Two-Week Wife

‘I suggest you toddle off now, sweetheart, and make up a new story to tell your mother. I’m sure you can come up with one, being such an inventive and imaginative little minx. If you’re really stuck, you could always try the truth!’

Bianca’s startled tongue-tiedness didn’t last for long, and was quickly replaced by indignant and sceptical outrage. ‘I don’t believe any of this! Have you been drinking? Did you lose all your money at the races? This isn’t like you at all, Adam.’

He gripped her shoulders and pushed her down into a sitting position on the end of the bed. ‘Yes, I’ve been drinking,’ he agreed in a steely tone. ‘And, yes, I did lose a good deal at the races today, which didn’t please me at all. But you’re quite wrong when you think this isn’t like me. It is. It’s the new me.’

‘The new you?’ she repeated blankly.

‘I’ve been too soft with you for too long, Bianca. It’s done your character no good. No good at all. You think you can do as you please where I’m concerned. You think you can run rings around me. Well, you can’t anymore, sweetness. I’m awake to you now. Actually, I have been for ages, but it didn’t suit me to make a stand. It does now.’

‘Why now?’ she threw back up at him, feeling suddenly angry. How dared he let her think he loved her all this time when he didn’t?

‘Because I’ve met someone,’ he said. ‘Someone I intend asking to marry me. Hard to do that when I’m pretending to be married to someone else, don’t you think?’

Bianca felt her world go slightly out of kilter for a moment. Adam had fallen in love? He was going to get married?

Her heart squeezed tight. Her stomach flipped over. ‘I don’t believe you!’

He straightened, laughing. ‘You do seem to be having trouble with believing me today. Tell me what you don’t believe.’

She levered herself to her feet, shaken to find that her legs felt like jelly. ‘I don’t believe you’ve met someone. You haven’t brought a girl home here once this last month. You’re just making her up.’

But at the back of her mind Bianca was remembering all those nights Adam hadn’t come home lately. She’d presumed he was sleeping over in his room at the university, which he sometimes did. Now she saw there could be a very different explanation for his many absences.

He laughed again. ‘You’re really grasping at straws, you know that? The reason I didn’t bring Sophie here was because I wanted our relationship to last. What chance did I have with any of my other girlfriends after they’d met you as my flatmate?

‘They always took one look at you and were instantly jealous and suspicious. Nothing I could ever say would convince them our friendship was purely platonic. They were all convinced we were secret lovers. An impression you deliberately seemed to foster, I might add.’

‘I did not!’ she denied hotly. But underneath she knew she had. She’d never felt any of those bimbos were good enough for Adam. She’d only been protecting him by getting rid of them.

‘You never wanted me, Bianca,’ he swept on, a cold rage settling into his eyes. ‘But you didn’t want anyone else to have me either. You’ve been a very greedy little girl. And very selfish. It’s time you stopped thinking of no one but yourself.’

‘But that’s not true,’ she wailed, hating this new Adam and the way he was making her feel. ‘I was thinking of my mother when I told her...what I told her.’ Tears filled her eyes, tears of temper more than distress. ‘You have no right to say these rotten things to me. You’re being so hateful!’

‘The truth often hurts.’

The truth, she thought savagely. The truth was that her Adam was going to marry someone else! Just the thought of it was like a dagger in her heart. God knows why. She didn’t want to marry him herself. She didn’t want to marry any man.

Marriage, in Bianca’s opinion, would be a living death for someone like her. She was just like her father in that respect, craving change and excitement all the time. She didn’t like the idea of settling down and having children any more than he had.

Her dad had married in the throes of a whirlwind passion, then spent the next twenty years finding satisfaction outside of the marital bed. Bianca suspected she might be just as fickle. There hadn’t been a male yet to hold her sexual interest beyond six months. She suspected none ever would.

‘So who is this Sophie you’re going to marry?’ she demanded to know.

‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ Adam retorted with a dry chuckle. ‘I’m going to keep her well away from you, Madam Mischief-Maker.’

‘Where do you sleep with her?’

‘None of your business. Do I ask you where you copulate with your latest boyfriend?’

‘You can, if you like. But Derek and I have parted company. He was beginning to bore me.’

‘Gee whiz, what happened? Didn’t you fall asleep straight afterwards one night? Were you actually forced to make conversation with Mr Macho-Man?’

Bianca could feel a smile begin to tug at her lips. It was a good description for Derek, who was a professional weight-lifter with more muscles than mental capacity. ‘Something like that,’ she said.

