About the Authors

CATHY WILLIAMS can remember reading Mills & Boon Modern books as a teenager, and now that she is writing them she remains an avid fan. For her, there is nothing like creating romantic stories and engaging plots, and each and every book is a new adventure. Cathy lives in London, and her three daughters—Charlotte, Olivia and Emma—have always been, and continue to be, the greatest inspirations in her life.

LOUISE FULLER was a tomboy who hated pink and always wanted to be the prince—not the princess! Now she enjoys creating heroines who aren’t pretty pushovers but are strong, believable women. Before writing for Mills & Boon she studied literature and philosophy at university and then worked as a reporter on her local newspaper. She lives in Tunbridge Wells with her impossibly handsome husband, Patrick, and their six children

JENNIFER HAYWARD has been a fan of romance since filching her sister’s novels to escape her teenage angst. Her career in journalism and PR—including years of working alongside powerful, charismatic CEOs and travelling the world—has provided her with perfect fodder for the fast-paced, sexy stories she likes to write—always with a touch of humour. A native of Canada’s east coast, Jennifer lives in Toronto with her Viking husband and young Viking-in-training.

Love Islands: Passionate Nights

The Wedding Night Debt

Cathy Williams

A Deal Signed by Passion

Louise Fuller

Carrying the King’s Pride

Jennifer Hayward

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-09704-8

LOVE ISLANDS: PASSIONATE NIGHTS

The Wedding Night Debt © 2015 Cathy Williams A Deal Sealed by Passion © 2016 Louise Fulle Carrying the King’s Pride © 2016 Jennifer Drogell

Published in Great Britain 2019

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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Table of Contents

Cover

About the Authors

Title Page

Copyright

The Wedding Night Debt

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

A Deal Signed by Passion

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

Carrying the King’s Pride

Back Cover Text

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

EPILOGUE

About the Publisher

The Wedding Night Debt

Cathy Williams

To my three wonderful and inspiring daughters

CHAPTER ONE

DIVORCE. IT WAS something that happened to other people: people who didn’t take care of their marriages; who didn’t understand that they were to be nurtured, looked after, handled as delicately as you would handle a piece of priceless porcelain.

At any rate, that had always been Lucy’s way of thinking, and she wondered how it was that she was standing here now, in one of the grandest houses in London, waiting for her husband to return home so that she could broach the subject of divorcing him.

She looked at her diamond-encrusted watch and her stomach knotted in anxiety. Dio was due back in half an hour. She couldn’t remember where he had spent the past week and a half. New York? Paris? They had places in both. Or maybe he had been in their Mustique villa. Maybe he had gone there with another woman. Who knew? She certainly didn’t.

Self-pity threatened to engulf her and she stemmed the tide with ease of practice born of habit.

She’d been married for nearly a year and a half, plenty of time to get accustomed to the way her youthful dreams had crumbled to ashes.

When she glanced up, she could see herself reflected in the huge, hand-made contemporary mirror which dominated the ultra-modern drawing room. Five foot ten, slender as a reed, long blonde hair that dropped to her shoulders, vanilla-blonde and poker-straight. When she was sixteen, she had been spotted by an agency and her father had tried to shove her into a career in modelling, because why waste a pretty face? After all, women weren’t cut out for anything more challenging, not really... But she had resisted—not that it had done her any good at all, in the end, because what good had been her degree when she had ended up...here? In this vast house, wandering in and out of rooms like a wraith, playing the perfect hostess? As if perfect hostessing was any kind of career for someone who had a degree in maths.

She barely recognised the woman she had turned out to be. On a warm evening in the middle of July, she was languishing in silk culottes with a matching silk vest top, just a few discreet bits of fairly priceless jewellery and high heels. She had turned into a Stepford Wife, except without the adoring husband rolling in at five-thirty every evening and asking what was for dinner. That might have been a distinct improvement on what she actually had, which was...nothing.

Or, had been nothing. She allowed herself a little smile because things weren’t quite as sterile as they had been. Her situation had changed in the past two months and she hugged that secret pleasure to herself.

It made up for all the time she had spent dressed up like an expensive doll, administering their various properties, smiling politely when she needed to smile politely and hosting dinner parties for the great and the good. Or, at any rate, the very, very rich.

And now...a divorce would set her free.

Provided Dio didn’t kick up a fuss. Although she told herself that there was no reason for him to, she could still feel a prickle of nervous perspiration break out over her body.

When it came to the concrete jungle, Dio Ruiz was the pack leader. He was an alpha male who played by his own rules. He was the sexiest man on earth and also the most intimidating.

But he wasn’t going to intimidate her. She had spent the past few days telling herself that, ever since she had decided which turning she would take at the crossroads—the turning that would put as much distance between herself and her husband as possible.

The only slight fly in the ointment was the fact that this would be the last thing he would be expecting and Dio didn’t do well when it came to flies in the ointment, not to mention the unexpected.

She heard the slam of the front door and her stomach lurched sickeningly but she only turned around when she sensed him at the door, his powerful, restless personality permeating the room even before she looked at him.

Even now, after everything, hating him as much as she hated him, his physical beauty still managed to take her breath away.

At twenty-two, when she had first laid eyes on him, he had been the most sinfully stunning guy she had ever seen and nothing had changed on that front. He was still the most sinfully stunning guy she had ever seen. Raven-black hair framed arrogantly perfect features. His pale, silver-grey eyes, so unusual against his bronzed skin, were dramatically fringed with thick, dark lashes. His mouth was firm and sensuous. Every little bit of him relayed the message that he was not a guy to be messed with.

‘What are you doing here? I thought you were in Paris...’ Lounging in the doorway, Dio began tugging at his tie, strolling into the room at the same time.

Surprise, surprise. It wasn’t often he found himself anywhere with his wife that hadn’t been meticulously planned in advance. Their meetings were formal, staged, never, ever spontaneous. When they were both in London, their lives were hectic, a whirlwind of social events. They each had their separate quarters, readied themselves in their own private cocoons and met in the vast hall, both dressed to the nines and ready to present the united image that couldn’t have been further from the truth.

Occasionally, she might accompany him to Paris, New York or Hong Kong, always the perfect accessory.

Smart, well-bred...and most of all stunningly beautiful.

Tie off, he tossed it onto the white leather sofa and circled her, frowning, before coming to rest directly in front of her, where he began undoing the top two buttons of his shirt.

‘So...’ he drawled. ‘To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?’

Her nostrils flared as she breathed him in. He had a scent that was peculiarly unique to him. Clean, woody and intensely masculine.

‘Am I interrupting your plans for the evening?’ She averted her eyes from the sliver of tanned chest just visible where he had unbuttoned the shirt.

‘My plans involved reading through some fairly dull legal due diligence on a company I’m taking over. What plans did you think you might be interrupting?’

‘No idea.’ She shrugged her narrow shoulders. ‘I don’t know what you get up to in my absence, do I?’

‘Would you like me to fill you in?’

‘I don’t care one way or another, although it might have been a little embarrassing if you’d come home with a woman on your arm.’ She gave a brittle laugh, hating herself for how she sounded—hard, cold, dismissive.

It hadn’t started out like this. In fact, she had actually been stupid enough, at the very beginning, to think that he was actually interested in her, actually attracted to her.

They had gone out on a few dates. She had made him laugh, telling him about some of her university friends and their escapades. She had listened, enthralled, about the places he had seen. The fact that her father had actually approved of the relationship had been a green light because her father had made a career out of disapproving of every single boy she had ever brought home, all three of them. In fact, he had made a career out of being critical and disapproving of everything she had ever done, and every choice she had ever made, so the fact that he had been accepting, encouraging, even, of Dio had been a refreshing change.

If she hadn’t been so wet behind the ears, she might have asked herself why that was, but instead, heady with the joy of falling in love, she had chosen to overlook his sudden benevolence.

When Dio had proposed after a whirlwind romance she had been over the moon. The intense but chaste courtship had thrilled her, as had the fact that he hadn’t wanted to wait. No long engagement for him! He had been eager to slip the ring on her finger and his eagerness had made her feel loved, wanted, desired.

Sometimes, she wondered whether she would have stupidly continued feeling loved, wanted and desired if she hadn’t overheard that conversation on their wedding night. She’d been floating on a cloud, barely able to contain her excitement at the thought of their honeymoon in the Maldives and their wedding night, the big night when she would lose her virginity, because until then he had been the perfect gentleman.

He’d been nowhere to be seen and she had eventually floated away from the marquee in her father’s garden, from the music and the people dancing and getting drunk, and had drifted off towards the kitchen and past her father’s office, where she had immediately recognised the deep timbre of his voice.

A marriage of convenience...a company takeover... He had got her father’s company, which had been losing money by the bucket load, and she had been an accessory thrown in for good measure. Or maybe, when she had bitterly thought about it later, her father had insisted on the marriage because if she was married to Dio he would remain duty-bound to the family company. No doing the dirty once the signatures had been written on the dotted line! No dumping her father in the proverbial because he was no longer an asset!

She would be her father’s safety net and Dio—as her father had spitefully told her when she had later confronted him with what she had overheard—would get the sort of class that his vast sums of money would never have been able to afford him.

Lucy, in the space of a couple of hours, had grown up. She was a married woman and her marriage was over before she had even embarked on it.

Except, she couldn’t get out of it, her father had told her, not that easily. Did she want to see the family company go under? There’d been some uncomfortable stuff with some of the company profits...a little borrowed here and there...he might go to prison if it all came out. Did she want that, to see her father behind bars? It would hit the news. Did she want that? Fingers pointed? People smirking?

She had acquiesced to her sham of a marriage although, frankly, her father might have escaped a prison sentence but only by handing the prison sentence over to her.

The one thing she had resolved, however, was to be married in name only. No sex. No cosy time together. If Dio thought that he had bought her body and soul, she had been determined to prove him wrong. When she thought of the way she had fallen for his charm, had thought he’d actually been interested in inexperienced little her, she had burned with shame.

So she had quietly put her dreams into a box, shut the lid and thrown away the key...and here she was now.

‘Is there a problem with the Paris apartment?’ Dio asked politely. ‘Can I get you a drink? Something to celebrate the one-off occasion of us being in the same room alone without prior arrangement? I can’t think of the last time that happened, can you?’ But, at a push, he would have said before they’d got married, when she had been studiously courting him, even though at the time he had thought it to be the other way around.

He had set his sights on Robert Bishop and his company a long, long time ago. He had covertly kept tabs on it, had seen the way it had slid further and further into a morass of debt and, like any predator worth his salt, he had bided his time.

Revenge was always a dish best eaten cold.

He just hadn’t banked on the daughter. One glimpse of Lucy and her innocent, ethereal beauty and he had altered his plans on the spot. He had wanted her. She had touched something in him with her innocence and, cynic that he was, he had fallen hook, line and sinker.

He hadn’t banked on that complication, had thought that she would hop into bed with him, allowing him to get her out of his system before he concluded business with her father. But, after a few weeks of playing a courting game that wasn’t his thing at all, he had concluded that he wanted more than just a slice of her.

Only thing was...nearly a year and a half later and their marriage was as dry as dust. He still hadn’t touched that glorious body, leaving him with the certainty that, whilst he had thought he had the upper hand, she and her conniving father had actually played him for a fool. Instead of swinging the wrecking ball to the company and setting the police on Robert Bishop—who had been embezzling for years—he had ended up saving the company because he had wanted Lucy. He had wanted her at his side and in his bed and, if saving the company came as part of the deal, then so be it. Course, he had saved it and made money from it, ensuring that Robert Bishop was firmly locked out with just enough pocket money to teach him the joys of frugality, but still...

He had been unwittingly charmed by her open, shy, disingenuous personality. When she had looked at him with those big, grave brown eyes, her face propped in the palm of her hand, her expression enraptured, he had felt as though he had found the secret of eternal life and it had gone to his head like a drug.

She’d led him on. God knew if her slime of a father had kick-started the idea but that didn’t matter.

What mattered was that they had got what they wanted while he had certainly missed out on what he had banked on getting.

She was shaking her head at the offer of a drink and he ignored her, fetching himself a glass of whisky and a glass of wine for her.

‘Relax,’ he said, pressing the glass on her and then retreating to the bay window where he sipped his drink and watched her in absolute silence. She had made it crystal clear on their wedding night that theirs was not a real marriage. No sex, no chit-chat, no getting to know one another. So he’d taken over her father’s company but that didn’t mean that she came as part of the package deal and, if he thought he’d been short-changed, then that was too bad.

He hadn’t asked how she knew, what her father had said or what she had been told. He’d been duped and that was the end of the story.

The thought of having any kind of soul-searching conversation about the quality of their marriage had never crossed Dio’s mind. He had made no effort to talk things through. And no one could ever accuse her of not being the ‘perfect wife’. She certainly looked the part. Willowy, blonde, with a devastating prettiness that conveyed an air of peculiar innocence underneath the polished exterior. It was a quality that no model or socialite could replicate. She looked like someone waiting for life to happen and people fell for it. She was the greatest business asset a man could have. The woman, Dio had often thought, had missed her career as an Oscar-winning actress.

‘So, if you’re not in Paris, it’s because something’s wrong with the apartment. You should know by now that I don’t get involved with the nitty-gritty details of my houses. That’s your job.’

Lucy stiffened. Her job. That said it all. Just what every young girl dreamed of...a marriage completely lacking in romance which could be described as a job.

‘There’s nothing wrong with the Paris apartment. I just decided that...’ she took a deep breath and gulped down some wine ‘... I decided that we needed to have a talk...’

‘Really? What about? Don’t tell me that you’re angling for a pay rise, Lucy? Your bank account is more than healthy. Or have you seen something you’d really like? House in Italy? Apartment in Florence? Buy it.’ He shrugged and finished the remainder of his whisky. ‘As long as it’s somewhere that can be used for business purposes, then I don’t have a problem.’

‘Why would I want to buy a house, Dio?’

‘What, then? Jewellery? A painting? What?’

His air of bored indifference set her teeth on edge. This was worse than normal. Usually, they could manage to be polite for the five minutes they were forced to spend in one another’s company—cooped up in a taxi, maybe, or else waiting for his driver to take them to some opening or other; or else back in one of their grand houses, removing coats and jackets before disappearing to opposite ends of the house.

‘I don’t want to buy anything.’ Restively she began walking, stopping to look absently at some of the expensive artefacts in the room. As with all their houses, this one was the last word in what money could buy. The paintings were breath-taking, the furniture was all hand-made, the rugs were priceless silk.

