is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular and bestselling novelists. Her writing was an instant success with readers worldwide. Since her first book, Bittersweet Passion, was published in 1987, she has gone from strength to strength and now has over ninety titles, which have sold more than thirty-five million copies, to her name.

In this special collection, we offer readers a chance to revisit favourite books or enjoy that rare treasure—a book by a favourite writer—they may have missed. In every case, seduction and passion with a gorgeous, irresistible man are guaranteed!

LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen Mills & Boon® reader since her teens. She is very happily married, with an understanding husband who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog, which knocks everything over, a very small terrier, which barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.

The Mistress Wife
Lynne Graham

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

‘I WASN’T sure whether or not you would want to see this…’ Speaking in the uneasy tone of one apologising in advance for a potential offence, Lucca’s cousin, Alfredo, settled a tabloid newspaper down on the elegant glass desk.

At first glimpse of the smirking blonde displaying her bountiful curves in the centre of a page topped by garish headlines, Lucca Saracino froze, his lean, powerful face hardening. It was Jasmine Bailey, the bimbo whose lies had contributed to the destruction of his marriage. Now yesterday’s news as far as the rich and famous were concerned, Jasmine was plumbing even sleazier depths with the no-holds-barred revelations of exactly how low she had had to sink to achieve her original fifteen minutes of fame. In that uninhibited telling, the former topless model freely confessed that she had concocted her story about having shared a wild night of passion with the Italian billionaire, Lucca Saracino, on his luxury yacht.

‘You should sue her!’ Alfredo, a stockily built young man in his early twenties, urged with all the eager but unsophisticated zeal of a recent law graduate keen to prove his mettle.

Such an exercise would be futile, Lucca reflected, wide, sensual mouth assuming a sardonic curl. He would gain nothing from dragging a cheap little scrubber and his own long-lost reputation through the courts. More to the point, his divorce was about to be made final. Vivien, his soon-to-be ex-wife, had judged him guilty with a speed and lack of trust that would have shocked any male with a sense of fair play. Lifting her virginal little head high, Vivien had donned the mantle of saintly, suffering piety and vacated the marital home. Encouraged by her sour and money-hungry sister, Bernice, Vivien had walked out on their marriage in spite of the fact that she’d been carrying their first child. She had refused to listen to his declaration of innocence. The woman who wept buckets over Lassie films had shown him a face of stone.

‘Lucca…?’ Alfredo prompted in the brooding silence that every other member of Lucca’s personal staff would have read as a tacit warning.

With difficulty, Lucca suppressed an exasperated rebuke. Allowing his gormless cousin to work for him even temporarily had been an act of charity on his part. Alfredo was desperate to add some business experience to his unimpressive CV. Lucca had found him clever but impractical, conscientious but uninspired, well meaning but tactless. While others soared, Alfredo would always plod and often infuriate.

‘I owe you a big apology,’ the younger man continued awkwardly, standing square in front of the desk and evidently determined to say his piece. ‘I didn’t believe the Bailey woman had set you up. My parents didn’t either. We all thought you had been playing away!’

Every low suspicion of the level of that side of the family’s faith in him now fully confirmed, Lucca veiled grim dark golden eyes.

‘And absolutely nobody blamed you in the slightest,’ Alfredo hastened to assert. ‘Vivien just didn’t fit the bill—’

‘Vivien is the mother of my son. Don’t speak of her with anything other than the respect that is her due,’ Lucca murmured in icy reproof.

Alfredo flushed and hurried to offer profuse apologies instead. Impatient with his essential stupidity, Lucca dismissed him from his presence. Rising from his seat, he strode over to the imposing windows that proffered a spectacular view of London, but his forbidding gaze was turned inward and his thoughts were relentlessly bitter.

His infant son, Marco, was growing up without him in a mean little home where Italian was not spoken. There had been nothing civilised about the breakup of his marriage or the separation that had followed. Lucca had had to fight hard for what little he saw of the child he adored. He had been branded an unfaithful husband by Jasmine Bailey’s sleazy allegations. His lawyers had made it plain to him that he had no hope whatsoever of winning guardianship of his son from an estranged wife with an irreproachable reputation. It utterly outraged Lucca’s sense of justice that Vivien, who had wrecked their marriage with her distrust, should have effortlessly retained custody of his child.

He knew himself to be at best an occasional visitor on the outskirts of Marco’s life and he was afraid that his son forgot him altogether between visits. How could so young a child remember an absentee father between one month and the next? There was no way either that Vivien would be reminding Marco of the parent she had deprived him of possessing. But now there was also no way that she would be able to retain occupancy of the moral high ground…

As that tantalising reality pierced Lucca’s brooding reflections it was like a shot of adrenalin slivering through his lean, powerful frame with life-giving force. His luxuriant lashes lowered on eyes that suddenly glowed tiger-bright with scorching satisfaction. He pondered the very real possibility that Vivien might miss out on seeing Jasmine Bailey’s confession. An academic who took little interest in the everyday world, Vivien rarely read newspapers.

Lucca buzzed his secretary, instructed her to obtain a pristine new copy of the relevant paper and have it delivered to Vivien with a gift card bearing his compliments. Petty? He didn’t think so. Pride demanded that he draw her attention to the proof of his innocence.

It would spoil Vivien’s day and worse. Vivien had led a sheltered life. Naïve as she was, she bruised easily. She had the sort of conscience that kept her awake at night and would suffer the tortures of the damned when she was forced to face the truth that she had misjudged her husband. Natural justice might finally be operating on his behalf but nothing could make the punishment fit the crime, could it?

‘Please come out, Jock…’ Vivien begged the three-legged Scottie dog hiding under the sideboard.

Jock, rather optimistically named after a genial cartoon character, stayed put. He had been denied the chance to get his teeth into the leg of the washing-machine repairman and therefore cruelly prevented from fulfilling his duty to protect his mistress from a male interloper. Dogs were not supposed to sulk but Jock went off in a huff if he was denied the delights of chasing male individuals from the premises.

