Two-Week Wife

Bloody stupid fantasy, he thought ruefully. Bianca was as far removed from a geisha girl as any female could get!

‘Just because you don’t know how to have fun, Adam,’ she tossed at him with haughty disdain.

He snorted and strode across the sable-coloured carpet, flopping down into his favourite brown leather armchair. ‘Is that what you think you’re doing when you keep changing direction in your life at the drop of a hat?’ he threw up at her. ‘Was it fun you were having when you came to me last year, stony broke and without a roof over your head? Was it fun earlier this year, after that loser of a boyfriend dumped you? Do you really find it fun having others pick up your pieces?’

‘I do not expect you or anyone else to pick up my pieces,’ she huffed and puffed. ‘And I’ll have you know that I’m the one who usually dumps my “losers of boyfriends,” not the other way around.’

‘At least we agree on one thing,’ he said drily. ‘They’ve all been bums so far.’

‘Maybe,’ she countered blithely. ‘But they all had very nice bums, those bums.’

‘You’d know, I suppose.’ He quaffed back half the whisky, congratulating himself on the offhandedness of his reply—especially when the image of his Bianca being intimate with any part of another man’s anatomy nearly killed him. ‘But we have digressed. Back to your present little problem. Out with it, Bianca. I’m not in the mood for any of your female manoeuvrings tonight.’

‘All right, then, you meanie. I was just trying to tell you nicely, to make you understand that I had no idea this would eventuate. When the situation first arose, I didn’t have to involve you personally at all, but something unexpected has happened and now I have no alternative.’

Adam didn’t have a clue as to what she was talking about. But he feared he would. Soon. Only too well.

Bianca sat down on the sofa-end nearest his chair and leant towards him with the most heartwarmingly pleading look on her lovely face. ‘Please don’t be mad at me, Adam,’ she said, in a voice which would have melted concrete.

For a split second Adam felt himself begin to go to mush, before cold, hard reality had him getting a firm handle on his ongoing weakness for this incorrigible creature. She was going to use him again, as she had used him for years.

No more, he vowed staunchly. No more!

‘Out with it, Bianca,’ he snapped. ‘No more bull. Just give me the facts, and I’ll decide if I’m going to be involved or not.’

Her startled eyes betrayed surprise at his hard stance. She straightened her spine, then rocked her shoulders slightly from side to side in the characteristic gesture which usually preceded defiance or outright rebellion. Her chin shot up. Her eyes flashed and her mouth tightened. ‘There’s no need to take that tone.’

‘I’ll best be the judge of that, thank you. Now just spit it out, woman!’

‘Very well. It’s to do with my mother.’

‘What about your mother?’ Adam frowned. Bianca’s mum was a widow and had gone back to Scotland to live several years before. She’d been very lonely after her husband had been killed in a drag-racing accident.

Bianca was her only child and not much company once she’d finished university and had started flitting round the world on never-ending backpacking holidays. She only returned long enough to pick up a few months’ work, thereby saving up enough to be off again.

Mrs Peterson had several brothers and sisters back in Scotland, so it had made sense for her to return to her homeland. Then, six months ago in May, she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer.

‘Is she worse?’ he asked worriedly. ‘Do you need some more money to go and see her again?’

‘No to both those questions. Which is just as well. I haven’t finished paying you back for the last ticket to Edinburgh you bought me.’

True, he thought ruefully. Which was the only reason she’d stayed in one job and one place for so long. No doubt as soon as her debt was paid she’d be off again on some new adventure, trekking through the Himalayas or skiing down the mountain slopes of St Moritz.

‘No, Mum’s much better,’ Bianca was saying. ‘And there’s every chance that the cancer won’t come back.’

‘Then what’s the problem? I don’t understand.’ ‘She’s coming out here for a fortnight’s visit, that’s what. Her plane touches down next Saturday afternoon—a week from today. Her brothers and sisters all pitched in and bought her a return flight to Sydney.’

‘Well, what’s the problem in that? You should be thrilled. Oh, I see...you want her to stay here. That’s no trouble, Bianca. I don’t mind. I’m hardly here these days anyway, and there are two beds in your room, aren’t there?’

‘That’s the problem,’ she muttered.

Adam blinked his confusion. ‘The beds in your room are a problem?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because Mum won’t be expecting me to occupy one, that’s why.’