No expense was ever spared and it was her job to ensure that all these high-end properties with their priceless furnishings ran like clockwork. Some were used by him, if he happened to be in the country at the time; occasionally they both found themselves in one at the same time. Often he arranged for clients to have use of them and then she had to oversee all the arrangements to make sure that his client left satisfied, having experienced the last word in luxury.

‘In that case,’ Dio drawled, ‘why don’t you get to the point and say what you have to say? I’m having a night in because I need to get through some work.’

‘And of course, if you’d known that I would be waiting here like a spare part,’ Lucy retorted, ‘you would have made sure you didn’t bother returning.’

Dio shrugged, allowing her to draw her own conclusions.

‘I feel...’ Lucy breathed in deeply ‘...that circumstances between us have changed since...since dad died six months ago...’

He stilled and dropped his empty glass on the side table next to him, although his silver-grey eyes remained on her face. As far as he was concerned, the world was a more pleasant place without Robert Bishop in it. Certainly a more honest one. Whether his wife would agree with him, he didn’t know. She had been composed at the funeral, her eyes hidden behind over-sized sunglasses and, since then, life had carried on as normal.

‘Explain.’

‘I don’t want to be shackled to you any more, and there’s no longer any need.’ She did her best to get her thoughts in order but the cool intensity of his gaze was off-putting.

‘You also happen to be shackled to a lifestyle that most women would find enviable.’

‘Then you should let me go and you should find one of those women,’ she retorted, her cheeks burning. ‘You’d be happier. I’m sure you would because you must know that I’m...not happy, Dio. Or maybe,’ she added in a lowered voice, ‘you do know and you just don’t care.’ She sat and crossed her legs but she couldn’t meet his eyes. He still did things to her, could still make her feel squirmy inside, even though she had done her best over time to kill that weak feeling. It was inappropriate to be attracted to a man who had used you, who had married you because you happened to be a social asset. That didn’t make sense. Yes, when he had pretended to be interested in her, she could understand how she had been hot for him, so hot that she had spent her nights dreaming about him and her days fantasising about him. But not when she had found out the truth, and certainly not now, after all this time of cold war.

‘Are you telling me that you want out?’

‘Can you blame me?’ She answered a question with a question and finally met those cool, pale grey eyes. ‘We don’t have a marriage, Dio. Not a real one. I don’t even understand why you married me in the first place, why you took an interest in me at all.’ Except, of course, she did. Robert Bishop had been happy enough to tell her. Dio had wanted more than just his company; he had wanted social elevation, although why he should care she had no idea.

It was something she had never asked her husband. It was humiliating to think that someone had married you because you could open a few doors for them. She had been a bonus to the main deal because she had looked right and had had the right accent.

‘You could have bought my father out without marrying me,’ she continued, braving the iciness of his eyes. ‘I know my father tried to shove me down your throat because he thought that, if you married me, he wouldn’t end up in prison like a common criminal. But you could have had your pick of women who would have flung themselves in your path to be your wife.’

‘How would you have felt if your dear daddy had ended up in jail?’

‘No one wants to see any relative of theirs in prison.’

It was an odd choice of words but Dio let it go. He was shocked at the way this evening was turning out but he was hiding it well.

Had she really thought that she could play games with him, reel him in, get the ring on her, only to turn her back on his bed on their wedding night? And then, as soon as her father died, turn her back on him a second time?

‘No, a relative in prison tends to blight family gatherings, doesn’t it?’ He rose to pour himself another drink because, frankly, he needed one. ‘Tell me something, Lucy, what did you think of your father’s...how shall I put it?...creative use of the company’s pension pot?’

‘He never told me in detail...what he had done,’ she mumbled uncomfortably. Indeed, she had known nothing of her father’s financial straits until that overheard conversation, after which he had been more than willing to fill her in.

Lucy thought that Dio might have been better off asking her what she had thought of her father. Robert Bishop had been a man who had had no trouble belittling her, a man who had wanted a son but had been stuck with a daughter, a chauvinist who had never accepted that women could be equal in all walks of life. Her poor, pretty, fragile mother had had a miserable existence before she had died at the tender age of thirty-eight. Robert Bishop had been a swaggering bully who had done his own thing and expected his wife to stay put and suck it up. He had womanised openly, had drunk far too much and, behind closed doors, had had fun jeering at Agatha Bishop, who had put up with it with quiet stoicism because divorce was not something her family did. Cancer had taken her before she’d been able to put that right.

Lucy had spent her life avoiding her father—which had been easy enough, because she had been farmed out to a boarding school at the age of thirteen—but she had never stopped hating him for what he put her mother through.

Which wasn’t to say that she would have wanted to see him in prison and, more than that, she knew her mother would have been mortified. There was no way she would have sullied her mother’s reputation, not if she could have helped it. She would rather have died than to have seen her mother’s friends sniggering behind their backs that Agatha Bishop had ended up with a crook.

Looking at her, Dio wondered what was going through that beautiful head of hers. There was a remoteness there that had always managed to feed into his curiosity. No woman had ever been able to do that and it got on his nerves.

‘Well, I’ll fill in the gaps, shall I?’ he said roughly. ‘Your father spent years stealing from the pension fund until there was nothing left to steal. I assume he had a drinking problem?’

Lucy nodded. At boarding school and then university she had not had much time to observe just how much of a drinking problem he had had but it had been enough, she knew, to have sent his car spinning off the motorway at three in the morning.

‘The man was an alcoholic. A functioning alcoholic, bearing in mind he was crafty enough to get his greedy hands on other people’s money, but the fact of the matter was that he nicked what didn’t belong to him to the point that his entire company was destined to sink in the quicksand if I hadn’t come along and rescued it.’

‘Why did you?’ she asked curiously. She assumed that he must have come from a working class background, if what her father had implied was true, but certainly, by the time he had crash-landed into her life, he was a self-made millionaire several times over. So why bother with her father’s company?

Dio flushed darkly. Such a long and involved story and one he had no intention of telling her.

‘It had potential,’ he drawled, his beautiful mouth curving into a smile that could still make her heart beat a little faster. ‘It had tentacles in all the right areas, and my intuition paid off. It’s made me more money than I know what to do with. And then,’ he continued softly, ‘how many failing companies come with the added bonus of...you? Have you looked in the mirror recently, my darling wife? What red-blooded male could have resisted you? And your father was all too happy to close the deal and throw you in for good measure...’

He saw the way her face reddened and the way her eyes suddenly looked as though they were tearing up. For a split second, he almost regretted saying what he had said. Almost.

‘Except,’ he carried on in that same unhurried voice, ‘I didn’t get you, did I? You went out with me; you smiled shyly as you hung onto my every word; you let me get so close, close enough for me to need a cold shower every time I returned to my house, because you had turned retreating with a girlish blush into an art form... And then, on our wedding night, you informed me that you weren’t going to be part of any deal that I had arranged. You led me on...’

‘I... I...never meant to do that...’ But she could see very clearly how the situation must have looked to a man like Dio.

‘Now, I wonder why I find that so hard to believe?’ he murmured, noticing with some surprise that he had finished his second drink. Regretfully, he decided against a third. ‘You and your father concocted a little plan to make sure I was hooked into playing ball.’

‘That’s not true!’ Bright patches of colour appeared on her cheeks.

‘And then, once I had played ball, you were free to drop the act. So now you’re talking about divorce. Your father’s no longer in danger of the long arm of justice and you want out.’ He tilted his head to one side as another thought crept in. For the first time, he wondered what she got up to in his many absences.

He could have put a tail on her but he had chosen not to. He had simply not been able to imagine his frozen ice-maiden doing anything behind his back. Except she hadn’t always been that ice maiden, had she? There was more to her than that cool detachment. He had seen that for himself before she had said ‘I do’... So had she been getting up to anything behind his back?

Was it a simple case of her wanting to divorce him, having given a sufficiently adequate period of mourning for her dear old daddy? Or was there some other reason lurking in the background...?

And, just like that, rage slammed into him with the force of a sledgehammer.

Had she been seeing some man behind his back? He couldn’t credit it but, once the nasty thought took hold, he found he couldn’t jettison it.

‘I want out because we both deserve something better than what we have.’

‘How considerate of you to take my feelings into account.’ Dio raised his eyebrows in a phoney show of gravity that made her grit her teeth. ‘I never realised you had such a thoughtful, pious streak in you.’

First thing in the morning, he would have her followed, see for himself where this was all coming from. He certainly had no intention of asking her whether there was some guy in the background. In this sort of situation, nothing could beat the element of surprise.

‘There’s no need to be sarcastic, Dio.’

‘Who’s being sarcastic? Here’s what I’m thinking, though...’ He allowed a few seconds, during which time he pretended to give what was coming next some careful thought. ‘You want out—but you do realise that you will leave with nothing?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I had a very watertight pre-nup made up before we married, which you duly signed, although I’m not entirely sure whether you read it thoroughly or not. My guess is that you were so eager to get me on board that signing anything would have just been a formality. Am I right?’

Lucy vaguely remembered signing something extremely long and complicated and very boring. She decided that she wouldn’t take issue with his accusation that she’d been eager to get him on board; with his accusation that she had been in cahoots with her father to lure him into buying the company with her in the starring role of sacrificial lamb. She wasn’t going to get involved in any sort of argument with him because he would emerge the winner. He had the sharpest brain of any person she had ever known in her life.

She would get out, never see him again. For a fleeting second, something wrenching and painful tugged inside her and she shoved the feeling away.

‘As a rich man,’ he said, ‘I thought it best to protect myself. Here’s what you signed up to. I got the company. Lock, stock and smoking barrel. Just recompense for rescuing it from imminent collapse and saving your father’s frankly unworthy skin. I’m not sure if you know just how much he skimmed off the pension funds, how much I had to inject back in so that your employees didn’t find themselves of pensionable age with nothing but a begging bowl for company? Enough for me to tell you that it was millions.’ He breathed an exaggerated sigh and looked at her from under sinfully thick lashes. It had always amazed him that such a stupendously pretty face, so stunningly guileless, could house someone so cunning. It took all sorts to make the world.

Lucy hung her head because shame was never far away when her father’s name was mentioned. She looked at her perfectly manicured nails and thought how wonderful it would feel never to wear nail polish ever again. She might have a burning-of-the-nail-polish ceremony.

She distractedly half-smiled and Dio, looking at her, frowned. So...what was the joke? he wondered.

More to the point, what was the little secret? Because that had been a secretive smile.

‘As long as you are my wife,’ he informed her, banking down the simmering rage bubbling up inside him, ‘you get whatever you want. There are no limits placed on the amount of money you can spend.’

‘You mean provided you approve of the purchases?’

‘Have you ever heard me disapprove of anything you’ve ever bought?’

‘All I buy are clothes, jewellery and accessories,’ Lucy returned. ‘And only because I need them to...play the part I have to play.’

‘Your choice.’ He shrugged. ‘You could have bought a fleet of cars as far as I was concerned.’

She made a face and his frown deepened. He considered the possibility of giving her a divorce and dismissed the idea, although the reasons for that instant dismissal were a bit vague. Was he that possessive a man that he would hold on to a woman who wanted to escape? He had wanted revenge. And it might have come in a different shape from the one he had planned, but it had still come. He had still ended up with Robert Bishop’s company, hadn’t he? So what was the point of hanging on to Lucy and an empty marriage?

But then, she wasn’t just any woman, was she? She just happened to be his wife. The wife who had promised a lot more than she had ended up delivering. What man liked being short-changed?

‘You leave me,’ he told her in a hard voice, ‘and you leave with the clothes on your back.’

Lucy blanched. She loathed the trappings of wealth but wasn’t it a fact that that was all she had ever known? How would she live? What sort of job had years of being pampered prepared her for? She had never had the opportunity to do the teacher training course she had wanted to do. She had, instead, jumped into a marriage that had turned her into a clone of someone she didn’t like very much.

‘I don’t care,’ she said in a low voice and Dio raised his eyebrows in a question.

‘Of course you do,’ he told her. ‘You wouldn’t know where to begin when it came to finding a job.’

‘You can’t say that.’

‘Of course I can. You’ve grown up in the lap of luxury and, when most other girls would have branched out into the big, bad world, you married me and continued your life of luxury. Tell me, what has prepared you for that ugly, grim thing called reality?’

He would turf her out without a penny. She could see that in his eyes. He had never cared a jot about her and he didn’t care about her now. He had wanted the company and she had been a useful tool to acquire along with the bricks and mortar.

She just recently might have dipped her toe in that grim thing he was talking about called reality, but he was right. A life of creature comforts hadn’t prepared her for striking out with nothing. It would take ages for her to find her feet in the world of work, and how would she survive in the meantime? When he told her that she would leave with nothing but the clothes on her back, she was inclined to believe him. The clothes on her back wouldn’t include the expensive jewellery in the various safes and vaults.

‘I can see that you know where I’m coming from...’ He leaned forward, arms resting loosely on his thighs. ‘If you want out, then you have two options. You go with nothing, or...’

Lucy looked at him warily. ‘Or...what?’

CHAPTER TWO

DIO SMILED SLOWLY and relaxed back.

Sooner or later, this weird impasse between them would have had to find a resolution; he had known that. Always one to dominate the situations around him, he had allowed it to continue for far longer than acceptable.

Why?

Had he thought that she would have thawed slowly? She’d certainly shown no signs of doing anything of the sort as the months had progressed. In fact, they had achieved the unthinkable—a functioning, working relationship devoid of sex, a business arrangement that was hugely successful. She complemented him in ways he could never have imagined. She had been the perfect foil for his hard-nosed, aggressive, seize-and-conquer approach to business and, frankly, life in general. He hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he had had to haul himself up by his boot straps, and the challenges of the journey to success had made him brutally tough.

He was the king of the concrete jungle and he was sharp enough to know that pretenders to the throne were never far behind. He was feared and respected in equal measure and his wife’s ingrained elegance counterbalanced his more high-voltage, thrusting personality beautifully.

Together they worked.

Maybe that was why he had not broached the subject of all those underlying problems between them. He was a practical man and maybe he had chosen not to rock the boat because they had a successful partnership.

Or maybe he had just been downright lazy. Or—and this was a less welcome thought—vain enough to imagine that the woman he still stupidly fancied would end up coming to him of her own accord.

The one thing he hadn’t expected was talk of a divorce.

He poured himself another drink and returned to the chair, in no great hurry to break the silence stretching between them.