Marco gave a gurgle of delight and began crawling under the sideboard to join his favourite playmate. Vivien scooped her son up. Huge brown eyes fringed by silky black lashes as long as fly swats reproached her for her interference. Marco made a determined squirming motion in an effort to escape his mother’s restraining arms and when that failed loosed a noisy shout of annoyance.

Vivien steeled herself for a battle. ‘No…’ she told Marco quietly and steadily, all too painfully aware after a recent very public humiliation at the supermarket that it was time that she learned how to handle her son’s fits of temper.

No? In visible disbelief, Marco gazed back at the fair-haired woman with her big anxious green eyes. No? His nanny, Rosa, used that unpleasant word to him, and his father too. But he knew his mother adored him, and loved to please him. Indeed at the age of eighteen months he had all the controlling instincts of a tyrant, who had already discovered that he needed only the most basic of weapons to triumph over all opposition: when thwarted, he threw unmanageable tantrums until he got what he wanted. He began to draw in a deep, deep breath in preparation for screaming and raging his way to a crushing victory.

Barely five feet two inches tall and of slender build, Vivien laid her solid little son down inside the playpen. Marco was strong and when he flailed around in a temper, she found it very difficult to hold him. Once he had fallen off her lap and bumped his head. After that scare she had begun putting him down for his own safety.

‘He’s a spoilt brat!’ her sister, Bernice, had condemned with a shudder of distaste that had cut Vivien’s tender maternal heart to the quick.

‘Demanding little chap, isn’t he?’ Fabian Garsdale, her friend and colleague in the botany department, had remarked with an air of shocked disapproval when he’d witnessed such a display. ‘Have you thought of applying a spot of good old-fashioned discipline?’

‘You must try really hard to be firm with him,’ Rosa, Marco’s part-time nanny, had advised when pressed to explain why her charge rarely subjected her to the same temperamental episodes. ‘Marco can be very strong-willed.’

Vivien performed a handstand beside the playpen. If she was quick off the mark, simply distracting Marco worked a treat. Mid-wail, her son paused for breath and then chortled with delighted surprise at the sight of his mother upside down. He sat up to get a better view and his glorious smile shone forth.

Flipping back upright again, Vivien swept him into her arms, hugged him tight and blinked back the moisture in her eyes. All the fierce agonising love that she had once felt for Lucca had been transferred to their son. Without Marco, she was convinced that she would have gone out of her mind with grief over her broken marriage. It had been her baby’s needs that first forced her to confront unpleasant realities and carve out a new life for them both. But the devastating pain of Lucca’s betrayal was still locked up inside her and she had to live with it daily. She had always felt things too deeply and had learnt as a child to conceal the embarrassing intensity of her feelings behind a quiet façade. To do otherwise made people uncomfortable.

The noise of a car pulling rather too fast into the gravel driveway outside announced Bernice’s return. Jock emerged from below the sideboard, uttered a single bark, looked nervously at the sitting-room door and then went into retreat again. A moment later, the door bounced back in protest on its hinges to frame a tall, leggy brunette, who would have been quite stunningly lovely had it not been for the angry hardness of her blue eyes and the clenched set of dissatisfaction marring her mouth.

Indifferent to Bernice’s, entrance for his aunt never gave him attention unless it was to lament his vocal output or his infuriatingly immature behaviour, Marco gave vent to a large sleepy yawn and rested back heavily in his mother’s arms.

Bernice sent the curly-headed toddler a look of irritation. ‘Shouldn’t the kid be having his nap?’

‘I was just about to take him up.’ Wondering sympathetically if her sister had suffered yet another disappointment in the employment stakes, Vivien went upstairs and tried not to worry about her own increasingly strained finances.

After all, it would be downright cruel to preach economy yet again to Bernice, who was already utterly miserable struggling to survive without champagne breakfasts and the like. Vivien was also guiltily conscious that her own personal reluctance to take anything other than the barest minimum financial assistance from Lucca after their separation was ultimately responsible for her overdraft at the bank. She had put pride ahead of common sense and was now paying the literal price.

At least, the cottage was small and, now that all the repairs had been done, economical to run. Of course, Bernice said it was only fit for dolls. But in the dark days of late pregnancy when Vivien had been alone and struggling to bear a life that did not contain even occasional glimpses of Lucca, the little house had seemed like a sanctuary. Embellished by a mature tree in the front garden, the cottage lay in pretty countryside not too far from the Oxford college where Vivien currently worked three days a week as a tutor in the botany department.

Vivien squeezed between her own bed and Marco’s cot and tucked her son in for his morning nap. Possessed of two narrow bedrooms, her diminutive home was the perfect size for a single parent of one but stretched to capacity when required to house another adult. Even so, Vivien was overjoyed to have her sibling’s company and only wished she had foreseen the possibility that she might one day require roomier accommodation. Yet who could have guessed that her sister’s designer boutique in London would fail? Her poor sister had lost everything: her trendy Docklands apartment, her smart sports car, not to mention the majority of her fashionable but fickle friends.

‘Don’t even bother asking me how my interview went!’ her sister hissed furiously when Vivien joined her again. ‘The cheeky old hag virtually accused me of lying on my CV and I told her what she could do with her lousy hotel job!’

Vivien was taken aback ‘Surely the woman didn’t accuse you of lying—’

‘She didn’t have to…she started asking me questions in French and I hadn’t a clue what she was rattling on about!’ Bernice proclaimed in outrage. ‘I claimed a working knowledge of French on my CV…I didn’t say I was practically bilingual!’

Although it was news to Vivien that the sibling three years her senior had even a working knowledge of the French language, she hurried to soothe ruffled feathers with words of sympathy.

Unimpressed, Bernice pursed her lips. ‘It’s your fault that I was humiliated!’

‘My fault?’ Vivien stilled in dismay.

‘You’re still married to an incredibly rich man and yet we’re practically starving!’ Bernice condemned with ferocious bitterness. ‘You’re always moaning about how broke you are and making me feel guilty…I’m chasing rotten jobs way below my capabilities and you’re sitting home on your bum most of the week spoiling Marco like he’s a royal prince!’

