The Mistress Wife

DISCONCERTED entirely by that greeting, Vivien was reduced to gaping at Lucca in bewilderment. ‘But you know why I’m here!’

An aristocratic ebony brow ascended in polite disagreement, for he had exquisite manners. ‘How could I know?’

‘You sent me that newspaper,’ Vivien reminded him rather tautly, for her extreme nervous tension was being heightened by an awful sense of foolishness.

Lucca shifted a fluid brown hand and spread dismissive fingers in a tiny, almost infinitesimal movement. ‘So?’

Vivien tried and failed to swallow past the lump lodged in her throat. ‘Naturally I came straight here to see you.’

Lucca vented a soft, amused laugh that nonetheless contrived to create a chill somewhere deep down inside Vivien. ‘Naturally? Would you care to explain how this sudden uninvited visit of yours could possibly be described as natural?’

Recognising the dangerous tension in the atmosphere, Vivien was daunted. Her own nature was too open for her to comprehend Lucca’s darker and infinitely more complex temperament. She considered their meeting of overwhelming importance. His cool detachment disorientated her. ‘It’s like you’re not really listening to me. Don’t be like that, don’t act like this is a game in which the highest score wins!’

‘Don’t make assumptions, cara. You’re not inside my head and can have no idea what I’m thinking.’

‘I know that you have to be very, very angry with me—’

‘No, you’re wrong,’ Lucca traded. ‘Anger over a long haul is unproductive. Even dinosaurs move on eventually.’

Vivien was too wound up to hold back the frantic words bubbling to her lips. ‘I know you hate me and have to blame me for everything that’s gone wrong…and that’s OK, only what I deserve,’ she conceded humbly.

‘Don’t waste my time with this,’ Lucca urged, cold as ice.

Vivien raised anguished green eyes to his lean, strong face and willed him to listen to her and recognise her sincerity. ‘Sorry is a very inadequate word and may even be horribly aggravating in these circumstances but I have to say it—’

‘Why?’ Brilliant dark eyes lit by a tiny inner flame of gold rested on her in blatant challenge. ‘I’m not interested in hearing your apologies.’

‘You sent me that newspaper…’ Vivien reminded him again, but this time half under her breath.

Lucca shrugged a wide shoulder in a gesture of magnificent disregard.

In the silence that stretched, Vivien sucked in a deep, shuddering breath and pressed on. ‘You wanted me to know that I’d misjudged you. You wanted me to see the proof that you were innocent.’

‘Or maybe I wanted to make you squirm,’ Lucca suggested silkily. ‘Or maybe my pride demanded I have the last word. Whatever my motivation, it’s not important now.’

‘Of course, it’s important!’ Vivien was no longer able to restrain her teeming emotions. ‘Jasmine Bailey destroyed our marriage—’

‘No,’ Lucca slotted in with lethal quietness. ‘All the honours of that achievement go to you. If you had trusted me, we would still be together.’

Vivien fell back a step as if he had struck her. He had stripped the facts down to their bones and reached his own cruelly straightforward baseline. ‘It’s not that simple.’

‘I think it is.’

‘But you let me leave you!’ Vivien protested in desperation. ‘How hard did you try to persuade me that that horrible woman was lying?’

‘Guilty until proven innocent…is that how you rationalise what you did? You shifted the burden of proof back onto me. But there was no way I could prove that Bailey had concocted her story. I slept alone that night and every night during that week in the Med but only I can know that for a fact,’ Lucca pointed out, wide sculpted mouth grim. ‘Bimbos target rich men. You knew that when you married me. The first line of defence in our marriage should have been trust and you fell at the starting gate.’

‘I might have had more trust if you had been more vigorous in your denials!’ Vivien argued, half an octave higher in volume, for she was aghast at his complete lack of emotion and utterly crushed by his disinterest. ‘But it seems that you were too proud to try and convince me that I’d made a mistake and misjudged you—’

His intense gaze flashed gold and veiled. ‘Get a grip, cara. This visit is an embarrassment for us both and it gives me no pleasure to tell you that.’