‘You’ve lost me, Bianca.’

Her sigh was expressive. ‘It’s like this, Adam. Mum thinks we’re married. Naturally she’ll be expecting me to be sleeping in your bed. And she’ll also expect you to be around a bit more than you have been lately. God knows what you’ve been up to. If I didn’t know better I’d think you were avoiding me.’

‘She...thinks...we’re...married,’ he repeated slowly, his eyes narrowing with each word.

‘Don’t look at me like that, Adam. I didn’t mean any harm. Honestly. But when I was over there in May she looked so darned ill. Try to understand ...I thought she was going to die!

‘I knew she’d always wanted to see me settled—preferably with you—so I told her what would make her happy. I said we were engaged and going to be married. Then after I came back and she kept hanging in there I had no alternative but to follow through. So I sent her some selective photos from Michelle’s wedding and said it was ours.’

Adam was shaking his head in utter disbelief. ‘How, in God’s name, did you pull that off? You weren’t even wearing white that day!’

‘My bridesmaid dress was pale pink and could easily pass for a wedding dress. Besides, Mum wouldn’t have expected me to have a traditional wedding with a big white dress. And you looked suitably bridegroomy in your best man outfit.

‘Luckily with it being your sister’s wedding, all your family were there. And on top of that, we had a lot of shots taken together, being partners for the day. Mum thought you looked very handsome, by the way. Oh, and remember those queen-sized sheets she sent, and which I gave you for your bed? They...er....they were our wedding present.’

Adam’s hand clenched tightly around the glass he was holding. Fury that she would perpetrate this fiasco without even consulting him had his blood bubbling with heated anger along his veins. Naturally she hadn’t expected to get caught. She’d probably thought her poor mum would safely pass away before her outrageous lies came to light.

That was always the way with Bianca. She never thought things through to all their possible eventualities and consequences. She always just plunged into some mad caper or other, without worrying or working out how it might affect others.

Never had this been more evident than on the occasion she’d come to him at the age of seventeen and asked him to relieve her of her virginity. Not for reasons of romance, mind. Simply out of curiosity. And she was tired, she’d said, of being the only girl in her group who hadn’t done it. Tired of having to defend her lack of male admirers.

Back then, boys hadn’t gone for Bianca all that much. Of course, she’d always thought it was because of her lack of boobs, but that hadn’t been so at all. It had simply been because they were used to treating her like a mate, not an object of male desire.

He’d been the only boy in school who’d fancied her like mad. And she’d known it. What she hadn’t known, when she’d asked this favour of him, was that he’d been a virgin too, back then. A bit of an embarrassment, really, being a male virgin at eighteen. His mates had used to rag him about it all the time.

He cringed now to think of the total mess he’d made of ‘relieving’ Bianca of her virginity—and himself of his own. He’d been so bloody nervous. Terrified, in fact. He’d been scared of hurting her, scared of coming too soon, scared of not being able to get the damned condom on properly.

The act itself had turned into an absolute disaster, with most of his fears coming to pass. In the end, he had hurt her, and it had all been over too soon. As for the damned condom...he had no idea how that had eventually assumed its rightful position. No doubt more by accident than design.

What should have been the most marvellous moment of his life had deteriorated into being the most embarrassing and definitely the most humiliating.

He could still recall the various expressions on her face during the ten-second event. Pain had been followed by a few moments of frowning frustration, culminating in something even worse... relief when the act had come to a very rapid conclusion, obviously without her experiencing one single moment of pleasure, let alone satisfaction.

Afterwards she’d been uncharacteristically silent, and he’d skulked off home feeling utterly crushed and totally deflated.

The only good to come out of that night had been that the experience had seemed to turn Bianca off sex for the next few years. She’d probably concluded it wasn’t worth bothering about, till a supermacho martial arts instructor, whose class she’d enrolled in during her last year at uni, had taken her uninterest in him as the ultimate challenge and then proceeded to show her that sex was nothing like what she’d experienced that night. He’d apparendy been a fantastic lover, with a body any girl would drool over and a technique to match.

From that moment she’d been hooked—not only on the pleasures of the flesh, but on that sort of male. After Mr Black Belt, she was programmed to believe that arousal and satisfaction were synonymous with an ultra-fit, muscle-bound body and a super-stud mentality.