Vivien was appalled at the level of her sister’s resentment and felt horribly responsible for her own deficiencies. ‘Bernice, I—’

‘You always were weird, Vivien. Look at your life!’ her angry sister urged with contemptuous clarity. ‘You live out here in the back of beyond with your freaky dog and precious son and you never do anything or go any place worth mentioning. You work in a boring job, live a boring life and have always been the most boring person I know. I wasn’t surprised when Lucca took to adultery on the ocean waves with a sexy blonde! The wonder was that he ever married a non-entity like you!’

Beneath that tirade, Vivien had turned white as milk. Bernice slammed into the sitting room and the cottage shook with the force of the door shuddering shut. Resolutely, Vivien thrust Bernice’s hurtful words down into her subconscious. Fondling Jock’s ears to soothe his trembling, for loud voices upset him, Vivien reminded herself that her sister was going through a very unhappy time, which would have challenged anyone’s temper to the utmost. Nobody knew better than Vivien that it was tough building a new life out of the ashes of loss and destruction. It was particularly difficult for Bernice, who had never had to make compromises and who had taken her once privileged world entirely for granted.

In comparison, Vivien had been brought up to believe that she was an incredibly lucky little girl. Her birth mother and father might have died in a car accident when she was only months old but she had been swiftly placed for adoption with the affluent and socially prominent Dillon family. Their daughter, Bernice, had been just three years old and the couple had been eager to adopt a little girl to ensure that Bernice would never want for company.

Nobody had ever been unkind to Vivien in the Dillon household but she had failed to fulfil her adoptive parents’ fond hope that she would become Bernice’s best friend. Bernice and Vivien had had nothing in common and the age gap between the two girls had only underlined the differences. Sensitive to a fault, Vivien had grown up with the guilt-making awareness that she seemed to be a source of continual disappointment to her family. The Dillons had hoped that Vivien would be a girlie girl like Bernice, who would delight in fashion, ponies and ballet before branching out into fashion, young men and a wild social whirl.

Instead, Vivien had been shy and retiring and the clumsiest little girl in the ballet class. Horses had scared her only a little less than young men and she had avoided parties like the plague. A bookworm from the instant she’d learned to read, she had been confident only in the academic world where her intelligence was rewarded with top exam grades awarded at an early age. Her achievements in that line however had merely embarrassed her parents, who felt that it was somehow not quite normal for a young woman to be quite so keen on studying.

Her mother had died of a heart attack when Vivien was seventeen. She had been at university when her father had passed away after many months of stress following severe financial reverses. Bernice had been hit very hard by the sale of the Dillon family home and the beautiful antiques, which she had grown up believing would one day be hers. Vivien had found it impossible to comfort her sibling for that loss.

The shrill of the doorbell startled Vivien out of an anxious re-examination of her failings as an adoptive daughter and sister. A courier passed her a package and raced away again on his motorbike.

‘What is it?’ Bernice demanded from behind Vivien as the smaller woman stared down dumbfounded at the elegant gilded card bearing her estranged husband’s signature in a careless black scrawl.

‘I don’t know.’ Having assumed the parcel contained a present for Marco, Vivien frowned in confusion when she found a newspaper inside the quite ludicrously opulent gift bag.

Instantly, she froze, for she recognised the photo of the voluptuous blonde promising to spill all her secrets on page five. Her tummy quivered and flipped with nausea and her palms grew damp. Why on earth would Lucca be so fantastically cruel as to send her an article about Jasmine Bailey? She thumbed clumsily to the relevant page, deaf to her sister’s piercing demand that she pass the publication to her.

Finding the headline of LIES MADE MY FORTUNE, Vivien read the first few paragraphs of the double-page spread three times over. With a total lack of even rudimentary shame, Jasmine confessed in print that her claim to have slept with Lucca Saracino had been an elaborate and highly effective lie couched to gain her publicity and win her invites to society parties. The wild all-night bout of adulterous passion, which the glamour model had described in such disgusting detail just two short years earlier, had been a complete fabrication.

Vivien was welded to the spot by a curious spreading numbness that appeared to be threatening her brain as much as her body. Perspiration dampened her brow. Jasmine Bailey had made up her story? It had all been a wicked lie? Her stomach felt hollow. Lucca had not betrayed his marital vows. Lucca had been true to her…and she? And she? She had believed the very worst of him and discounted his denials. She had turned her back on her husband and their marriage. That rolling agony of horrifying truth swallowed Vivien alive. It was like falling into an abyss and drowning.

‘I got it all wrong…I misjudged Lucca…’

‘You…you did what?’ her sister questioned loudly, impatience impelling her to snatch the newspaper from Vivien’s loosened grasp.

Vivien raised a trembling hand to her brow where unbearable tension was pounding out a drumbeat of self-blame. Her mind just could not cope with the enormity of Jasmine Bailey’s confession. It had hit her like a brick on glass and shattered her. The world she had remade had been shattered with it. In the space of a moment she had gone from being a woman who believed she had been right to walk away from her unfaithful husband to a woman who had made a huge and appalling mistake that had damaged both the man she loved and their child.

‘Surely you’re not being taken in by this rubbish?’ Bernice queried on a cutting note of scornful dismissal. ‘Now that she’s yesterday’s news, Jasmine Bailey would say or do anything to get her name back into the headlines!’

‘But not that…her story tallies with exactly what Lucca said at the time, only…’ Vivien’s voice lost power and then regrouped in a choky tone as her throat convulsed on the tears she was fighting back. ‘Only I wouldn’t listen to him—’

‘Of course you didn’t listen!’ her sister snapped. ‘You had too much sense to listen to his lies. You knew he was a notorious womaniser even before you married him. Didn’t I try to warn you?’

A lot of people had tried to warn Vivien off marrying Lucca Saracino. Nobody had been happy about their union. Not his family and friends and not her own either. Everyone had been astonished and then critical of the chances of such an apparent mismatch lasting. Supposed well-wishers had variously told Vivien that she was too quiet, too reserved, too old-fashioned, too academic and insufficiently exciting for a male of Lucca’s smooth sophistication. She had dutifully listened to all the concerned onlookers and her confidence had been battered low even before the wedding. At the end of the day, however, Lucca would still only have had to snap his fingers for her to have come running across a field of flames. She had loved him more than life itself and had been as lost and helpless as a child against the power of that love.