‘You won’t let me say sorry, will you?’ Vivien grasped unhappily.

She was so earnest, so straightforward, so disastrously naïve, Lucca acknowledged. She was asking for trouble, inviting it in by calling open season. When he had married her, he reflected bitterly, he had planned to protect her from every evil. It had never occurred to him that he would find himself exiled to the enemy camp and the only escape route would entail compromising his own ideals. Sunlight distracted him from his brooding introspection as he studied her upturned face. The fine-grained perfection of her creamy skin illuminated green eyes with the depth and clarity of jewels and a wide, soft, vulnerable mouth as juicy and inviting as a ripe cherry. His body reacted with infuriating immediacy and hardened.

Vivien connected unwarily with riveting black eyes that turned her bones to water. She felt hot, weak and dizzy, her physical response to his aggressive masculinity instant and familiar. Black lashes as lush as his infant son’s snapped down over his gaze, narrowing them to a vibrant glimmer, and he stepped back with measured cool.

‘I don’t know why you’ve come to see me,’ Lucca stated with a cutting lack of expression.

‘Yes, you do…you know absolutely why!’ Vivien reasoned tautly, cheeks hotly flushed with agonised self-consciousness. She was struggling to concentrate rather than cringe at the suspicion that he had noticed her humiliating reaction to his proximity.

‘But possibly I don’t wish to engage on that subject,’ Lucca fenced in a tone as smooth as black velvet. ‘Why don’t you tell me instead how Marco is doing?’

Vivien blinked and then the tense anxiety etched on her face was softened by the warm beginnings of a loving smile. ‘He’s doing wonderfully well…he learns everything so fast, you know—’

Even that hint of a smile increased Lucca’s anger. ‘No, I don’t know.’

‘Sorry?’ Vivien didn’t understand. She had hoped that talking about their son, currently the only shared element in their lives, might take some of the chill out of the atmosphere.

‘I said that no, I don’t know how fast Marco learns because I don’t see enough of my son to make that kind of judgement. Obviously, he’s always doing or saying something new and different by the time I see him again.’

Vivien shrank at that icy clarification. ‘I suppose he must do.’

‘Evidently, it hasn’t occurred to you either that I also missed out entirely on his first smile, his first step and his first word.’

Over-sensitive tears lashed and stung the back of Vivien’s eyes and she had to keep them very wide to prevent them from spilling out and betraying her.

‘I suppose that I should count myself lucky that he seems to recognise me from one visit to the next,’ Lucca completed with the same cold, flat intonation.

For the first time, Vivien was confronted by his bitterness where their child was concerned. In shock, she swallowed so hard she hurt her throat and had to look away until she had control of herself again. Understanding how he must have felt at being excluded and essentially left unaware of all the most important moments in his toddler son’s life, how could she blame him for his hostility? It seemed beneath her to remark that he was talking like a much fonder father than she would ever have expected him to become. One of her least favourite recollections was Lucca’s annoyance when she had fallen pregnant.

‘I wish I knew what to say,’ she began awkwardly.

‘Not the overworked, ever-cheerful English cliché for the occasion…please,’ Lucca derided. ‘Perhaps it is now sinking in on you that, like most divorced couples, we don’t have much to talk about.’

‘We’re not divorced yet—’

‘As good as, cara mia,’ Lucca contradicted with an insolent insouciance that flayed her to the bone. ‘Before you leave—I’m sure you don’t want to be late—is there anything else you wish to discuss?’

Feeling harassed and unable to get her thoughts into any kind of useful order and horrendously loaded with guilt and unbearable regret, Vivien recalled her reluctant promise to her sister.

‘Money…’ she said abruptly.

Lucca frowned in surprise.

Vivien turned a beetroot colour and shifted uneasily off one foot onto the other. ‘I mean, I’m having a little trouble managing at present. I’m also well aware that it was my choice to accept only minimal financial assistance from you after we separated—’

‘We didn’t separate,’ Lucca interposed. ‘You walked out on our marriage.’