‘When we got married,’ Dio said slowly, ‘it didn’t occur to me that I would end up with a wife who slept in a separate wing of the house when we happened to be under the same roof. It has to be said that that’s not every man’s dream of a happy marriage.’

‘I didn’t think you had dreams of happy marriages, Dio. I never got the impression that you were the sort of guy who had fantasies of coming home to the wife and the two-point-two kids and the dog and the big back garden.’

‘Why would you say that?’

Lucy shrugged. ‘Just an impression I got.’ But that hadn’t stopped her from falling for him. She had got lost in those amazing eyes, had been seduced by that deep, dark drawl and had been willing to ignore what her head had been telling her because her heart had been talking a lot louder.

‘I may not have spent my life gearing up for a walk down the aisle but that doesn’t mean that I wanted to end up with a woman who didn’t share my bed.’

Lucy reddened. ‘Well, both of us has ended up disappointed with what we got,’ she said calmly.

Dio waved his hand dismissively. ‘There’s no point trying to analyse our marriage,’ he said. ‘That’s a pointless exercise. I was going to talk to you about options...’ He sipped his drink and looked at her thoughtfully. ‘And I’m going to give you a very good one. You want a divorce? Fine. I can’t stop you heading for the nearest lawyer and getting divorce papers drawn up. Course, like I said, that would involve you leaving with nothing. A daunting prospect for someone who has spent the last year and a half never having to think about money.’

‘Money isn’t the be all and end all of everything.’

‘Do you know what? It’s been my experience that the people who are fond of saying things like that are the people who have money at their disposal. People who have no money are usually inclined to take a more pragmatic approach.’ Having grown up with nothing, Dio knew very well that money actually was the be all and end all of everything. It gave you freedom like nothing else could. Freedom to do exactly what you wanted to do and to be accountable to no one.

‘I’m saying that it doesn’t always bring happiness.’ She thought of her own unhappy, lavish childhood. From the outside, they had looked like a happy, privileged family. Behind closed doors, it had been just the opposite. No amount of money had been able to whitewash that.

‘But a lack of it can bring, well, frustration? Misery? Despair? Imagine yourself leaving all of this so that you can take up residence in a one-bedroom flat where you’ll live a life battling rising damp and mould on the walls.’

Lucy gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘Aren’t you being a bit dramatic, Dio?’

‘London is an expensive place. Naturally, you would have some money at your disposal, but nothing like enough to find anywhere halfway decent to live.’

‘Then I’d move out of London.’

‘Into the countryside? You’ve lived in London all your life. You’re accustomed to having the theatre and the opera and all those art exhibitions you enjoy going to on tap... But don’t worry. You can still enjoy all of that but, sadly, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. You want your divorce? You can have it. But only after you’ve given me what I expected to get when I married you.’

It took a few seconds for Lucy’s brain to make the right connections and catch up with what he was telling her but, even so, she heard herself ask, falteringly, ‘What are you talking about?’

Dio raised his eyebrows and smiled slowly. ‘Don’t tell me that someone with a maths degree can’t figure out what two and two makes? I want my honeymoon, Lucy.’

‘I... I don’t know what you mean...’ Lucy stammered, unable to tear her eyes away from the harsh lines of his beautiful face.

‘Of course you do! I didn’t think I was signing up for a sexless marriage when I slipped that wedding band on your finger. You want out now? Well, you can have out just as soon as we put an end to the unfinished business between us.’

‘That’s blackmail!’ She sprang to her feet and began restively pacing the room. Her nerves were all over the place. She had looked forward to that wretched honeymoon night so much...and now here he was, offering it to her, but at a price.

‘That’s the offer on the table. We sleep together, be man and wife in more than just name only, and you get to leave with an allowance generous enough to ensure that you spend the rest of your life in comfort.’

‘Why would you want that? You’re not even attracted to me!’

‘Come a little closer and I can easily prove you wrong on that point.’

Heart thudding, Lucy kept a healthy distance, but she was looking at him again, noting the dark intent in his eyes. The desire she had shoved away, out of sight, began to uncurl inside her.

She’d been foolish enough to think that he had been interested in her, attracted to her, and had discovered that it had all been a lie. He had strung her along because he had decided that she would be a useful addition to his life.

There was no way that she would sleep with him as some sort of devil’s bargain. She had watched the car crash of her parents’ marriage and had vowed that she would only give her body to a man who truly loved her, that she would only marry for the right reasons. Her parents had had a marriage of convenience, the natural joining of two wealthy families, and just look at where they had ended up. The minute she had realised that her marriage to Dio had not been what she had imagined was the minute she’d made her decision to withhold the better part of herself from him, to remain true to her principles.

She watched, horrified, as he slowly rose from his chair and strolled towards where she was standing by the window. With each step, her nerves shredded a little bit more.

‘A matter of weeks...’ he murmured, delicately tracing his finger along her cheek and feeling her quiver as he touched her.

She was the only woman in the world he had never been able to read.

There had been times during their marriage when he had surprised her looking at him, had seen something in her eyes that had made him wonder whether his dear wife was slightly less immune to him than she liked to portray, but he had never explored the possibility. There was such a thing as pride, especially to a man like him.

He was willing to explore the possibility now because he knew that, if she left and he never got to touch her, she would become unfinished business and that would be a less than satisfactory outcome.

‘Weeks...?’ Transfixed by the feel of his skin against hers, Lucy remained rooted to the spot. Her breasts ached and she could feel her nipples tightening, sensitive against her lacy bra. Liquid was pooling between her legs and, although she remained perfectly still, she wanted to squirm and rub her legs together to relieve herself of the ache between them.

‘That’s right.’ Plenty long enough to get her out of his system. She was his and he intended to have her, all of her, before he allowed her her freedom.

At which point, he would close the door on a part of his past that had gnawed away at him for as long as he could remember.

His erection was hard enough to be painful and he stepped a bit closer, close enough for her to feel it against her belly. He knew that she had from the slight shudder that ran through her body. Her eyes were wide, her mouth parted.

An invitation. One that he wasn’t going to resist. He hadn’t been this physically close to his wife since he had tied the knot with her and he wasn’t about to waste the opportunity.

Lucy knew he was going to kiss her. She placed her hand flat on his chest, a pathetic attempt to push him away before he could get too close, but she didn’t push him away. Instead, as his mouth found hers, treacherous fingers curled into his shirt and she sighed, losing herself in the headiness of feeling his tongue probing into her mouth, his tongue moving, exploring, with hers, sparking a series of explosive reactions in her body.

Like a match set to tinder, she felt her whole body combusting. Their brief courtship had been so very chaste. This wasn’t chaste. This was unrestrained hunger and his hunger matched her own.

She felt him slip his hand underneath the silk top to cup her breast and, when he began to rub her nipple through the lacy bra, she wanted to pass out.

Or else rip off his shirt so that she could spread trembling, eager fingers against his broad, hard chest.

He pulled back. It took her a couple of seconds to recognise his withdrawal and then horror at what she had allowed to happen filtered through her consciousness and washed over her like a bucket of freezing cold water.

‘What the heck do you think you’re doing?’

Dio smiled. ‘Giving you proof positive that we could have a couple of weeks of very pleasant carnal adventures...’ Keen eyes noted the hectic flush in her cheeks and the way she had now prudishly folded her arms across her chest, as if she could deny the very heated, very satisfactory, response she had just given him.

He hadn’t been mistaken when it came to those little looks he had surprised her giving him after all.

‘I have no intention of...of sleeping with you for money!’

Dio’s lips thinned. ‘Why not? You married me for money. At least sleeping with me would introduce the element of fun.’

‘I did not marry you for money!’

‘I have no intention of going down this road again. I’ve given you your options. You can decide which one to go for.’ He spun round on his heels, heading for the door.

‘Dio!’

He stilled and then took his time turning to face her.

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why does it matter whether you sleep with me or not? I mean surely there have been...women in your life over the past year or so more than willing to jump into bed with you... Why does it matter whether I do or not?’

Dio didn’t answer immediately. He knew what she thought, that he spent his leisure time between the sheets with other women. There had been no need for her to vocalise it. He had seen it in her face on the few occasions when he had happened to be in conversation with another woman, an attractive woman. He had seen the flash of resentment and scorn which had been very quickly masked and he had seen no reason to put her straight.

He didn’t think that there was any need to put her straight now. Not only had he not slept with any other woman since his marriage, but he had not been tempted. There wasn’t a human being on earth who wasn’t driven to want what was out of reach and his wife had been steadfastly out of reach for the past eighteen months. During that period, he had not found his eyes straying to any of the women who had covertly made passes at him over the months, happy to overlook the fact that there was a wedding ring on his finger.

‘I just can’t,’ Lucy breathed into the silence. ‘I... I’m happy to leave with a small loan, until I find my feet.’

‘Find your feet doing what?’ Dio asked curiously.

‘I... I have one or two things up my sleeve...’

Dio’s eyes narrowed as hers shifted away. He was picking up the whiff of a secret and he wondered, again, what was going on behind his back. What had been going on behind his back? Had the mouse been playing while the cat had been away?

‘What things?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ she said evasively. ‘It’s just that... I think we’d both be happier if we brought this marriage to an end, and if I could borrow some money from you...’

‘Lucy, you would need a great deal of money to begin to have any life at all in London.’

‘Money which you are not at all prepared to lend me, even though you have my word that you would be repaid.’

‘Unless you’re planning a big job in the corporate world or have a rich backer,’ he said dryly, ‘then I can guarantee that any loan I make to you would not be paid back. At least, not while I have my own teeth and hair.’

‘How do you think it would look if your wife was caught with a begging bowl, looking for scraps from strangers?’

‘Now who’s being dramatic?’ When he had met her all those months ago, she had been blushing and shy but he had had glimpses of the humour and sharp intelligence behind the shyness. Over the past year and a half, as she had been called on to play the role of perfect wife and accomplished hostess, her self-confidence had grown in leaps and bounds.

He also knew that, whatever she felt for him, she wasn’t intimidated by him. Maybe that, too, was down to the strange configuration of their lives together. How could you be intimidated by someone you weren’t that interested in pleasing in the first place?

‘You will, naturally, walk away with slightly more than the clothes on your back,’ Dio admitted. ‘However, you would still find it a challenge to have a lifestyle that in any way could be labelled comfortable. Unless, of course, there’s a rich patron in the background. Is there?’

Asking the question was a sign of weakness but Dio couldn’t help himself.

She shrugged. ‘I’m not into rich men,’ she told him. ‘I’ve always known that and having been married to you has confirmed all my suspicions.’

‘How’s that?’ Frankly, he had never heard anything so hypocritical in his life before, but he decided to let it pass.

‘Like you said, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. I know you say that it’s the most important thing in life...’

‘I can’t remember saying that.’

‘More or less. You said it more or less. And I know you think that I wouldn’t be able to last a week unless I have more money than I can shake a stick at but—’

‘But you’re suddenly overcome with a desperate urge to prove me wrong...’ His gaze dropped to her full mouth. Something about the arrangement of her features had always turned him on. She wasn’t overtly sexy, just as she wasn’t overtly beautiful, but there was a whisper of something other-worldly about her that kept tugging his eyes back to her time and time again.

She had screwed up his clear-cut plans to buy her father’s company at a fire sale price before chucking him to his fate, which would undoubtedly have involved wolves tearing him to pieces. He had been charmed by that other-worldly something, had allowed it somehow to get to him, and he had tempered all his plans to accommodate the feeling.

She had, over time, become the itch he couldn’t scratch. He might have had her signed up to a water-tight pre-nup but, even so, he would never have seen her hit the streets without any financial wherewithal.

In this instance, though, he was determined to have that itch scratched and, if it meant holding her to ransom, then he was pretty happy to go down that road.

Especially now that he knew that the attraction was returned in full.

‘I’m just trying to tell you that there’s no rich anyone in the background.’ Did he imagine that she fooled around the way he did? ‘And there never will be anyone rich in my life again.’

‘How virtuous. Is it because of those free lunches not coming for free? Do you honestly think that hitching your life to a pauper would be fertile ground for happily united bliss? If so then you really need to drag your head out of the clouds and get back down to Planet Earth.’ He abandoned the decision to go back to work, not that he would have been able to concentrate. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry. If we’re going to continue this conversation, then I need to eat.’

‘You were about to leave,’ Lucy reminded him.

‘That was before I became intrigued with your radical new outlook on life.’

He began heading towards the kitchen and she followed helplessly in his wake.

This felt like a proper conversation and it was unsettling. There were no crowds of people around jostling for his attention. No important clients demanding polite small talk. And they weren’t exchanging pleasantries before heading off in opposite directions in any one of their grand houses.

She knew the layout of the kitchen well. On those occasions when they had entertained at home, she had had to supervise caterers and familiarise them with the ins and outs of the vast kitchen. When he was out of the country, as he often was, this was where she had her meals on her own, with the little telly on, or else the radio.

However, it was a bit different to see him here, in it.

For a few seconds, he stared around him, a man at sea trying to get his bearings.

‘Okay. Suggestions?’ He finally turned to her.

‘Suggestions about what?’

‘Thoughts on what I can eat.’

‘What were you planning to eat if you hadn’t found me here?’ Lucy asked jerkily, moving from doorway to kitchen table and then sitting awkwardly on one of the chairs while he continued to look at her in a way that made her blood sizzle, because she just had to see that mouth of his to recall his very passionate kiss. Her lips still felt stung and swollen.

‘I have two top chefs on speed dial,’ he drawled, amused when her mouth fell open. ‘They’re usually good at solving the “what to eat?” dilemma for me. Not that it’s a dilemma that occurs very often. If I’m on my own, I eat out. Saves hassle.’

‘Go ahead and order what you want from your two top chefs,’ Lucy told him. ‘Never mind me. I...er...’

‘Ate already?’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘And I don’t believe you. Don’t tell me,’ he said, ‘that you feel uncomfortable being in a kitchen with me and breaking bread? We’re a married couple, after all.’

‘I don’t feel uncomfortable,’ Lucy lied. ‘Not in the slightest!’

‘Then where are your suggestions?’

‘Do you even know where to find anything in this kitchen?’ she asked impatiently.

Dio appeared to give that question a bit of thought then he shook his head. ‘I admit the contents of the cupboards are something of a mystery, although I do know that there’s some very fine white wine in the fridge...’

‘Are you asking me to cook something for you?’

‘If you’re offering, then who am I to refuse?’ He made for a chair and sat down. ‘It doesn’t offend your feminist instincts to cook for me, does it? Because, if it does, then I’m more than happy to try and hunt down one or two ingredients and put my cooking skills to the test.’