‘You’re virtually divorced now anyway,’ Bernice reminded the smaller, slighter woman sharply. ‘You should never have married him. You were totally unsuited.’

Vivien said nothing. She was staring into space, momentarily lost in her own feverish thoughts. Lucca had not, after all, betrayed her in Jasmine Bailey’s arms. The tacky blonde had pretty much conned her way onto Lucca’s yacht in the first place, Vivien recalled dully. Passing herself off as a student, Jasmine had been hired by one of Lucca’s guests to act as a companion to his adolescent daughter during the cruise and help her improve her English. When Jasmine had gone public with her colourful tale of a night of stolen passion nobody had been in a position to confirm or contradict her claims. Nobody but Lucca…

Vivien felt sick. She had punished her husband for a sin he had not committed. Instead of having faith in the man she had married, she had abandoned faith. Lucca had been innocent, which meant that all the agonising unhappiness she had endured since then was entirely of her own making. That was a very tough reality for Vivien to accept but she had sufficient humility to soon achieve it and move on to the far more important point of facing the great wrong that she had inflicted on Lucca. Her mind was as clear as a bell on what she ought to do next.

‘I need to see Lucca…’ Vivien breathed.

‘Haven’t you listened to anything I’ve said?’ Bernice demanded. ‘What on earth would you need to see Lucca for?’

Vivien was in the grip of shock and acting on automatic pilot but, regardless, the overpowering necessity of seeing Lucca in the flesh shone like a beacon in the darkness of her turmoil. It was almost two years since she had last laid eyes on him. Lawyers had dealt with the legal proceedings and a nanny collected Marco for his visits with his father. Lucca’s immense wealth had ensured that there was no requirement for him to tolerate a more personal connection with his estranged wife.

‘I have to see him.’ Vivien was slowly, clumsily striving to consider the practicalities of travelling up to London. As it was a day on which Vivien usually worked, Rosa would soon be arriving to look after Marco and would stay until six that evening. ‘Are you going out tonight?’

Surprised by that change of subject, Bernice frowned. ‘I’ve nothing organised…’

‘Goodness knows what time I’ll get to see Lucca. I expect I’ll be very low on his list of welcome visitors. So I’ll probably be back late,’ Vivien explained anxiously. ‘I can arrange for Rosa to stay longer and put Marco to bed. Could you babysit until I get home?’

‘If you go anywhere near Lucca, you’ll be making the biggest mistake of your life!’ Bernice swore in vehement annoyance.

‘I have to tell him how sorry I am…that’s the very least of what I owe him,’ Vivien pointed out tightly.

In the strained silence that fell, a calculating light entered Bernice’s appraisal. ‘Possibly it’s not such a bad idea after all. You could use the opportunity to tell Lucca that you are hopelessly broke—’

Vivien flinched. ‘I couldn’t!’

‘Then I won’t be able to look after Marco,’ her sister countered without hesitation.

Frustration and embarrassment fought inside Vivien. ‘All right…I’ll raise the subject and see if something can be sorted out…’

Her capitulation made Bernice smile with amused triumph. ‘Fine…then just this once I’ll babysit. Let’s hope that when Lucca sees you grovelling, he feels excessively generous.’

Informed of Vivien’s arrival, Lucca rose and called a five-minute break in the meeting he was chairing.

Able to view his estranged wife through the glass partition that surrounded the reception area, Lucca stilled on the landing above. In the vast, opulent space below, Vivien looked small, slight and insignificant. Her brown top and skirt were shapeless and ill fitting and she probably owned at least three sets of the same outfit. She hated shopping and buying in triplicate helped her to avoid it. Shorn of his care and attention, she had regressed from the standards he set at shocking speed and barricaded herself back into her unfashionable shell. Her nails were unpainted, her silky blonde hair caught up rather messily in a cheap plastic clip.

In her current guise, she was not a woman likely to turn male heads at first glance. Yet she possessed a luminous beauty that not even the dullest presentation could conceal. His keen gaze lingered on the visible slice of narrow shoulder blessed with skin as opalescent as a pearl and moved on to the delicate perfection of her profile and the tantalising femininity of her slim, restive hands and slender ankles. A raw flame of desire blistered through his big, powerful frame and rage at his own lack of control surged in its wake and balled his own hands into hard fists.

Once, he recalled bleakly, he had thought her sweet and unspoilt and loyal unto death. Her warmth and modesty had enchanted him and her honesty and kindness had made a huge impression on his cynical view of the world. There had been nothing false about her. He had truly believed he had struck gold. He had believed that his marriage would work where so many others broke down. He was a man to whom failure of any kind was anathema and he had chosen his wife with great care and caution. Yet she had proved completely unworthy of the ring he had put on her finger.

Righteous derision made him look away from her and the chill of intellectual control soon cooled the fire in his blood. For what good reason had he walked straight out on an important meeting? His essential courtesy had momentarily misled him, he decided, swinging on his heel to return to the conference table. After all, he had not invited Vivien to storm his office in the middle of his working day and demand his attention.

Her response to Jasmine Bailey’s confession in print was, however, very typical of her and he could have predicted it, Lucca conceded grimly. He knew Vivien well. Indeed, he had once prided himself on the reality that he excelled at everything at which she was useless. For all her apparent outward calm, Vivien could react with staggering impulsiveness and wildly undisciplined emotion. She was always uniformly blind to the darker motivations of others. She was a leading authority on rare ferns but she could neither recognise nor protect herself from the arts of calculation and manipulation. She would struggle to find a redeeming quality in even the most dislikeable human being.

But Lucca had no desire to be redeemed in her eyes. He did not wish to see her either and regarded her spontaneous arrival at his office as a piece of foolishness, likely to plunge her into embarrassment. To stage her descent on the same day that Jasmine Bailey confessed her lies to the world was exceptionally bad timing. Had Vivien no sense whatsoever? He had often thought not. If the press realised where she was, the paparazzi would arrive in hordes. Angling his wide shoulders back beneath his superbly tailored grey suit jacket, Lucca strode back to his meeting.