Their eyes met, and that old camaraderie which had sustained their friendship all these years struggled to the surface. She’d always been able to tell Adam pretty much anything. And she’d never been able to shock him. He’d always listened and always given her sound advice, but never condemned. He was still her best friend, she realised, her heart squeezing tight as a wry smile began to play around his mouth.

Instinctively she reached out to place an intimate hand on his arm. ‘Sophie doesn’t have to know, Adam,’ she said pleadingly. ‘Mum will soon be gone, back to Scotland. Please...I don’t want to spoil her trip by telling her the truth just yet. I promise I’ll write to her after she’s gone back and make up something to get you permanently off the hook.’

She held her breath as he simply stared at her.

Please say yes, she was silently willing him. Please...

His sigh was weary as he removed her hand from his arm. ‘You never know when to give up, do you? Now let me make this quite clear. I am not going to play happy husband for you and your mother. I am not going to let you sleep in my bed while she’s here, unless I’m not in it. I am not going to be at your beck and call, or dance to any tune you might choose to play.’

Bianca’s dismay was only exceeded by her. panic. ‘But whatever am I going to tell her?’

‘Tell her whatever story you fancy, Bianca, only make it convincing. You have a choice: either telling the truth, or inventing a temporary separation or impending divorce. Believe me when I tell you I have somewhere I can lay my head for the duration of that fortnight, so you don’t have to worry your pretty little head about where I’ll sleep.’

Bianca glared at him while he shepherded her out of his bedroom. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get dressed. I’m going out.’ And he firmly closed and locked his door.

CHAPTER THREE

ADAM closed his eyes as he leant against the door.

God damn Bianca for making him lie like that!

He had no intention of asking Sophie to marry him. Hell, he’d only just met the girl the previous week.

He also hadn’t been going to go out tonight. He was tired after his unsuccessful foray at the races. He would have liked nothing better than to settle down in front of the TV with his feet up and have Bianca dish him up one of her interesting meals.

She was a fantastic cook, and spoiled him whenever he was at home in that regard. It was one of the plusses among the many negatives in having her around.

But he’d be blowed if he’d stay at home tonight now! He’d have to sleep over at the penthouse, he supposed, even though it would still smell of paint. He didn’t have a date with Sophie, as Bianca would undoubtedly conclude. But he wished he had.

A night in bed with Sophie would blot Bianca out of his mind for a few hours at least. Sophie was everything Bianca wasn’t. Tall and curvy, with long blonde hair, wide hips and breasts like melons. He’d learnt from Laura many years ago never to date a girl who reminded him in any way of the heartless creature who’d told him she felt nothing when she looked at him. Generally he confined himself to bedding busty blondes, with the occasional redhead thrown in for variety. Brunettes never stood a chance.

Sophie was a minor actress, sleeping her way up in the world with gay abandon. He’d met her last Saturday night at the new Darling Harbour Casino, where she was working as a croupier between bit roles in movies. No doubt she’d thought he was a real high-roller, laying thousand-dollar bets. Which he was, he supposed.

Gambling had always paid off for Adam, because he approached it with a cool head and mathematical skill. Bianca would be stunned at how much money it had brought him over the years...if he ever chose to tell her. She thought he confined his gambling to the races. She also thought he lost more than he won.

Racing was all very well, in small doses, but the really big money was to be made in the casinos. Unfortunately, he had to keep changing venues, because management soon spotted professional gamblers, and had a dim view of clients capable of counting cards or who used other systems which could regularly beat the house.

Bianca had no idea of his weekend trips interstate, to the casinos in Melbourne, Hobart, Adelaide and even Pert, nor of the elegant, sophisticated and very accommodating women who threw themselves at him on those occasions. It stroked his ego to note that they had no trouble with ‘spark’ when they looked at him, as Bianca did. Hell, they fairly went up in flames when he touched them.

Fortunately, the opening of a new casino in Sydney had brought him a much closer venue—for gambling and otherwise. The night he’d met Sophie, he’d been trying one of his newer systems on the blackjack table, though his concentration had been shot to pieces. He’d been thinking about Bianca spending the weekend up the coast at some sleazy motel with darling Derek. She hadn’t been bored with him seven days ago. Far from it!

Sophie had given him the eye as she’d dealt him the cards, so his bruised ego had taken her home to her place after she finished up. He hadn’t given Bianca a single thought till he’d woken the next morning to brown eyes instead of blue, and blonde hair instead of black.