‘You don’t have cooking skills.’ From some past remembered conversation, when she had still had faith in him, she recalled one of his throwaway remarks that had made her laugh.

‘You’re right. So I don’t.’

This wasn’t how Lucy had imagined the evening going. She had more figured on dealing with shock at her announcement followed by anger because she knew that, even if he heartily wanted to get rid of her, he would have been furious that she had pre-empted him. Then she had imagined disappearing off to bed, leaving him to mull over her decision, at which point she would have been directed to a lawyer who would take over the handling of the nitty-gritty.

Instead she felt trapped in the eye of a hurricane...

She knew where everything was and she was a reasonably good cook. It was something she quite enjoyed doing when she was on her own, freed from the pressure of having to entertain. She expertly found the things she needed for a simple pasta meal and it would have been relaxing if she hadn’t been so acutely aware of his eyes following her every movement.

‘Need a hand?’ he asked as she clanged a saucepan onto the stove and she turned to him with a snappy, disbelieving frown.

‘What can you do?’

‘I feel I could be quite good at chopping things.’ He rose smoothly to join her by the kitchen counter, invading her space and making her skin tingle with sexual awareness.

Stupid, she thought crossly. But he had thrown down that gauntlet, brought sex into the equation, and now it was on her mind. And she didn’t want it to be. She had spent the past months telling herself that she hated him and hating him had made it easy for her to ignore the way he made her feel. It had been easy to ignore the slight tremble whenever he got too close, the tingling of her breasts and the squirmy feeling she got in the pit of her stomach.

He’d never been attracted to her, she had thought. He’d just seen her as part of a deal. He’d used her.

But now...

He wanted her; she had felt it in his kiss, had felt his erection pressing against her like a shaft of steel. Just thinking about it brought her out in a fine film of perspiration.

She shoved an onion and some tomatoes at him and told him where to find a chopping board and a knife.

‘Most women would love the kind of lifestyle you have,’ Dio murmured as he began doing something and nothing with the tomatoes.

‘You mean flitting from grand house to grand house, making sure everything is ticking over, because Lord help us if an important client spots some dust on a skirting board?’

‘Since when have you been so sarcastic?’

‘I’m not being sarcastic.’

‘Don’t stop. I find it intriguing.’

‘You told me that most women would envy what I have and I told you that they wouldn’t.’

‘You’d be surprised what women would put up with if the price was right.’

‘I’m not one of those women.’ She edged away, because he was just a little too close for comfort, and began busying herself by the stove, flinging things into the saucepan, all the ingredients for a tomato-and-aubergine dish, which was a stalwart in her repertoire because it was quick and easy.

Dio thought that maybe he should have tried to find out what sort of woman she was before remembering that he knew exactly what sort of woman she was. The sort who had conspired with her father to get him where they had both wanted him—married to her and thereby providing protection for her father from the due processes of law.

If she wanted to toss out hints that there were hidden depths there somewhere, though, then he was happy enough to go along for the ride. Why not? Right now he was actually enjoying himself, against all odds.

And the bottom line was that he wanted her body. He wanted that itch to be scratched and then he would be quite happy to dispose of her.

If holding her to ransom was going to prove a problem then what was the big deal in getting her into his bed using other methods?

‘So, we’re back to the money not being the be all and end all,’ he murmured encouragingly. ‘Smells good, whatever you’re making.’

‘I like cooking when I’m on my own,’ she said with a flush of pleasure.

‘You cook even though you know you could have anything you wanted to eat delivered to your doorstep?’ Dio asked with astonishment and Lucy laughed.

He remembered that laugh from way back when. Soft and infectious, with a little catch that made it seem as though she felt guilty laughing at all. He had found that laugh strangely seductive, fool that he had been.

‘So...’ he drawled once they were sitting at the kitchen table with bowls of steaming hot pasta in front of them. ‘Shall we raise our glasses to this rare event? I don’t believe I’ve sat in this kitchen and had a meal with you since we got married.’

Lucy nervously sipped some of the wine. The situation was slipping away from her. How many women had he sat and drank with in the time during which they had been supposedly happily married? She hadn’t slept with him but that didn’t mean that she wasn’t aware that he had a healthy libido. One look at that dark, handsome face was enough to cement the impression.

She had never, not once, asked him about what he did behind her back on all those many trips when he was abroad, but she could feel the questions eating away at her, as though they had suddenly been released from a locked box. She hated it. And she hated the way that fleeting moment of being the object of his flirting attention had got to her, overriding all the reasons she had formulated in her head for breaking away from him. She didn’t want to give house room to any squirmy feelings. He had turned on the charm when they had first met and she knew from experience that it didn’t mean anything.

‘That’s because this isn’t really a marriage, is it?’ she said politely. ‘So why would we sit in a kitchen and have a meal together? That’s what real married couples do.’

Dio’s mouth tightened. ‘And of course you would know a lot about what real married couples do, considering you entered this contract with no intention of being half of a real married couple.’

‘I don’t think it’s going to get either of us anywhere if we keep harping back to the past. I think we should both now look to the future.’

‘The future being divorce.’

‘I’m not going to get into bed with you for money, Dio,’ Lucy told him flatly. For a whisper of a second, she had a vivid image of what it would be like to make love to him—but then, it wouldn’t be love, would it? And what was the point of sex without love?

‘So you’re choosing the poverty option.’ He pushed his bowl to one side and relaxed back in the chair, angling his big body so that he could extend his legs to the side.

‘If I have to. I can make do. I...’

‘You...what?’ His ears pricked up as he detected the hesitancy in her voice.

‘I have plans,’ Lucy said evasively. And she wasn’t going to share them with him, wasn’t going to let her fledgling ambitions be put to the test by him.

‘What plans?’

‘Nothing very big. Or important. I just obviously need to think about the direction my life is going in.’ She stood up and briskly began clearing the table. She made sure not to catch his eye.

Dio watched her jerky movements as she busied herself around the kitchen, tidying, wiping the counters, doing everything she could to make sure the conversation was terminated.

So she wanted out and she had plans.

To Dio’s way of thinking, that could only mean one thing. A man. Maybe not a rich one, but a man. Lurking in the background. Waiting to get her into bed if he hadn’t already done so.

The fake marriage was going to be replaced by a relationship she had probably been cultivating behind his back for months. Maybe—and the red mist descended when he considered this option—she had been cultivating this relationship from way back when. Maybe it had been right there on the back burner, set to one side while she’d married him and had done what she had to do for the sake of her father.

It might have come as a shock that she would face walking away empty handed but clearly, whatever her so-called plans were, they were powerful enough to override common sense.

Faced with this, Dio understood that first and foremost he would find out what those plans were.

Simple.

He could either follow her himself or he could employ someone to do it. He preferred the former option. Why allow someone else to do something you were perfectly capable of handling yourself?

The past year or so of their sterile non-relationship faded under the impetus of an urgent need that obliterated everything else.

‘I’m going to be in New York for the next few days,’ Dio said abruptly, standing up and moving towards the kitchen door where he stood for a few seconds, hand on the door knob, his dark face cool and unreadable. ‘While you’re still wearing a wedding ring on your finger, I could insist that you accompany me, because I will be attending some high level social events. But, under these very special circumstances, you’ll be pleased to hear that I won’t.’

‘New—New York?’ Lucy faltered. ‘I can’t remember New York being in the diary until next month...’

‘Change of plan.’ Dio shrugged. He stared at her, working out what he planned to do the following day and how. ‘You can stay here and spend the time thinking about the proposition I’ve put to you.’

‘I’ve already thought about it. I don’t need to do any more thinking.’

Over his dead body. ‘Then,’ he said smoothly, ‘you can stay here and spend the time contemplating the consequences...’

CHAPTER THREE

LUCY HAD HAD better nights.

Spend her time contemplating the consequences? The cool, dismissive way he had said that, looking at her as if he had complete authority over her decisions, had set her teeth on edge.

Their sham of a marriage had worked well for him. She knew that. Her father had told her that Dio wanted someone classy to be by his side and she had fitted the bill. Whilst he had been alive, he had never ceased reminding her that it was her duty to play the part because, if she didn’t, then it would be within her husband’s power to reveal the extent of the misappropriated money—and if he went down, her father had told her, then so too would the memory of her mother. The dirty linen that would be washed in public would bring everyone down. That was how it worked.

That had been Lucy’s Achilles’ heel so she had played her part and she had played it to perfection.

The day after their wedding, Dio had taken himself off to the other side of the world on business and, during the week that he had been away, she had obeyed instructions and had overhauled her image with the aid of a top-notch personal shopper.

Like a puppet, she had allowed herself to be manoeuvred into being the sort of woman who entertained. He had returned and there and then the parameters of their personal life had been laid down.

He had said nothing about her physical withdrawal. The closeness that had been there before her father’s revelation had disappeared, replaced by a cool remoteness that had only served to prove just how right she had been in reading the situation.

He had used her.

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

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

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

And now he wanted her.

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

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

Did it get any more insulting?

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

She burned with shame when she thought about that.

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

So, she wanted out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And as for Mario Ruiz?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anything but the tube and the bus.

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

He wondered whether this was all part of her sudden dislike of all things money and then he wondered how long the novelty of pretending not to care about life’s little luxuries would last.

It was all well and good to talk about pious self-denial from the luxury of your eight-bedroomed mansion in the best postcode in London.

His lips curled derisively as he edged along through the traffic. She had been the apple of her father’s eye and that certainly didn’t go hand in hand with pious self-denial.

He cleared the traffic in central London, but found that he was still having to crawl through the stop-start tedium of traffic lights and pedestrian crossings, and it was after eleven by the time he pulled up in front of a disreputable building nestled amongst a parade of shops.

There was a betting shop, an Indian takeaway, a laundrette, several other small shops and, tacked on towards the end of the row, a three-storeyed old building with a blue door. Dio was tempted to phone his driver and ask him whether he had texted the wrong address.

He didn’t.

Instead, he got out of his car and spent a few moments looking at the house in front of him. The paint on the door was peeling. The windows were all shut, despite the fact that it was another warm, sunny day.

His mind was finding it hard to co-operate. For once, he was having difficulty trying to draw conclusions from what his eyes were seeing.

He could hear the buzzing of the doorbell reverberating inside the house as he kept his hand pressed on the buzzer and then the sound of footsteps. The door opened a crack, chain still on.

‘Dio!’ Lucy blinked and wondered briefly if she might be hallucinating. Her husband had been on her mind so much as she had headed off but the physical reactions of her body told her that the man standing imperiously in front of her was no hallucination.

From behind her, Mark called out in his sing-song Welsh accent, ‘Who’s there, Lucy?’

‘No one!’ They were the first words that sprang into her head but, as her eyes tangled with Dio’s, she recognised that she had said the wrong thing.

‘No one...?’ Dio’s voice was soft, silky and lethally cool. The chain was still on the door and he laid his hand flat on it, just in case she got the crazy idea of trying to shut the door in his face.

‘What are you doing here? You said that you were going to New York.’

‘Who’s the man, Lucy?’

‘Did you follow me?’

‘Just answer the question because, if you don’t, I’ll break the door down and find out myself.’

‘You shouldn’t be here! I... I...’ She felt Mark behind her, inquisitively trying to peer through the narrow sliver to see who was standing at the door, and with a sigh of resignation she slowly slid the chain back with trembling fingers.

Dio congratulated himself on an impressive show of self-control as he walked into the hallway of the house which, in contrast to the outside, was brightly painted in shades of yellow. He clenched his fists at his sides, eyes sliding from Lucy to the man standing next to her.

‘Who,’ he asked in a dangerously low voice, ‘the hell are you, and what are you doing with my wife?’

The man in front of him was at least three inches shorter and slightly built. Dio thought that he would be able to flatten him with a tap of his finger, and that was exactly what he wanted to do, but he’d be damned if he was going to start a brawl in a house.

Growing up on the wrong side of the tracks, however, had trained him well when it came to holding his own with his fists.

‘Lucy, shall I leave you two to talk?’

‘Dio, this is Mark.’ She recognised the glitter of menace in her husband’s eyes and decided that, yes, the best thing Mark could do would be to evaporate. Shame he wouldn’t be able to take her with him, but perhaps the time had come to lay her cards on the table and tell Dio what was going on. Before he started punching poor Mark, who was fidgeting and glancing at her worriedly.

She felt sick as she looked, with dizzy compulsion, at the tight, angry lines of her husband’s face.

‘I’d shake your hand,’ Dio rasped, ‘but I might find myself giving in to the urge to rip it off, so I suggest you take my wife’s advice and clear off, and don’t return unless I give you permission.’

‘Dio, please...’ she pleaded, putting herself between her husband and Mark. ‘You’ve got the wrong end of the stick.’

‘I could beat him to a pulp,’ Dio remarked neutrally to her, ‘without even bloodying my knuckles.’

‘And you’d be proud of that, would you?’

‘Maybe not proud, but eminently satisfied. So...’ He pinned coldly furious silver eyes on the guy behind her. ‘You clear off right now or climb out from your hiding place behind my wife and get what’s coming to you!’

With a restraining hand on Dio’s arm, Lucy turned to Mark and told him gently that she’d call him as soon as possible.

Dio fought the urge to deal with the situation in the most straightforward way known to mankind.

But what would be the point? He wasn’t a thug, despite his background.

His head was cluttered with images of the fair-haired man, the fair-haired wimp who had hidden behind his wife, making love to Lucy.

The heat of the situation was such that it was only when the front door clicked shut behind the loser that Dio noticed what he should have noticed the very second he had looked at Lucy.

Gone were the expensive trappings: the jewellery, the watch he had given to her for her birthday present, the designer clothes...

He stared at her, utterly bemused. Her hair was scraped back into a ponytail and she was dressed in a white tee-shirt, a pair of faded jeans and trainers. She looked impossibly young and so damned sexy that his whole body jerked into instant response.

Lucy felt the shift in the atmosphere between them, although she couldn’t work out at first where it was coming from. The tension was still there but threaded through that was a sizzling electrical charge that made her heart begin to beat faster.

‘Are you going to listen to what I have to say?’ She hugged her arms around her because she was certain that he would be able to see the hard tightening of her nipples against the tee-shirt.

‘Are you going to spin me fairy stories?’

‘I’ve never done that and I’m not going to start now.’

‘I’ll let that ride. Are you having an affair with that man?’

‘No!’

Dio took a couple of steps towards her, sick to his stomach at the games going on in his head. ‘You’re my wife!’