Unaware that she had been under observation, Vivien took a seat. She was flustered and uneasy at the covert stares she was attracting. On the train, she had tried to contact Lucca by phone and failed. Once she had had a private number for his mobile phone but that number was no longer operational. He had been ‘unavailable’ when she’d phoned the Saracino building. When she had asked for the means to contact him in person, she had been coolly told that only Lucca could give out that information. Dismayed by the confidential wall holding her at bay, she had rung off again without requesting an appointment. Told on arrival that Lucca was exceptionally busy, she prepared herself for a long wait and comforted herself with the reflection that at least Lucca was in the building and not abroad on business as he might well have been.

At five that evening Lucca closed his meeting and instructed a member of his staff to show Vivien into his office. Having waited for almost three hours without a word of encouragement and with steadily shrinking expectations, Vivien was hugely relieved to be escorted out of the reception area. But she was a jelly of nerves at the very thought of seeing Lucca again after so long. She did not know what she was going to say to him. She had no idea how to bridge the enormous chasm between them. His supposed infidelity had formed a giant barrier between her and her emotions and now that barrier was gone and with it the script of how she was to behave.

Flustered and unsure of herself, Vivien walked through the door.

Lucca stood centre stage in his cool, contemporary office, effortlessly dominating his surroundings. Six feet three inches tall and gifted with the superb build of a natural athlete, he was an exceptionally good-looking guy with an overwhelmingly physical impact. All the oxygen Vivien needed to breathe seemed to vanish from the atmosphere. Her mouth ran dry and her heart thumped. Colliding with his stunning dark eyes was like falling on an electric fence. She was embarrassed and rather ashamed that at such a crucial moment she could still be so immediately aware of his magnetic attraction

‘So…’ murmured Luca, whose machinations in business had once led to him being described as smooth as black ice and twice as treacherous. His gorgeous accent sizzled along the single drawn-out word and sent a reflexive shiver down her taut backbone. ‘What brings you up from the country?’

CHAPTER TWO

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.’

Vivien gritted her teeth together, for she did not require that reminder, nor did she wish to recall how very much she had once valued her ability to remain almost independent of his wealth. ‘Situations change. I was supposed to be writing a book this year and the department agreed to let me reduce my hours as a tutor. Unfortunately, the publisher decided the subject was too esoteric for the general public and pulled out. I won’t be able to return to full-time work in the botany department until the next academic year.’

‘I gather you had no contract with the publisher…’

Vivien nodded grudging confirmation and wondered how on earth she had let herself be persuaded into discussing something so remote from the emotions surging through her in great waves of frustrated grief.

‘My lawyers will contact yours and work out an appropriate arrangement. It’s not a problem. Did you think it would be a problem? Is that why you took the opportunity to approach me with fervent apologies today?’ Lucca demanded in a sudden switch of subject that caught her quite unprepared.

Vivien dealt him a startled glance. ‘Of course, it isn’t—’

‘Perhaps you thought I would be a mean bastard and refuse to step into the breach?’ Lucca flashed her a shimmering look of contempt.

‘No, I didn’t think that!’ But her pride, she was willing to admit, had shrunk from the prospect of admitting just how much she now needed the monetary help that she had once declined.

‘In spite of the fact that I was not the guilty party in the breakdown of our marriage, I was never petty. It was you who threw my generosity back in my face,’ Lucca condemned with harsh emphasis. ‘Although it was my right to contribute to my son’s upkeep, your selfish intransigence prevented me from advancing more than a tiny sum.’

Beneath that onslaught, Vivien had grown so pale and tense that her fine facial bones were clearly delineated by her pale skin. ‘I had no idea you felt like that about supporting Marco.’

His handsome jaw line squared to an aggressive angle. Again he shrugged, cold eyes black as polished jet dismissing her as a creature of no import. ‘Dio mio. Why should you have? Our only communication since you left has been through lawyers. Do you want a cheque now?’

Vivien reddened as though he had slapped her and pure anguish filled her, forming a tight, hard, intolerable knot somewhere below her ribs. Was he willing to do or say anything to get rid of her? ‘No…that’s truly not why I came to see you, Lucca.’

‘Yet a mercenary motive makes more sense than any other,’ Lucca fielded with supreme scorn. ‘You’re lucky you can’t be prosecuted for embarrassing me—’

‘Embarrassing you?’

‘As ex-wives go you look very poor and my enemies must think I keep a very tight hold on my cash reserves.’

‘I don’t have a mercenary motive!’ Vivien protested in growing consternation at his attitude. ‘Is it so hard for you to accept that I was and still am genuinely devastated by what Jasmine Bailey confessed in that newspaper today?’

Lucca elevated a brow. ‘No, I can accept that. Which of us enjoys being proven wrong? However, I really cannot understand why you felt the need to share your reaction with me in person.’

Vivien breathed in jerkily. ‘You don’t…?’

‘We’re virtually divorced—’

‘We’re not…stop saying that!’

‘But our marriage is over, dead, buried so deep it will never see the light of day again except on our son’s birth certificate,’ Lucca extended, his honeyed drawl thick with raw, biting derision. ‘Wake up and stop playing the Sleeping Beauty, who’s been stood up by the Prince. Two years have gone by. I hardly remember my time with you. It’s not even as though we were together that long.’

Every word was like a dagger plunged between Vivien’s ribs, poisoned and deadly, slicing in fast and hurting her more than she could bear. Part of her wanted to scream at him in tormented rebuttal but the other part of her wanted to curl up and die somewhere dark and silent and private. Every single memory of that same period they had been together remained as fresh as yesterday to her. It might have ended in tears but she had not allowed herself to become bitter and she had cherished the special memories she still had. In comparison, Lucca was telling her what no woman wanted to hear: he was spelling out the reality that theirs had only been one relationship amongst many in his past and he had moved on. Had it been two years? How had she contrived to overlook just how much time had passed?

Vivien looked peaky enough to be on the brink of fainting and her transparent pallor pierced the deep polar freeze with which Lucca had encased his responses. Had he set out to be deliberately cruel? He did not think so. He had only told her the truth, only pointed out that her behaviour was unwise and irrational. Even so, he asked her to sit down and when she refused offered her a drink.

