.

Never one to waste time brooding, Dio allowed his mind to play back the series of events that had finally led to the revenge he had planned so very carefully.

Some of what he had known, he had seen with his own eyes, growing up. His father fighting depression, stuck in a nowhere job where the pay was crap. His mother working long hours cleaning other people’s houses so that there would be sufficient money for little treats for him.

The greater part of the story, however, had come from his mother’s own lips, years after his father’s life had been claimed by the ravages of cancer. Only then had he discovered the wrong that had been done to his father. A poor immigrant with a brilliant mind, he had met Robert Bishop as an undergraduate. Robert Bishop, from all accounts, had been wasting his time partying whilst pretending to do a business degree. Born into money, but with the family fortunes already showing signs of poor health, he had known that although he had an assured job with the family business he needed more if he was to sustain the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed.

Meeting Mario Ruiz had been a stroke of luck as far as Robert Bishop had been concerned. He had met the genius who would later invent something small but highly significant that would allow him to send his ailing family engineering concern into the stratosphere.

And as for Mario Ruiz?

Dio made no attempt to kill the toxic acid that always erupted in his veins when he thought of how his father had been conned.

Mario Ruiz had innocently signed up to a deal that had not been worth the paper it was written on. He had found his invention misappropriated and, when he had raised the issue, had found himself at the mercy of a man who’d wanted to get rid of him as fast as he could.

He had seen nothing of all the giddy financial rewards that should have been his due.

It had been such an incredible story that Dio might well have doubted the full extent of its authenticity had it not been for the reams of paperwork later uncovered after his mother had died, barely months after his father had been buried.

Ruining Robert Bishop had been there, driving him forward, for many years...except complete and total revenge had been marred by the fresh-faced, seductive prettiness of Lucy Bishop. He had wavered. Allowed concessions to be made. Only to find himself the revenge half-baked: he had got the company but not the man, and he had got the girl but not in the way he had imagined he would.

Well, he just couldn’t wait to see how this particular story was going to play out. Not on her terms, he resolved.

He picked up the call from his driver practically before his mobile buzzed and listened with a slight frown of puzzlement as he was given his wife’s location.

Striding out of his office, he said in passing to his secretary that he would be uncontactable for the next couple of hours.

He wasn’t surprised to see the look of open-mouthed astonishment on his secretary’s face because, when it came to work, he was always contactable.

‘Make up whatever excuses you like for my cancelled meetings, be as inventive as the mood takes you.’ He grinned, pausing by the door. ‘You can look at it as your little window of living dangerously...’

‘I live dangerously every time I walk through that office door,’ his austere, highly efficient, middle-aged secretary tartly responded. ‘You have no idea what you’re like to work for!’

Dio knew the streets of London almost as comprehensively as his driver did but he still had to rely on his satnav to get him to the address he had been given.

Somewhere in East London. He had no idea how Jackson had managed to follow Lucy. Presumably, he had just taken whatever form of public transport she had taken and, because he was not their regular evening driver, she would not have recognised him.

It was a blessing that he had handed the grunt work over to his driver because he had just assumed that his wife would drive to wherever she wanted to go, or else take a taxi.

Anything but the tube and the bus.

He couldn’t imagine that her father would ever have allowed her to hop on the number twenty-seven. Robert Bishop had excelled in being a snob.