Lucy’s eyes shifted away from his. Her breathing was laboured and shallow and she was horrified to realise that, despite the icy, forbidding threat in his eyes, she was still horribly turned on. It seemed that something had been unlocked inside her and now she couldn’t ram it back into a safe place, out of harm’s way.

Dio held up his hand, as though interrupting a flow of conversation, although she hadn’t uttered a word.

‘And don’t feed me garbage about being my wife in name only, because I sure as hell won’t be buying it! You’re my wife and I had better not find out that you’ve been fooling around behind my back!’

‘What difference would it make?’ she flung at him, her eyes simmering with heated rebellion. ‘You fool around behind mine!’

‘In what world do you think I’d fool around behind your back?’ Dio roared, little caring what he said and not bothering to filter his words.

The silence stretched between them for an eternity. Lucy had heard what he had said but had she heard correctly? Had he really not slept with anyone in all the time they had been married? A wave of pure, undiluted relief washed over her and she acknowledged that resentment at her situation, at least in part, had been fuelled by the thought that he had been playing around with other women, having the sex she had denied him.

She would have liked to question him a bit more, tried to ascertain whether he was, indeed, telling the truth; if he was, more than anything else she would have loved to have ask him why.

‘Now...’ His thunderous voice crashed through her thoughts, catapulting her right back to the reality of him standing in front of her, having discovered the secret she had held to herself for the past couple of months. ‘Who the hell was that man?’

‘If you’d just stop shouting, Dio, I’ll tell you everything.’ Lucy eyed him warily.

‘I’m waiting—and you’d better tell me something I want to hear.’

‘Or else what?’

‘You really don’t want to know.’

‘Oh, just stop acting like a Neanderthal and follow me...’

‘Neanderthal? You haven’t see me at my best!’

They stared at one another. Hell, she looked so damned hot! He should have obeyed his primitive instincts and laid down laws of ownership from the get-go. He should have had a bodyguard walk three inches behind her at all times. If he’d done that, he wouldn’t be standing here now with his brain spiralling into freefall!

‘Just come with me.’ Lucy turned on her heels and disappeared towards a room at the back, just beyond the staircase that led upwards, and he followed her.

‘There!’ She stepped aside and allowed him to brush past her, then looked at him as he, in turn, looked around him. Looked at the little desks, the low bookshelves crammed with books, the white board and the walls covered with posters.

‘Not getting it,’ Dio said, after he had turned full circle.

‘It’s a classroom!’ Lucy controlled the desire to yell because he was just so pig-headed, just so consumed by the business of making money, that he couldn’t think outside the box.

‘Why are you seeing some man in a classroom?’

‘I’m not seeing some man in a classroom!’

‘Are you going to try and convince me that the loser I got rid of was a figment of my imagination?’

‘Of course I’m not going to do that, Dio! Okay, so maybe I’ve been meeting Mark here over the past couple of months...’

‘This has been going on for months?’ He raked his fingers through his hair, but his blood pressure was at least getting back to normal, because she wasn’t having an affair. He didn’t know why he knew that but he did.

Which didn’t mean that he wasn’t interested in finding out just what had been going on...

‘Oh, please, just sit down.’

‘I’m all ears to hear what my wife’s been getting up to when I’ve been out of the country.’

He dwarfed the chair and, even though he was now safely sitting down, he still seemed to emanate enough power to make her feel a bit giddy and unsteady on her feet.

‘Did you plan this?’ Lucy suddenly asked, arms still folded. ‘I mean, when you told me that you were going to New York, did you lie, knowing that you intended to follow me?’

‘A man has to do what a man has to do.’ Dio shrugged, not bothering to deny the accusation. ‘Although, if we’re going to be completely accurate, I didn’t follow you. Jackson, my driver, did. When he alerted me to your location, I drove here to find out what was going on.’

‘That’s as good as following me yourself!’

‘It’s better because I gather you took the tube and the bus to get here. It might have been difficult getting onto the same bus as you without you recognising me.’

‘But why? Why now?’

‘Why do you think, Lucy?’

‘You never seemed to care one way or another what I got up to in your absences.’

‘I never expected my wife to be running around with some man when I wasn’t looking. I didn’t think that I had to have you watched twenty-four-seven.’

‘You don’t. Didn’t.’ She flushed, recognising the measure of trust he had placed in her. She had met many women, wives of similarly wealthy men, whose every movement was monitored by bodyguards, who had little or no freedom. She had once mentioned that to Dio and he had dismissed that as the behaviour of paranoid, arrogant men who were so pumped up with their own self-importance that they figured the rest of the world wanted what they had.

It cut her to the quick now that he might think that his trust had been misplaced.

She hated him, she told herself stoutly, but she wasn’t the sort of girl who would ever have fooled around.

Suddenly it seemed very, very important for her to make him believe that.

‘I would never have done anything behind your back, Dio,’ she said evenly. ‘And I haven’t. Mark and I are work mates.’

‘Come again?’

‘I follow a local website,’ she told him. ‘All sorts of things get posted. Advertisements for used furniture, rooms to let, book clubs looking for members. Mark posted a request for anyone interested in teaching maths to some of the underprivileged kids around here. I answered the ad.’

Dio stared at her, astounded at what he was hearing.

‘I remember telling you once that I wanted to go into teaching.’

‘I wanted to be a fireman when I was eight. The phase didn’t last.’

‘It’s not the same thing!’

‘Strange that you wanted to teach yet ended up marrying me and putting paid to your career helping the underprivileged.’

‘I didn’t think I had a choice!’ Lucy answered hotly.

‘We all have choices.’

‘When it comes to...to...family, sometimes our choices are limited.’

Dio wryly read the subtext to that. There had been no way that she was going to leave Daddy to pay the price for his own stupidity and greed. Better that she put her own dreams and ambitions on hold. And of course, saving Daddy had, after all, come with a hefty financial sweetener...

‘And, now your choices are wide open, you decided that you’d follow your heart’s dream...’

‘There’s no need to be cynical, Dio. Don’t you have any dreams you’ve ever wanted to follow?’

‘Right now my imagination is working full-time on getting the honeymoon you failed to deliver...’ And that was precisely how he intended to harness his roaming mind. He had fallen hard for what he had thought was her disingenuous innocence. If she thought that he was mug enough to repeat his mistake, by buying into the concept of the poor little rich wife whose only dream was to help the poor and the needy, then she was in for a surprise.

‘You’re not even interested in hearing about this place, are you?’ she asked in a disappointed voice. ‘When I told you that I wanted a divorce, you weren’t even interested in asking me why.’

‘Would you like me to ask you now?’ Dio looked at her with raised eyebrows and Lucy drew in a couple of steadying breaths because he could be just so unbearable when he put his mind to it. He believed the worst of her and there was no way that he was going to revise his opinions, whatever she told him.

It didn’t matter that he had married her for all the wrong reasons! He played by his own rules.

‘Is all of this going to pay enough to keep the wolf from the door?’ He spread his arms wide to encompass the little room but he kept his eyes fixed on her face. She looked as though she wanted to cry.

‘It doesn’t pay anything at all. It’s all purely voluntary work.’

‘Ah... And what’s your relationship with the man who scarpered when I threatened to beat him up?’

‘He didn’t scarper.’

‘Not the answer I want.’

‘You’re so arrogant, Dio!’

‘I’m interested in finding out whether my wife has a crush on some man she met on the Internet!’

His voice was calm and only mildly curious but Lucy could sense the undercurrent of steel running through it. She shivered because, just for the briefest of seconds, she wondered what it would be like for that possessiveness in his voice to indicate jealousy.

She wondered what it would feel like to have this sinfully good-looking, charismatic and utterly arrogant man...jealous.

She shakily dismissed that insane curiosity before it even had time to take root.

‘I don’t have a crush on Mark,’ she told him quietly. ‘Although, he’s just the sort of guy I might have a crush on.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ Dio was outraged that they were sitting here having this conversation.

‘I mean he’s a really nice guy. He’s kind, he’s considerate, he’s thoughtful and the kids adore him.’

‘Sounds like a barrel of laughs.’

‘He can be,’ Lucy retorted sharply. ‘He can actually be very funny. He makes me laugh,’ she added wistfully and Dio took a deep, steadying breath.

‘And I don’t?’

‘We haven’t laughed together since...’

Suddenly restless, he stood up and began pacing the room and, this time, he actually took in what he was seeing, all the evidence of classes in progress. He flicked through one of the exercise books lying on a desk and recognised his wife’s handwriting. Ticks, corrections, encouraging smiley faces...

‘So, no crush on the hapless teacher,’ Dio eventually drawled. ‘And is that reciprocated?’

For a moment, Lucy considered throwing caution to the winds and telling him that the hapless teacher was crazy about her. Something dark inside her wanted to see if she could make him jealous, even though she already knew that answer to that one.

‘Mark isn’t interested in women,’ she said baldly. ‘Not in that way. He’s very happy with his partner who works for a legal firm in Kent. We’re just good friends.’

Dio felt a bolt of pure satisfaction and he allowed himself to relax. It had been inconceivable that she had been fooling around behind his back. It was also inconceivable that he would allow her to walk away from him without him first sampling the body that had preyed on his mind ever since he had first laid eyes on her.

Whether she knew it or not, she was his weakness, and he was determined finally to put paid to that. The momentary threat of another man had shown him what he had casually assumed. He had allowed his pride to call the shots, to subdue a more primal instinct to assert himself under a civilised, remote veneer that just wasn’t his style. No more. She was his and he wanted her, never more so than now, when she was stripped of the make-up and the designer clothes, when her raw beauty was on show. Her teacher friend might be gay but it still bothered Dio that the man had even seen her like this, in all her natural glory.

Her talk about some mythical man who was kind and caring, waiting out there for her, had also got on his nerves.

His eyes slid lazily to her face and he watched her for a few seconds in silence until he could see the tide of pink creep into her cheeks. When she began to fidget, he allowed his eyes to drift a little lower, slowly taking in the jeans, the tee-shirt and the jut of her pert little breasts underneath.

‘So...’ he murmured, finding a slightly more comfortable position. ‘At least my woman hasn’t been screwing around behind my back...’

‘Since when am I your woman?’

‘I like you like this.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Unadorned. It’s sexy.’

Lucy went redder. She felt tell-tale moisture seep through her panties, felt an ache down there that throbbed and spread under the unhurried intensity of his gaze.

‘I told you, I’m not interested...’ But she could hear a wobble in her voice and the shadow of a smile that tugged his lips was telling. She straightened and gave herself a stern mental talking to. ‘I’m going to build a life for myself, Dio. A real life—no pretending, no having to talk to people I don’t want to talk to, no dressing up in clothes I don’t like wearing!’

‘Laudable.’ He cocked his head to one side. ‘So your plan is to continue your voluntary work here?’

‘Like I said, it isn’t all about money!’

‘But you never qualified as a teacher, did you?’

‘I will as soon as I can and the work I do here will be invaluable experience.’

‘The place is falling down,’ Dio pointed out. ‘You might want to devote your talent for teaching here but, frankly, I doubt this building will stay the course. You may not have noticed, but there’s a bad case of rising damp going on and I’d bet that the plumbing goes back to the Dark Ages.’

‘Mark is doing an excellent job of trying to raise funds.’

‘Really?’

Lucy didn’t say anything for a while and Dio nodded slowly, reading what she was reluctant to tell him.

In hard times, it was always difficult to get well-meaning individuals to part with their cash and certainly, if they were providing a service to the needy, then the parents of those needy children would just not have the cash to give anyway.

The building was collapsing around them and neither of them would be able to stall the inevitable.

‘I never knew you were so...engaged in wanting to do good for the community,’ he murmured truthfully. ‘And I’m willing to lend a hand here.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Lucy dragged her mind away from a brief picture of how her father would have reacted to what she was doing. With horror. He had always been an inveterate snob of the very worst kind. Women were not cut out for careers and certainly not careers that involved them dealing with people lower down the pecking order! A nice job working for a posh auction house might have met with his approval but teaching maths to school kids from a deprived background? Never in a month of Sundays.

To think of the kids not having this facility was heart breaking. She hadn’t been there long, but she knew that Mark had poured his life and soul into trying to make something of the place. And the kids, a trickle which was steadily growing, would be the ones who fared worst.

‘You want to walk away from our marriage with nothing rather than face getting into bed with me.’ Dio didn’t bother to gift wrap what he had to say and he didn’t bother to point out that that kiss they had shared was proof positive that she wasn’t immune to what he had to offer. ‘I can’t help that—but you want this building bought...? Repaired...? Turned into a functioning high-spec space...? No expense spared...? How does that sound to you, Lucy? You see...’ He relaxed, met her bemused gaze coolly and steadily. ‘I want you and I’m not above using any trick in the book to get what I want...’

CHAPTER FOUR

LUCY WAS APPALLED.

‘What kind of thing is that for you to say?’ she demanded shakily. ‘You’d stoop so low?’

Dio inclined his beautiful head to one side and shrugged elegantly. ‘I don’t look at it that way.’

‘No? And what way do you look at it?’

‘I look at it as a form of persuasion.’

‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this.’

‘You’re my wife,’ he said in the sort of voice that implied he was stating the glaringly obvious and irrefutable. ‘When you started concocting your little plan to walk out of my life, you must surely have known that I wouldn’t lie down on the ground waving a white flag and wishing you every success. Since when did I turn into that kind of person?’

Lucy shifted uncomfortably and then began fiddling with a pile of exercise books on the desk at which she had sat. Teacher in the front with wayward pupil facing her. Except Dio was far too intimidating to be any old wayward pupil.

‘Well?’ he prodded coolly.

‘I just think it’s out of order for you to jeopardise the welfare of lots of deprived children who happen to be benefitting from what is on offer here!’

‘I’m not jeopardising anyone’s welfare. You are.’ He glanced at his watch. He had been optimistic about getting back to the office at some point during the day and had thus dressed in his suit but, the way things were going, the office felt out of reach at the moment and, strangely enough, that didn’t bother him.

He was far too invigorated by what was taking place.

‘Is this taking longer than you expected?’ Lucy asked with saccharin sweetness that wouldn’t have fooled an idiot and he grinned.

Her stomach seemed to swoop and swirl inside her, as though she had been suddenly dropped from a great height without the aid of a parachute. That grin; it transformed the harsh, forbidding contours of his lean face. It reminded her of her youthful folly in letting it get under her skin until she had been walking on clouds, hanging onto his every word, waiting for the next meeting with barely bated breath.