‘I don’t…’ she muttered and looked fixedly down at her watch in an attempt to reinstate her self-discipline because inside herself she felt incredibly bruised and sensitive.

‘Yes, I know that, but perhaps just this once you could take a brandy,’ Lucca suggested rather curtly, disliking the tenor of his own concern. ‘When did you last remember to eat?’

‘Breakfast.’

He said nothing. She did not stop to eat when she was involved in anything that absorbed her concentration. He remembered the way his staff used to look after her in his absence, serving meals on trays when she was deep in her research and producing finger foods when her appetite needed tempting. She was extremely clever when it came to the rare plants she studied but not by any stretch of the imagination a woman of a practical bent.

Vivien lifted her head, green eyes haunted by the spectres of the past she had had and lost again. ‘You don’t want me to express my very great regret because you can’t forgive me,’ she whispered tightly. ‘I understand that and right now I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself.’

Taken aback by the intensity she exuded, Lucca pressed the brandy he had poured into her taut grasp. ‘I’ll call a limo for you. Did you travel here by train?’

‘Yes, but I don’t need a limo.’ She tipped the crystal glass to her lips, let the alcohol burn a fiery passage down past her dry and aching throat and pool like molten fire in the hollow pit of her tummy. While he watched with increasing fascination, she gulped the brandy down as though it were a soft drink and walked to the door. She was so deep in her own thoughts that she bumped into a chair and had to steady herself on it with one hand.

‘I insist that you wait for a limo to take you to the station,’ Lucca decreed.

‘I don’t listen when you insist any more.’ Vivien held her fair head high on her slender neck and her slight shoulders hurt with the tension of her rigid carriage.

Our marriage is over, dead, buried so deep it will never see the light of day again.

‘Vivi…be sensible.’

The use of that affectionate abbreviation of her name hurt like the sting of a bee, at first only a sharp, tiny, needling sensation that would ultimately be followed by greater pain. Her lovely face pale but seemingly serene, she walked out through the reception area and stepped into the sanctuary of the lift, horribly ill at ease beneath the prying, curious eyes trained on her. Already she was remembering other occasions when Lucca had called her by that name.

‘Vivi…don’t nag,’ he would reprove when she had endeavoured to persuade him to aim at spending one evening a week with her. An evening that would just be for them, not a night when they socialised with others or a night when he worked so late that she fell asleep alone in their bed. ‘Quality time is what you save for children and thankfully we don’t have any yet.’

‘Vivi…the scent of your skin drives me wild,’ he used to groan, kissing her awake with the seductive expertise for which he was famed and, even though she had so often been tired and sad, the only earthly paradise she had ever known had been the magic she had discovered in his arms.

‘Vivi…life will be so sweet for you now that you have me,’ he had promised with dazzling confidence and conviction on their wedding night and she had blindly trusted and believed it would be exactly as he’d said it would be.

The lift came to a halt and jolted Vivien back to the present and the noise and bustle of the busy ground floor. On the street, she caught a glimpse of her own ghostly reflection in a shop window and a laugh that was no laugh at all was torn from her.

Typically, it had not even occurred to her to think about her own appearance. When she had left Lucca, she had decided that such frivolous considerations were no longer necessary. But now she was aghast at her pale, plain reflection and the deeply unsexy baggy silhouette of her linen top and skirt. She should have dressed up for Lucca’s benefit. Perhaps he would have listened then. An Italian to the backbone, from the skin out he exuded designer elegance.

Someone collided with her and cannoned away again. ‘Why don’t you look where you’re going?’ an angry woman demanded, pushing past with the toddler who had smeared his ice-cream cone across Vivien’s skirt.

‘Signora Saracino…?’

Vivien looked across the pavement in surprise. Lucca’s chauffeur, Roberto, was holding open the passenger door of a long, gleaming limousine parked by the kerb. People walking past were looking at her. Colouring, she wondered just how long she had been standing staring at herself in the window and if indeed she was behaving as oddly as she felt. The suspicion was sufficient to persuade her that accepting a lift was the lesser of two evils.

Our marriage is over, dead, buried so deep it will never see the light of day again.

For goodness’ sake, why couldn’t she get those words out of her head? A sense of deep humiliation drenched her. Bernice had been aghast when Vivien had announced that she needed to see Lucca. Now it was obvious that she should have taken heed of her worldlier sibling’s opinion. Lucca had been cold, derisive and hostile. He had not shown the smallest interest in anything she’d had to say but had been reasonably enthusiastic about encouraging her departure. He had accused her of embarrassing them both. Anyone would think she had burst through his office door shouting that she still loved him and wanted him back! As if… Mouth tight to stop it quivering, pained eyes burning, Vivien snatched in a jagged breath.

It was almost impossible to recall that little more than three years ago. Lucca had acted as though she were a glittering prize to be won. Back then, he had seemed far from indifferent and it had taken him weeks just to persuade her to give him a chance…

The first Vivien had known of Lucca’s earthly existence was when he’d pinched her reserved parking space while she’d been painstakingly lining up her car to reverse into it. Having read about people who died in road rage attacks, she’d fumed in silence while she’d searched the busy campus for another place to park. Walking past that stolen space, she’d glowered unimpressed at the opulent scarlet Ferrari, which had already gathered a clutch of youthful male admirers.

Her bad day had not improved. Before she’d even got her coat off, a colleague had informed her that a visiting VIP was using her office to make his phone calls.

‘So what am I supposed to do?’ Vivien groaned because she had work to do and wanted to get on with it. ‘Who is it?’

‘Lucca Saracino…probably the most influential businessman who ever graduated from this institution,’ the older man explained. ‘He is so rich that that Ferrari parked out there could be fuelled on liquid gold and he’s thinking about endowing the faculty with a new research facility. We’re lucky he wasn’t offered the whole building for his private use!’

‘Saracino…’ Vivien repeated, for the name was vaguely familiar. ‘I have a student called Serafina Saracino—’

‘His kid sister is here on a year’s exchange,’ her companion confirmed.