And just like that it dawned on her why the thought of making love to him was so terrifying.

Yes, she hated him for the way he had manipulated her into marrying him for all the wrong reasons. Yes, she hated the way he had showcased her, like a business asset to be produced at will and then dispatched when no longer needed.

But what really scared her was the fact that he could still do things to her, make her feel things that were only appropriate in the domain of a real, functioning marriage.

When she thought of having him touch her, make love to her, she knew that somehow she would end up being vulnerable. He still got to her and she was scared stiff that, the closer he approached, the more ensnared she would become.

Like it or not, she was not nearly as detached as she had presented herself over time.

And that lazy grin was enough to remind her of that unwelcome reality.

‘For my dear wife, I would be willing to put business on hold indefinitely.’

Lucy shot him a glance of scathing disbelief and Dio laughed, a rich, sexy, velvety sound that shot right past her defences.

‘Or at least for a couple of hours, while we try to work out our little differences. Show me around.’ He stood up and flexed his muscles. ‘I can’t carry on sitting in this chair for much longer. It’s far too small. My joints are beginning to seize up. I need to stretch my legs, so give me the guided tour. If I’m going to revive this dump, I might as well start assessing what needs to be done.’

Lucy’s full mouth compressed. Was he deliberately trying to goad a response out of her? Or was he just supremely confident of getting his own way, whatever she said to the contrary?

‘You’re not going to revive this dump and you’re not interested in what I do here, anyway!’

Dio looked at her long and hard, hands thrust into his trouser pockets.

‘I’m going to disagree on both counts,’ he told her softly.

Lucy’s eyes fluttered and she looked away hurriedly. The dark, naked intent in his gaze was unsettling. She decided that showing him around the school, what little there was of it, was a better option than standing here and having to brave the full frontal force of his personality.

She gave a jerky shrug and directed him to the exercise books on her desk. This was the main classroom, where she and Mark did their best to accommodate the children, whose abilities varied wildly, as did their ages.

She warmed to her subject.

Dio saw what had been missing all these months. She had presented a beautiful, well-educated, cultured mask to the outside world but the animation had gone. It was here now as she talked about all the wonderful things the school was capable of providing; how much the considerate, funny and thoughtful Mark had managed to do with minimum help and almost no funding. Her eyes glowed and her cheeks pinked. She gestured and he found himself riveted by the fluid grace of her hands as she spoke.

There were several rooms on the ground floor. The building was like the Tardis, much bigger inside than it appeared from the outside.

‘Volunteer teachers come whenever they can,’ she told him, leading the way into another small room. ‘Mark has managed to get a rota going and several subjects are now covered by experts.’ She looked at Dio and her voice softened. ‘You wouldn’t believe the conditions some of the kids who come to us live in,’ she explained. ‘The fact that they’re brought to us in the first place shows a great deal of parental support but there are stories of almost no food, noise pollution from neighbours, overcrowding in small flats...the list goes on.’

Dio nodded and let his eyes drift over that full mouth, the slim column of her neck, her narrow shoulders. Vanilla-blonde strands of hair were escaping the confines of the ponytail and the way they wisped around her face made her look incredibly young, barely a teenager.

‘How safe is it?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Huh?’

‘What are the safety procedures around here? Is there just the pair of you working here? And have you been working at night?’

‘Are you telling me that you’re concerned for my welfare?’ Lucy’s voice was mocking.

‘Always.’

She felt the steady thud of her heart banging against her rib cage. His face was so serious that she was momentarily deprived of the power of speech and, when she did rediscover her vocal cords, she could hear a thread of jumpiness in her voice as she explained that neither of them worked nights and the place was always busy with people coming and going during the handful of hours in which they did work.

‘Be that as it may,’ Dio continued, ‘now that I know where you spend your time, and what you get up to when I’m not around, you’re going to have two of my guards close at hand whenever you come here—and, Lucy, that’s not negotiable.’

‘You used to say that you didn’t agree with men who felt that they had to surround their wives with bodyguards!’

‘You wouldn’t require a bodyguard if you spent your time doing your nails and shopping...which was what I thought you got up to in your spare time.’

‘What sort of impression is that going to give?’ Lucy cried, feeling the wings of her freedom being clipped and resenting it even as she warmed with forbidden pleasure at the thought of him wanting to protect her.

To protect his investment. She brought herself back down to earth with a sobering bump. An investment he was keen to look after now that he wanted to take full advantage of it before he consigned it to the rubbish bin.

‘I’ve never cared about what other people think. So, how many classrooms are there in this place and what’s upstairs...?’

‘I can’t have great big, bulky men lurking around. They’ll scare off the kids.’

‘I doubt that in this neighbourhood.’

‘Stop being provocative, Dio!’

‘If you think I’m being provocative, then how would you describe yourself?’ He strolled towards her and she found herself nailed to the spot, mesmerised by the casual grace of his movements.

‘I’m just...just trying to tell you that I don’t want to...to...stand out when I come here.’ Perspiration beaded her upper lips as he curled a strand of wayward hair around his finger. ‘What are you doing, Dio?’

‘I’m talking to you. You can’t object if your soon-to-be ex-husband takes a little interest in the safety and wellbeing of his wife, can you?’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘No?’ He looked perplexed. ‘Then what did you mean?’

‘You... I...’ Her sluggish brain could not complete the remainder of her thoughts. Her body felt heavy and lethargic. Right now, she yearned for him to touch her in other places; she absolutely yearned for him to take her to all those places he frequently took her to in her dreams.

She had to exert every ounce of willpower to drag herself physically out of his mesmerising radius, stepping back and sucking in a lungful of restorative air.

‘It won’t work having great big guys standing on either side of me. Plus, when I come here, no one knows who I am.’

‘You’re not recognised?’ Dio frowned and she allowed herself a little smile.

‘Why would anyone recognise me? I dress like this, in jeans, tee-shirts and jumpers, and I scrape my hair back and I don’t wear tons of make-up and expensive jewellery.’

He heard the derision in her voice and was struck, once again, at hidden depths swirling just out of sight.

It confused him and that was a sensation he was not accustomed to dealing with. Least of all in a woman whose motivations had left him in no doubt as to the sort of person she was. Not one with hidden depths, for starters.

He raked his fingers through his hair and shook his head impatiently, clearing it of the sudden fog of doubt that had descended.

Did she enjoy the novelty of pretending to do good undercover? Was that it?

‘Now, you were asking about the other rooms downstairs.’ She briskly took him on the tour he had requested. More rooms with more low bookshelves and a scattering of stationery. She could have equipped the entire school with computers had she so desired simply by flogging one of the items of jewellery locked away in the safe in her bedroom. But she had chosen not to and he presumed that that was because she wanted, as she had told him, to keep her identity under wraps. To keep the extent of her wealth under wraps.

And yet how did that make sense?

She had been a Bishop, through and through. Surely the last thing she should have wanted would be...this.

He looked around at the shabby walls which someone had optimistically painted a cheerful yellow, similar to the walls in the hallway. Nothing could conceal the wear and tear of the fabric of the building, however, and the fact that it was practically falling down.

‘Mark should be back shortly.’ She ended the downstairs tour in a room that was very similar to the others he had been shown. ‘If you’re really interested, you can ask him whatever questions you like.’

‘Think I’ll pass on that one.’ He leaned against the wall and looked at his wife whose face had become smudged with pencil at some point during their tour. ‘I wouldn’t want to have to administer smelling salts because he has a fainting fit seeing me still here.’

‘Very funny,’ Lucy muttered, making sure to keep a healthy distance.

‘I have some questions to ask you, though. Is there anywhere around here we can go for lunch?’

‘Lunch?’ she parroted, because lunch, just the two of them, was not something they had done since getting married.

‘Unless you’ve travelled with sandwiches and a flask of hot coffee...? In your anxious attempts not to stand out...?’ He could have told her that she stood out just looking the way she did.

‘There’s a café just round the corner.’

‘Café?’

‘It’s not much but they make nice enough sandwiches and serve very big mugs of tea.’

‘I’ll give that one a miss. Any other suggestions?’

Lucy eyed him coolly and folded her arms. ‘You’re in my territory now, Dio.’

‘Your territory? Don’t make me laugh.’

‘I don’t care what you think but I feel I belong here a lot more than I belong in any of those soulless big houses, where I’ve had to make sure the fridges are stocked with champagne and caviar and the curtains are cleaned on a regular basis just in case...’

Dio’s lips thinned. ‘If you’re trying to annoy me, then congratulations, Lucy—you’re going about it the right way.’

‘I’m not trying to annoy you but I meant what I said. If you want to continue this conversation and ask whatever questions you want to ask, including questions about the divorce I’ve asked you for, then you can jolly well eat in the café Mark and I eat in whenever we’re here! I can’t believe you’re such a snob.’

‘I’m not a snob,’ Dio heard himself reply in an even, well-measured voice. ‘But maybe I’ve seen enough of those greasy spoon cafés to last a lifetime. Maybe I come from enough of a deprived background to know that getting out of it was the best thing I ever did. I certainly have no desire to pretend that it holds any charm for me now.’

Lucy’s mouth fell open.

This was the first time Dio had ever mentioned his background. She had known, of course, that he had made his own way up in the world, thanks to her father’s passing, derogatory remarks. But to hear him say anything, anything at all, was astounding.

Dio flushed darkly and turned away. ‘I’ll talk to you when you return home this evening.’

‘No!’ Seeing him begin walking towards the door galvanised Lucy into action and she placed a detaining hand on his arm.

Just like that, heat from his body seared through her, and she almost yanked her hand back as if it had been physically burnt.

‘We...we should talk now,’ she stammered, stepping back. ‘I know you must have been shocked at what I’ve asked and I never thought that you would...well, that you would see what I’ve been up to here...but, now that you have, well, I don’t mind having lunch with you somewhere a little smarter.’

Dio sighed and shook his head before fixing fabulous, silver eyes on her flushed face. ‘Take me to the café. It’s no big deal.’

She locked up behind her and they walked side by side to the café where she and Mark were regulars.

She was desperate to ask him about his past. Suddenly it was as though locked doors had been opened and curiosity was bursting out of her.

He’d grown up without money but had he been happy? As she knew only too well from personal experience, a moneyed background was no guarantee of happiness.

She sneaked a glance at his averted profile and concluded that he wasn’t in the mood for a soul-searching chit chat on his childhood experiences.

And it surprised her that she was so keen to hear all about them.

‘It’s not much,’ she reminded him as they pulled up in front of a café that was still relatively empty and smelled heavily of fried food.

‘Understatement of the year.’ Dio looked down at her and noticed the way the sun glinted off her blonde hair; noticed the thick lushness of her lashes and the earthy promise of her full lips. His breathing became a little shallower. ‘But I won’t forget the virtues of the brimming cups of tea and the big sandwiches...’

They knew her!

Dio was stunned. Two of the people working behind the counter had kids who had started drifting in to do maths lessons and there was a brief chat about progress.

‘And this...’ she turned to Dio and glanced away quickly ‘...is a friend. Someone thinking of investing in the building, really turning it into somewhere smarter and better equipped...’ She felt him bristle next to her. She’d always removed her wedding ring before coming here; it was just too priceless to take chances. She sneaked a sideways glance and caught the look of annoyance in his eyes and she returned that look of simmering annoyance with a special look of her own, one that was earnest and serious. ‘He’s very interested in helping the kids in this area really reach their full potential at school.’

‘Because...’ Dio said instantly, with the sort of charming smile that would knock anyone off balance, which it seemed to be doing to Anita, whose mouth had dropped open the second she had clocked him. ‘Because I happen to have grown up not a million miles from here,’ he said smoothly. ‘On an estate not unlike the one we passed and, take it from me, the only way to escape is through education.’

Anita was nodding vigorously. John was agreeing in a manly fashion. Lucy was feeling as though she had been cleverly outmanoeuvred.

‘This lovely young woman and I...are in discussions at the moment. It could all hinge on her acceptance of my proposal: no more rising damp, all the rooms brought up to the highest specification. Naturally, I would buy the building outright, and the cherry on the cake would be the equipment I would install. I find that computers are part and parcel of life nowadays. How else can children access vital information? Like I said, though, Lucy and I are in talks at the moment...’

As soon as they were seated, with mugs of steaming tea and two extra-large doorstop sandwiches filled to bursting in front of them, Lucy leaned forward, glaring.

‘Thanks for that, Dio!’

‘Any time. What else are friends and potential investors for? Why didn’t you introduce me as your husband?’

‘Because there would have been loads of questions to field,’ Lucy said defensively. ‘They would want to know who I really was...’

‘To have snagged me?’

‘You have a ridiculous ego.’ She sipped some tea and looked at him over the rim of the mug. ‘Were you lying when you said what you said?’

Dio knew exactly what she was talking about. Why had he suddenly imparted information about his past? He had always kept the details of his background to himself. Growing up on a tough estate, where the laws of the jungle were very different from the jungle laws of the business world, he had learnt the wisdom of silence. It was a habit that was deeply ingrained.

‘Be more specific,’ he drawled. ‘Nice sandwich, by the way.’

‘Did you grow up near here?’

‘We are breaking into new and unexplored territory, aren’t we?’ he murmured, his fabulous eyes roving over the stunning prettiness of her heart-shaped face. It amazed him that he had never seen that body. His success with women had started at a very young age and was legendary and yet, with her, his wife, he had yet to discover what lay underneath the tee-shirt and the jeans.

Bitterness refused to dampen the sudden thrust of his erection and it occurred to him that he had spent an awful lot of time fantasising about the untouchable ice-maiden who had conned him into marriage.

Not for much longer. That was a very satisfying thought.

‘Unexpected announcements, revelations all round, time together without high society peering over our shoulders... Where does it end, I wonder? Oh, yes, I know. In bed.’

Lucy flushed. Those amazing pale eyes sent her nervous system into freefall and as soon as he mentioned the word ‘bed’ she couldn’t stop the tide of graphic images that pelted into her head at breakneck speed.

The principles she had held so dear became gossamer-thin under the impact of those images.

But for her, sex and love were entwined. They were!

‘You were out of order implying to John and Anita that you were willing to sink money in the place if I agreed to your demands.’

‘Was I?’ Dio shot her a perplexed frown. ‘I thought that I was only being honest. Nice people, by the way. They seem to have bought into the usefulness of having the after-school tutoring scheme there, but then I guess they would, considering they both have children who attend. Must be tough.’