Vivien defrosted a little and waited outside her own office with greater patience. At the start of term, Serafina had been extremely homesick and had tearfully confided in Vivien, who had become fond of the younger woman.

‘Why?’ a male drawl queried with a definable foreign accent, making Vivien peer at the door of her office, which stood ajar. ‘There is no reason why, Elaine. We’ve had fun together but time moves on and so must I. I’m not into fidelity or the long-term factor.’

Vivien flinched. Some poor woman was getting dumped by an arrogant louse with a lump of concrete where his heart should be. She was about to move out of hearing distance when the head of her department, Professor Anstey, appeared with a very bored-looking blonde by his side. Three things then happened simultaneously. A very tall dark male emerged from Vivien’s office. Suddenly energised, the blonde surged forward to cling possessively to his arm and whisper in a breathy intimate undertone. At the same time, the professor stepped forward to introduce Vivien.

‘Dr Dillon…’ Lucca Saracino murmured after a perceptible pause, his accent very pronounced.

‘Mr Saracino…’ Vivien looked up into a face of such breathtaking male beauty that momentarily all thought was suspended. The long-lashed brilliance of his black eyes seemed to reach inside her and cut off her ability to breathe at source. For a shameful instant, she was unaware of anything but him.

But then his lovely lady friend literally stepped between them. Vivien recognised her own brief lapse in concentration with a shock of recoil that made her freeze. Lucca Saracino was a very rich and very arrogant womaniser, in every way the sort of male she avoided. He attempted to extend their dialogue but her eyes would no longer meet his and her responses were as discouraging as her stance. With a harried reference to the time, she escaped into her office.

Two days later, she was giving a lecture based on the textbook she had written on ferns while she was still a student and she almost succumbed to nervous panic when she saw Lucca Saracino in the back row. Afterwards, he was waiting with his sister Serafina to invite her out to lunch and Vivien tried to make a gracious refusal.

‘Please…’ the bubbly brunette pressed with determination. ‘Everybody knows how shy you are but Lucca only wants to thank you for letting me wail all over you when I was so unhappy.’

‘Untrue. I would like to enjoy the simple pleasure of your company, Dr Dillon,’ Lucca contradicted, stunning dark eyes making her mouth run dry and her tummy flip.

Reluctant to hurt his sister’s feelings, Vivien acquiesced. Over the meal, she barely touched her food while Lucca planted subtle personal questions that she did not have the conversational dexterity to avoid answering.

Afterwards, Serafina rushed off to a lecture and, when Vivien attempted to imitate that fast exit, Lucca said with a mixture of amusement and faint annoyance, ‘Why have you decided not to like me?’

‘Where on earth did you get that idea?’ Vivien protested, writhing in embarrassment at the depth of his insight.

Yet in truth she did not know what to say to him or even what she was feeling. There was no way she would have confessed to a living soul and least of all him that from the moment she first saw him she had not existed a minute without thinking of him in some way. He was a stranger and yet he was not. In that initial fleeting meeting some connection had been forged that she could not shake off.

He asked her out to dinner, the date to be of her choosing so that she could not fall back on the excuse of pleading a prior engagement. She was astonished by that expression of personal interest on his part because she had simply assumed that the wicked attraction he exuded for her was a one-sided thing.

‘I think you are very beautiful,’ Lucca informed her with the enjoyment of a male who could read her mind.

‘I’m not at all beautiful!’ Vivien argued, defiant in her conviction that she was being fed a nonsensical line. Assuring him quite truthfully that she didn’t date and less truthfully that there was nothing personal in her lack of interest, she fled.

Every day after that, for two entire weeks, he sent her the most beautiful flowers, wonderful imaginative offerings that went far beyond standard bouquets. On the third weekend, Lucca arrived at her small apartment with dinner in a picnic basket. He charmed his way into her home and with glorious cool served them both with a gorgeous meal. Only when he was leaving did he ask her out again.

‘You’re crazy,’ she muttered in despair at his utterly single-minded pursuit. ‘Why would someone like you even want to go out with me?’

‘I can’t think about anything else.’

‘That doesn’t make sense.’

‘You can’t think of anything else either.’ Lucca delivered that coup de grâce without hesitation. ‘What has sense to do with this?’

But for Vivien sense had everything to do with it. She did not chase rainbows and she always respected her own limitations. She knew that she was useless with men and she was far too cautious to give her heart to someone who would treat it and her like a football once he had got bored. Yes, it hurt almost intolerably to deny her helpless craving to be with him, but to have him and lose him again would be much worse. So she laughed in the face of his boundless confidence, unwilling to acknowledge that he was right on target.

He began phoning her, but only occasionally. She began waiting for his calls and was disappointed and unable to settle when they didn’t come. On the phone she found him endlessly entertaining without being threatening and she continued to deny the growing strength of her own feelings. Meanwhile her peace of mind evaporated and her once total absorption in her work vanished. She had no idea that Lucca was steadily breaking down her defences until she dropped into Serafina’s leaving party in the summer term and saw him with another woman. Literally torn apart by the most violent sense of betrayal, she was finally forced to confront the power of her emotional attachment to Lucca Saracino…

Emerging from that energising recollection of the past into the even more challenging present, Vivien registered that once again she was in a very similar position. She gazed out the windows of the limo and saw nothing. Exactly what were her feelings for her husband? As soon as she had read Jasmine Bailey’s confession, she had dropped everything in her urgent need to see Lucca. It was true that honour demanded that she immediately make every effort to express her regret for not having had greater faith in him two years earlier. But was that really the only reason she had fired off like a rocket to London?

Vivien found herself squirming at that inner question but she made herself answer it truthfully. And the answer was so self-serving she was thoroughly ashamed of herself. The instant the barrier of Lucca’s supposed infidelity had been swept from her path, she had wanted him back. Without the smallest fore-thought she had approached him in the desperate hope of saving their marriage before the divorce went through. Wasn’t that what her real motivation had been? Hopefully Lucca remained in blissful ignorance of her foolish secret hopes. So did that mean she just went back home because he had told her to go back home? Was that it? Had she really made her best effort?