Lucy was beginning to feel as though she had been stuck in a washing machine with the speed turned to full.

‘What must be tough?’ She knew what was tough. Tough was the way her carefully laid plans had unravelled at the speed of light in the space of twenty-four short hours. She had suspected that talk of divorce wouldn’t fall on completely fertile ground, because her husband was nothing if not proud, but she had not banked on the route he had taken which had now landed them both up here.

With talk of sex shimmering between them.

‘Tough being a working parent, trying to make ends meet while still attempting to find the spare time to sit and do homework with kids. I guess that’s the situation with your two...friends.’

‘They’re going to repeat what you told them to Mark.’

‘Oh dear. And would that be a problem?’

‘You always have to get your own way, don’t you?’ Lucy looked at him resentfully and then immediately diverted her eyes, because he was just too sexy and too good-looking to stare at for very long. Especially now that the dynamics between them had changed, subtly but dramatically.

‘Always,’ Dio confirmed readily. ‘What do you think your caring, sharing friend will think when he discovers that you’re the person standing between the success and failure of his little baby...? Because, from what you’ve told me, this has been more than just a flash in the pan, try-it-on-for-size experiment for him.’

Lucy bristled. ‘Are you implying that that’s what it’s been for me?’ she demanded, sinking her teeth into her sandwich and chewing angrily on it.

‘I never noticed just how cute you are when you’re angry,’ Dio murmured. ‘But then, anger didn’t score high on the list of required emotions in our marriage, did it?’

It surprised him just how much he was enjoying himself. Was it the bizarre novelty of the situation? He didn’t know and he wasn’t going to waste time with pointless questions. He was in very little doubt that as soon as he had had her, as soon as he had slept with her, he would regain healthy perspective on just the kind of woman she was, at which point he would bid farewell to his manipulative wife. But in the meantime...

Lucy lowered her eyes, reminded of just how hollow and empty their marriage had been, and then further reminded of all the high hopes and girlish dreams that had driven her to marry him in the first place.

‘I find working with these kids fulfilling,’ she told him, ignoring his barb. ‘Much, much more fulfilling than making stupid small talk to people I don’t like and barely know. Much more fulfilling than going to the opening of an art gallery or a society wedding.’

Privately, Dio couldn’t have agreed more. One of the more odious things he had to do in his steady, inexorable rise to the very top of the pecking order was attend events he couldn’t give a damn about. But it came with the job and he was too much of a realist to think otherwise.

Funnily enough, it had never occurred to him that his well-bred wife would ever have found that side of life a bore. In fact, he would have thought that that might have been one of the many things she enjoyed about the position into which she had cleverly manoeuvred herself.

Now he looked at her with a frown, trying to work out the little inconsistencies he was beginning to spot underneath the polished veneer he had always associated with her.

‘It’s going to be all round the neighbourhood that a big shot investor has taken an interest in our little local after-school club.’

‘Not just any old big shot investor, though.’

‘What am I supposed to say?’ she demanded, pushing her plate to one side, making sure to keep her voice low and calm because people were beginning to filter into the café now and curious looks were being directed at them.

‘You could tell them that you didn’t care for the terms your big shot investor demanded.’

‘You should never have followed me!’

‘You know you want me...’

‘I beg your pardon!’

‘Shocking, isn’t it?’ He leant back in the chair and was amused when she leaned forward, all the better to make sure that their conversation wasn’t overheard. ‘You don’t want to face up to it, but let’s cut to the chase. You’re hot for me.’

‘I am not!’

‘Would you like to put that to the test?’ He cast his eyes round the small café and the curious faces. ‘Why doesn’t the hot shot investor apply a little physical pressure...? Hmm...? How about I reach across this table and kiss you? Remember that kiss? How about we have a repeat performance right here? Right now? Then we could take a vote...find out how many people agree with me that you’re attracted to me...’

‘You took me by surprise when you kissed me!’ Patches of red had appeared on her cheeks. She knew that she didn’t look like the calm, composed teacher everyone around here expected her to be. She looked just like she felt. Hassled, overwhelmed, confused.

Excited...

‘So this time you’ll be prepared. We can both gauge just how much you can withstand what’s simmering between us.’

‘There’s nothing simmering between us!’ Desperation threaded her voice.

‘Of course there is.’ Dio dismissed her in a hard, inflexible voice. ‘And it’s been there all the way through our sexless marriage.’

‘Shh!’

He ignored her frantic interruption. ‘I’ve seen the way you’ve looked at me when you thought you weren’t being observed. You may have connived your way into marriage, and then pulled back once you’d got me hooked, but you still can’t quite help what you feel, can you?’

Lucy rested her head in her hand and wondered if she could just wish herself some place else.

‘Tell me...did you find it offensive to think of me in terms of being your lover?’

She looked at him, horrified. ‘How can you say that? What are you talking about?’

‘We couldn’t have come from more opposite sides of the tracks,’ Dio said drily. ‘Did you imagine you might catch a working class infection if you got too close to me?’

‘I’m not like that! We didn’t have a proper marriage and I wasn’t going to...to...’

He waved aside her half-baked, stammering explanation with an air of sudden boredom. ‘Not really interested in going down this road,’ he drawled. ‘The only thing I want is you, my beloved wife. I want to feel your naked body writhing under me. I want to hear you scream out my name and beg me to bring you to orgasm.’

‘That’ll never happen!’

‘Oh, it will. You just need to give the whole thing a little bit of thought and stop pretending that it’ll be any great hardship for you. It won’t be.’

‘And you know this because...?’ She was aiming for snappy and sarcastic; she got reedy and plaintive.

‘Because I know women. Trust me. It won’t be a hardship. And just think of the rewards... Fat alimony allowance...your little school shiny and well-equipped...grateful parents and happy little children... Could there be a better start to your wonderful bid for freedom...?’ He leaned forward so that they were both now resting their elbows on the table, their faces close together, locked in their own private world. ‘In fact, I have a splendid idea. Let’s take our honeymoon, Lucy. Two weeks. After that, I have to be in Hong Kong to close a deal on a company buyout. I’ll head there and you can... Well, you can begin your life of independence. How does that sound...?’

CHAPTER FIVE

PREY TO WARRING EMOTIONS, Lucy was left to consider her options for three days while Dio disappeared to Paris for an emergency meeting with the directors of one of his companies over there.

By her calculation, that left eleven days of honeymoon time before he vanished across the Atlantic to Hong Kong.

She knew that she had been cleverly but subtly outmanoeuvred.

For a start, the story of the brand new school spread like a raging wild fire. He had played the ‘hot shot investor’ to perfection. Now, as far as everyone in the neighbourhood was concerned, ordering computers, stationery and getting the builders in was just a little formality because everything was signed, sealed and delivered bar the shouting.

If the whole pipe dream collapsed, Lucy knew that she would have to dig deep to find an excuse that would work. The blame would fall squarely on her shoulders.

The day after she and Dio had lunched in the café, Mark had arrived at work clutching brochures for computers and printers. He had made noises about getting the national press involved to cover a ‘feel good’ story because ‘the world was a dark place and it was just so damn heart-warming to find that there were still one or two heroes left in it’...

Lucy had nearly died on the spot. In what world could Dio Ruiz be classed as a hero?

No one had actually asked what the mysterious conditions were that had been imposed on her, for which she was very grateful, because she had no idea what she would have said.

They had been dependent on various money-raising ventures and government help to cover the scant lease on the building; now two members of the local council descended, beaming, to tell her that there were plans afoot to buy the place outright. They delivered a rousing speech on how much it would benefit the community to have the place brought up to scratch and in permanent active use.

They dangled the carrot of helping to subsidise three full-time members of staff who could perhaps assist in teaching non-English-speaking students, of which there were countless in the borough.

And, twice daily, Dio had called her on her mobile, ostensibly to find out how she was—given their new relationship, which involved conversation—but really, she knew, to apply pressure.

Two weeks...

And then, after that, freedom was hers for the taking.

Was he right? Would sleeping with him be such a hardship? They were married and, when she had married him, she had been hot for him, had counted the hours, the minutes and the seconds till they could climb into bed together. Her virginity was something precious to be handed over to him and she hadn’t been able to wait to do it.

She was still a virgin but she was now considerably more cynical than she had once been. And how precious was it, really? So once upon a time she had had a dream of only marrying for love and losing her virginity to a guy she wanted to spend her life with. She had woken up. Big deal.

And she was still hot for him. It pained her to admit it, especially since he had gloatingly pointed it out to her and, worse, had proved it by kissing her, feeling her melt under his hands.

What was the point in denying reality? She’d been damned good at facing reality so far; she had not once shied away from the fact that she was trapped in a marriage and forced to play the part of the socialite she probably should have but never had been.

On day three she picked up her mobile to hear his dark, velvety voice down the line and, as usual, she felt the slow, thick stir of her heightened senses.

Once more or less able to withstand the drugging effect of his personality, Lucy had now discovered that her defences had been penetrated on all fronts. Even when he was on the opposite side of the world, she just had to hear his voice and every nerve inside her body quivered in response.

Overnight it seemed as though all the walls she had painstakingly built between them had been knocked down in a single stroke.

‘What are you up to?’

Lucy sat down. Was she really interested in launching into a conversation about the porridge she had just eaten?

‘Marie has handed in her notice. I knew she was going to at some point. She’s far too ambitious to be cleaning. She’s got a placement at a college. So I’m afraid you’re going to have to find someone else to do the cleaning in the Paris apartment.’

‘I’m going to have to find someone else?’

‘Well, I won’t be around, will I?’ Lucy pointed out bluntly. She projected to when she would shut the door of their grand, three-storey mansion in London for good and she felt her heart squeeze inside her.

Sitting in the first class lounge at JFK airport, Dio frowned. By the time he returned to London, he wanted an answer from her, and the only answer he was prepared to accept was the one he wanted to hear.

That was what he wanted to chat about now. He certainly didn’t want to have a tedious conversation about their apartment in Paris and finding a cleaner to replace the one who had quit. He didn’t want her to start the process of withdrawing from the marriage. No way. Nor had he contemplated the prospect of not getting what he wanted from her.

It occurred to him that there really was only one topic of conversation he was willing to hear.

‘I’ll cross the bridge of hiring a new cleaner when the time comes.’

‘Well, it’ll come in the space of two weeks, which is when Marie will be leaving.’

‘What are you wearing? It’s early over there...are you still in your pyjamas? Does it strike you as a little bizarre that we’ve never seen each other in the confines of a bedroom, wearing pyjamas?’

Lucy went bright red and cleared her throat. ‘I don’t know what my clothes have to do with anything...’ She automatically pulled her dressing gown tighter around her slender body and was suddenly conscious of her bra-less breasts and the skimpiness of her underwear.

‘I’m making small talk. If we’re to spend the next two weeks together—’

‘Eleven days,’ Lucy interrupted.

Dio relaxed and half-smiled to himself. He had made sure to phone her regularly while he had been away. Over the marriage, they had managed to establish a relationship in which she had been allowed to retreat. That retreat was not going to continue.

And now, without her having to say it, he could hear the capitulation in her voice. It generated the kick of an intense, slow burn of excitement.

‘If we’re to spend the next eleven days together, then we need to be able to converse.’

‘We know how to converse, Dio. We’ve done a great deal of that over the course of our marriage.’

‘Superficial conversation,’ Dio inserted smoothly. ‘No longer appropriate, given the fact that our relationship has changed.’

‘Our relationship hasn’t changed.’

‘No? I could swear you just told me how long we’re going to be spending on our long-overdue honeymoon...’

Lucy licked her lips nervously. The dressing gown had slipped open and, looking down, she could see the smooth lines of her stomach and her pert, pointed breasts.

She had made her mind up about his ultimatum and she hadn’t even really been aware of doing so.

Soon that flat stomach and those breasts would be laid bare for him to see and touch.

A little shiver raced through her. She slipped her finger beneath her lacy briefs and felt her own wetness. It shocked her. It was as if her body was already reacting to the knowledge that someone else would be touching it—that Dio would be touching it.

‘Okay,’ she said as loftily as she could manage. ‘So, you win, Dio. I hope it makes you feel proud.’

‘Right now, pride is the very least of the things I’m feeling.’ His voice lowered, sending a ripple of forbidden excitement through her.

Out of all the reasons she had privately given herself for yielding to his demands, she now acknowledged the only reason that really truly counted for anything.

It had nothing to do with the school, duty towards her students or, least of all, money.

She had yielded because she fancied him and because she knew, as he did, that to walk away from a dry marriage would be to wonder for ever what it might have been like to sleep with him.

Her head might not want to get into bed with Dio but her body certainly did and this was her window.

The fact that there were a lot of up sides and bonuses attached to her decision was just an added incentive.

‘I’d tell you what I’m feeling,’ he said roughly, ‘but I’m sitting in the lounge at JFK and I wouldn’t want anyone to start noticing the hefty bulge in my trousers...’

‘Dio! That’s...that’s...’

‘I know. Unfortunate, considering I’m going to have to wait a few more hours before I can be satisfied.’

‘That’s not what I meant!’

‘No?’

‘No,’ Lucy told him firmly. To add emphasis to her denial, she very firmly tightened the dressing gown so that she could cover up her treacherously over-heated, semi-naked body. ‘I... I’m happy to discuss the details of...er...our arrangement.’

‘Speak English,’ Dio said drily.

‘I’ll do this honeymoon business with you but only because I don’t have a choice.’

‘That’s not very enthusiastic,’ Dio admonished, hanging onto his temper. If he could put his feelings to one side, if he could forget her duplicitous take on their marriage, then he was damned if he was going to let her get away with dragging her feet and somehow blaming him for the fact that she wanted to sleep with him.

‘Everyone expects you to descend and start flinging money at the school.’

‘I find it doesn’t do to mould your life according to other people’s expectations.’

‘How do I know that once this so-called honeymoon of ours is over you’ll do what you say...?’

‘You don’t.’ Dio was affronted. He had always been a man of his word, which was saying something, in a world where very few men were. He might not have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth but he knew one thing for sure: in his business practices, and in fact in his whole approach to life, he was a damned sight more ethical than a lot of his counterparts whose climb up the ladder had been a great deal less precarious than his had been!

‘You’ll have to rely on that little thing called trust.’

Lucy didn’t say anything and Dio felt the significance of her silence like a disapproving slap on the face.

Rich, coming from the ice-maiden who had strung him along.

‘I’m not a man who breaks his word,’ he said coolly. ‘I know many who do.’