She found herself striving to remember how many rejections Lucca had swallowed before she’d finally surrendered and agreed to go out with him. Lucca was very proud yet, three years ago, he had persisted in spite of her rebuffs. It would have been so much easier for Lucca to walk away and choose one of the many women who would have been flattered by his interest and immediately responsive. But Lucca had decided that he wanted her and he had not let pride get in the way of that objective.

Vivien straightened her bent spine as though someone had jabbed a well-aimed hat-pin into a tender part of her anatomy. At the first taste of embarrassment and hurt pride, she had been ready to give up. Shame enveloped her. Just three short years ago, Lucca had fought for her…did she have the courage to fight for him? And for their marriage? Was she prepared to ditch her pride and make the effort to persuade Lucca that their marriage could still have a chance? It did not take much time for her to make a decision: existing without Lucca was like being only half alive.

The limousine was already drawing into the station to drop her off and she clambered out for want of anything better to do. Noticing the ice-cream stains on her skirt, which she had forgotten, she groaned. She would have to buy a change of clothes before she could make a second call on Lucca, who had long since impressed her with the reality that whether she approved or otherwise, people made value judgements on the basis of appearance.

It took some time for her to find her way back to an area where she was familiar with the shops and it took even longer for her to locate a suitable outfit. Stiff with reluctance, for she absolutely loathed wearing anything that attracted the least attention to her person, Vivien chose an ice-blue dress. Lucca had always preferred to see her clothed in light, bright colours. Letting the pale golden weight of her hair fall loose round her shoulders, she brushed it smooth.

She took a taxi to the elegant residential square where Lucca now owned a Georgian townhouse. His interior designer had sold illicit pictures to a glossy magazine and Bernice had drawn her sister’s attention to the article. It seemed especially ironic to Vivien that Lucca should finally have given up the vast minimalist apartment that she had loathed only after their marriage had broken down.

Her body taut with tension, she climbed out of the taxi with thoughts that were wholly dominated by the enervating challenge of what she should say to Lucca. Someone shouted her name and, when she glanced up in surprise, a man with a camera took a picture of her and urged her to stay where she was to enable him to take another. At the same time other people were running across the road towards her, shouting questions. For a split second she was so taken aback by the onslaught, she was paralysed to the spot, and then she dropped her head and raced as fast as she could up the steps to ring the bell on Lucca’s front door.

The paparazzi crowded round her in a suffocating crush. ‘How do you feel about Jasmine Bailey now, Mrs Saracino?’

‘You were seen at your husband’s office this afternoon.’ A microphone was thrust in Vivien’s stricken face and more cameras clicked. ‘Is it true that Lucca made you wait for hours before he would agree to see you?’

‘Are you aware that Lucca is currently seeing Bliss Masterson? She’s one of the most beautiful women in the world. How does that make you feel? Do you find that intimidating?’ Horrified by the shocking intrusiveness of that cruel interrogation, and backed up against the door in her desperate desire to escape, Vivien could easily have fallen when the door opened abruptly. Happily, a strong arm braced her and lifted her smoothly over the threshold.

‘Vivien…are you trying to save your marriage?’ the last reporter screeched like a vulture just before the door thudded shut.

‘Are you all right?’ Wearing an expression of concern, her rescuer urged her down into a chair in the huge gracious hall. It was Arlo, Lucca’s Chief of Security, who had always been very kind to her

‘F-fine…’ Vivien stammered, her teeth chattering together while she struggled to still the tremors of shock still coursing through her slender body.

‘That’s good, cara.’ Another, infinitely less sympathetic voice interposed from several feet away. ‘I would hate to be deprived of the opportunity of telling you that coming here tonight has to be the stupidest thing you have ever done!’

CHAPTER THREE

AGHAST at that condemnation, Vivien focused on Lucca as he strode towards her. The sight of him transfixed her and slashed like a cruel blade through her concentration. She, who had always liked to argue that looks were a superficial thing and not half so important as intellect and personality, was utterly dazzled by Lucca’s raw masculine vibrancy. He was so gorgeous that just looking at his lean, strong face and hard, powerful body made her feel dizzy and weak.

‘How on earth can you say that?’ Vivien fumbled and found those words with difficulty and rose hurriedly up from the chair to defend herself. Lucca would steamroller over her and verbally pound her into submission if she did not fight back.

‘It was obvious that the press would pounce at the first sign that you were reacting to the Bailey woman’s confession!’ Lucca proclaimed, his anger given a keener edge by the shocked pallor of fright that she still wore.

‘I was so wound up by all this,’ Vivien admitted ruefully with the frankness that was a great part of her charm, ‘that I’m afraid that that risk just didn’t occur to me.’

‘But it should’ve done.’ Lucca was too exasperated to be softened by the genuine regret clouding her lovely green eyes. Tomorrow the newspapers would carry unflattering photos of her clad like a tiny fragile ghost in a very strange wispy dress with fluttering sleeves and a fussy handkerchief hem. A fashion accident of pile-up proportions, it had most probably leapt right off the hanger into Vivien’s appreciative arms.

‘Yes…do you think I could have a drink?’ Vivien enquired in an apologetic undertone, for she was still feeling distinctly unsteady on her feet. But then it was hardly surprising that she should feel faint when she had not eaten since breakfast-time, she conceded ruefully. Recalling the restorative powers of the brandy she had imbibed in Lucca’s office, she decided to temporarily set aside her objections to alcohol and make use of it on what was a momentous occasion.

Another drink? Lucca was startled by her request and hugely disapproving. Had she begun drinking since their separation? He thrust wide the door of an imposing reception room decorated in cool shades of blue.

Vivien fiddled with one trailing sleeve, hands so restless she wished she could fold them up and put them away. ‘I know you have to be wondering why I’ve come back to see you…’

‘You couldn’t find you way back to the train?’

Chagrined colour laced her tense pallor and her chin came up. ‘This is serious—’

‘Sì…’ A slanting smile that was somehow an insult formed on Lucca’s beautifully moulded mouth as he extended a brandy goblet. ‘Here we are practically divorced and all of a sudden you’re in my face. Quite unexpectedly, I’m very much in demand. You say this is serious. Is it?’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.