Lucy thought of her father, who had cheated so many people out of their pensions, and she flushed guiltily. Were Dio’s thoughts running along the same lines? He might have married her for all the wrong reasons but then he had never claimed to love her, had he? Even when they had been dating, he had never talked about love.

And something deep inside her knew that, if he had given his word, then he wasn’t going to break it.

‘Shall I book somewhere?’ she asked stiffly. ‘I expect you want to use one of the houses...’

‘I think you can climb out of “personal assistant” mode on this occasion,’ Dio said softly. ‘It somehow ruins the...sizzle.’

His husky voice was doing all sorts of peculiar things to her body and she squirmed on the chair, idly glancing round at all the top-notch, expensive equipment in the very expensive kitchen.

‘I surely need to book flights for us?’ Lucy intended to do her very best not to let either of them forget that their weird honeymoon was built on stuff that was very prosaic.

This wasn’t going to be one of those romantic affairs where they would spend their time whispering sweet nothings and staring longingly at one another over candlelit dinners before racing to their room so that they could rip the clothes off one another.

This was more getting something elemental out of their systems.

‘Don’t give it a thought,’ Dio said briskly. ‘I’ll get my secretary to do the necessary.’

‘But where will we be going? And when, exactly?’

‘I’m at JFK now. When I return to London, I’ll have a quick turnaround. Be prepared to be out of the country this time tomorrow.’

‘What? I can’t just leave here at a moment’s notice.’

‘Of course you can. My secretary will take care of everything. You just need to get ready for me...’

‘Get ready for you?’

Dio laughed at the outrage in her voice. He was so hard for her right now, he was finding it difficult to move.

Small, high breasts... He had glimpsed the shadow of her cleavage in some of the more daring dresses she had worn to social events over the course of the marriage. He wondered what colour her nipples were. She was a natural blonde and he imagined that they were rosy pink, kissable nipples. He wondered what she would taste like when he buried himself between her thighs.

He wondered who else she had shared her body with before she had met him.

It was a grimly unappealing thought and he ditched it before it had time to take root.

‘Use your imagination,’ he drawled. ‘Get into the head set...’

‘Yes, sir...’ Lucy muttered under her breath and she heard his soft laughter down the end of the line. Sexy laughter. The laughter of a man who’d got exactly what he wanted. She fidgeted a little more and forced herself to focus. ‘And what should I pack?’

‘Don’t. I’ll make sure that there are clothes waiting for you at the other end.’

‘I don’t want to be dressed up like a Barbie doll,’ she told him quickly. ‘That’s not part of this arrangement.’

‘I shall see you very soon, Lucy...’

‘But you still haven’t told me where we’ll be going!’

‘I know. Isn’t it exciting? I, for one, can’t wait.’

And he disconnected. Lucy was left holding a dead phone and feeling panicked because now there was no going back.

She tried to think of life after the next ten days but she found her mind getting stuck with images of Dio in bed with her. After she had discovered the truth behind their sham of a marriage, she had told herself that that was why he had not tried to get her into bed before they had tied the knot.

She had thought that he was being a gentleman, respecting her wish to wait until they were married before having sex. She had been too embarrassed to tell him that she was still a virgin, and anyway the subject had not arisen.

Instead, he had been stringing her along. She had stopped day dreaming about him but the day dreams were rearing their heads once again and she couldn’t stop them.

How was she supposed to travel to some unknown destination? They could be going to the Arctic, the Caribbean or a city somewhere. Had he even decided or was he going to let his assistant choose where they went?

And what was it going to be like when he returned to the house?

The knowledge that they would be cooped up together for the better part of a fortnight would lie between them like a lead weight...

Wouldn’t it?

She was a bundle of nerves as evening drew round. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she didn’t dress up for his arrival. Usually, she never dropped the role unless she was on her own. Usually he saw her formally attired, even when she was in casual clothing.

But things were different and she had defiantly chosen to wear a pair of jeans and a faded old tee-shirt from her university days. Nor was she plastered with make-up and she hadn’t curled her hair. Instead, she was a make-up-free zone and her hair hung heavily just past her shoulders, neatly tucked behind her ears.

She was in the same place as she had been when she had confronted him with talk of divorce, standing in the drawing room. And she was just as jumpy.

And yet, staring through the window into the, for London, relatively large garden with its row of perfectly shaped and manicured shrubs, she didn’t hear him until he spoke.

‘I wondered if you would wait up for me.’ Dio strolled into the drawing room, dumping his jacket, which he had hooked over his shoulder. It had been a tiresome flight, even in first class, but he felt bright eyed and bushy-tailed now as he flicked his eyes over her.

He’d half-expected her to go into a self-righteous meltdown between speaking to her on the phone and showing up at the house. She was very good at adopting the role of blameless victim. He guessed that the lure of money was irresistible, however. She might play at her volunteer work and make big plans to teach but teaching didn’t pay nearly enough for her to afford the sort of lifestyle to which she had always been accustomed.

Cynicism curled his lips when he thought that.

‘Drink?’

A feeling of déjà vu swept over Lucy as she helplessly followed him into the kitchen, although this time she had eaten, and she expected he would have as well, so there would be no pretend domesticity preparing a meal.

‘I thought we could chat about plans for tomorrow,’ she began valiantly. ‘I need to know what time we will be leaving. I... I’ve packed a couple of things...’ He looked drop-dead gorgeous and she could feel the electricity in the air between them, sparking like a live, exposed wire. It made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.

And the way he was looking at her, his pale eyes skewering her, brought her out in a nervous wash of perspiration.

She wanted crisply to remind him that their arrangement was for the honeymoon period, which technically would only start when they reached wherever they were heading, and so for tonight they would retreat to their separate quarters as per normal. However, her tongue seemed to have become glued to the roof of her mouth.

‘Have you been thinking about me?’ Dio asked lazily. ‘Because I’ve been thinking about you.’ And marvelling that it had taken them this long to get where they were now, but then again the whole question of the penniless divorce had driven the situation.

He walked slowly towards her and she gave a little nervous squeak. ‘I thought we were going to...er...well, when we were away...’

‘Why stand on ceremony? The honeymoon’s been cut a little short by my unexpected meeting in New York anyway, so fair’s fair, wouldn’t you say? I don’t want to be short-changed on time. If I’m to pay for two weeks, then I want my two weeks, or as good as...’

The last thing Lucy was expecting was to be swept off her feet. Literally. The breath whooshed out of her body as she was carried out of the kitchen. She felt the thud as he nudged the door open with his foot and then she was bouncing against him, heart racing as he took her up the stairs.

To his bedroom, which she had been into many times before. It was a marvel of masculinity. The colours were deep and rich, the furniture bold and dark with clean lines. Even with her eyes squeezed tightly shut, she could visualise it. Once, when he had gone away, leaving the house a lot earlier to catch a transatlantic flight, she had gone into the bedroom to air it before the cleaner came and had remained frozen to the spot at the sight of the rumpled bed, still bearing the impression of where he had been lying. She could remember tentatively touching it and then springing back because it had still held the lingering warmth of his body.

It had shaken her more than she had thought possible.

He dumped her on the bed and then stood back, arms folded, for once lost as to what his next move might be.

He had been fired up with confidence downstairs, when he had hoisted her into his arms like a true caveman and brought her to his bedroom. But now...

She looked unimaginably beautiful and unimaginably fragile, her eyes wide and apprehensive, making him feel like a great, hulking thief who had snatched her from her bed and carried her off to his cave so that he could have his wicked way.

Dio raked his fingers through his hair and moved to the window where he stood for a few seconds, looking outside, before snapping the wooden shutters closed, blocking out the street light.

Lucy stared at him from under her lashes. Her heart was still pounding and the blood was still rushing through her veins, hot and fierce. She wanted him so badly right now that she felt like she might die of longing, yet he was just standing there, looking at her with brooding stillness.

Maybe he had come to his senses, she thought.

Maybe he had realised that you couldn’t just bargain with someone’s fate the way he had with hers. Maybe he had seen the light and come to the conclusion that to blackmail someone into sleeping with you just wasn’t on.

And if that was the case then why wasn’t she feeling happier? Why wasn’t she sitting up and making a case for having her divorce without a bunch of stupid stipulations? Why wasn’t she striking while the iron was hot, trying to locate Mr Decent who must surely be there hiding behind Mr Caveman?

She wasn’t feeling happier because she wanted him, simple as that.

Maybe if he had never mentioned sleeping with her, had never looked at her with those amazing, lazy, sexy eyes, she would have walked away from their marriage with her head held high and all her principles burning a hole inside her.

But he had opened a door and she wanted that door to remain open. She wanted to enter the unexplored room and see what was there...

She stirred on the bed then pushed herself backwards so that she was propped against the pillows, which she arranged under her, her vibrant blonde hair tangled around her flushed face.

Dio was her husband yet she felt as tongue-tied as a teenager on her first date with the cutest boy in class.

‘Why are you just standing there?’ she challenged, dry mouthed. ‘Isn’t this what you wanted? To carry me up here so that you could get what you paid for?’

Dio flushed darkly and scowled. Was that how he had sounded? Like a thug?

‘Nearly a year and a half with no sex, Lucy. Are you telling me that I got a fair deal when I married you?’ His voice was harsher than he had intended and he saw her flinch.

‘Maybe neither of us got much of a fair deal.’

Personally, Dio thought the deal she had ended up with had been a hell of a lot better than his.

‘You haven’t answered my question.’

‘You brought me up to your room for sex and here I am. You’re getting what you paid for!’ Brave words, but the way she cleared her throat alerted Dio to the fact that she might be talking the talk, but that was where it probably ended.

It seemed just one more thing that wasn’t fitting into the neat slot he had shoved her into for the past year and a half.

A cold, opportunistic woman would surely not have been able to replicate the nervous wariness he could see beneath the brave statement of intent?

Her fingers wouldn’t be digging into her arms to stop them from trembling...

‘I find that I’m not as much into self-sacrificing martyrs as I had imagined,’ Dio said, pushing himself away from the window ledge against which he had been leaning.

‘Even the ones you forked out good money to buy?’

‘You were never that cynical, Lucy.’ He had a vivid image of her laughing at him with genuine, girlish innocence, the sort of girlish innocence that had made him lose his mind. She might not have been quite as innocent as she had pretended but she certainly hadn’t been as sharp-tongued as she was now.

‘I grew up,’ she said with painful honesty.

‘You can run along,’ he told her, reaching to the top button of his shirt. ‘I’ve had a long flight. I’m tired. I’m going to have a shower and hit the sack.’

She didn’t want him to.

She could play the passive victim and scuttle off but she wasn’t going to do that. She felt as though she had spent the past year or so playing the passive victim—had spent practically her whole life playing the passive victim—and now would be her only window in which to take control of a situation.

‘What if I decide that I don’t want to run along?’ she asked with considerable daring.

Dio stilled, hand still poised to remove his shirt. Her chin was mutinously jutting out and he smiled, reluctantly amused by the expression on her face: stubborn, holding her breath, eyes squeezed tightly shut..

‘What are you saying?’

‘You know what I’m saying.’

‘I like things to be spelt out in black and white. No room for error then...’

‘I’ve wondered, okay?’

‘Wondered what?’ He was standing right by the bed now, looking down at her with a smile of male satisfaction.

‘What it would be like...you know...? With you...’

‘Even though you’ve spent many months being an ice-queen?’

‘I’ve been very friendly with all your clients.’

‘Maybe I’ve been longing for a few of those smiles to be directed my way,’ Dio murmured. He slowly began unbuttoning his shirt, watching her watching him as his brown chest was exposed inch by inch.

Lucy was riveted. How long had she wanted this? How had this insane desire been so successfully hidden under layers of resentment and simmering anger, with a large dose of self-pity thrown in for good measure?

She watched as he tugged the shirt out from the waistband of his trousers, drew in a deep breath and held it as he shrugged off the shirt altogether, tossing it casually on the ground.

‘So, you’re curious...’ He felt as though he was suddenly walking on clouds. It was an extremely uplifting sensation. In fact, when it came to the feel-good factor, this was as good as it got. Her eyes were huge and, yes, curious. He was bulging in his trousers, thick and hard and desperate for a release, which he was going to take his time getting to.

Drugged by the sensational vision of him half-naked...her bronzed god of a soon-to-be ex-husband... Lucy was deprived of speech. She nodded and didn’t even bother trying to tear her eyes away from his glorious body.

‘I confess I’m curious too,’ Dio admitted, basking in her undiluted fascination with his body. ‘So it’s time for you to return the favour...’

‘Huh?’ Lucy blinked.

‘One good turn deserves another,’ Dio said drily. ‘Or, in this case, one semi-striptease deserves another.’

‘You want me to...?’

‘We’re man and wife.’ He gestured broadly. ‘A little bit of nudity should be as nothing between us.’

‘I hate it when you do that,’ she complained. He grinned and that grin erased all the forbidding, harsh lines of his beautiful face; made him seem almost boyish.

‘Do what?’

‘Oh, don’t play the innocent with me.’ But she smiled shyly and sat up. Her fingers were shaking; her hands were shaking. He had no idea that she had never done anything like this in her life before. Okay, at university there had been some good-natured fumbling with the two boys she had dated for six months and three months respectively. But they’d been boys and he was...

Dio...

Nerves ripped into her with a vengeance, but she had committed to this path, wanted this path, and she wasn’t going to give in to cold feet now.

But that didn’t mean that she wasn’t shaking like a leaf as she dragged the tee-shirt over her head and flung it to the ground where it joined his shirt.

He had folded his arms and was staring, just as though she really was performing a proper striptease for his benefit only.

Which, she supposed, she was, in a way.

She closed her eyes, reached behind, unclasped her bra and, still with her eyes shut, flung the bra onto the little growing heap of discarded clothes.

‘You can open your eyes,’ Dio drawled. He was surprised he could talk at all because the sight of her was enough to take his breath away.

He loved the way she was sprawled there on his bed, her head averted. He could see the tiny pulse beating in her neck and, God, he wanted to fall on her, take her, sate himself with her body.

She was beyond captivating.

Pale, slender, her small breasts pert and pointed, her nipples as pink as he had imagined, but bigger. Perfect, circular discs that sent his blood pressure soaring.

Lucy opened her eyes and slid a hesitating, self-conscious sideways glance at him. She had no idea where she had found the courage to do what she had done, but she had had to do it, and one look at the naked hunger and desire in his eyes was enough to restore every scrap of her wavering self-confidence. She glanced at his trousers, then back to his face, and he laughed.

‘So my beautiful ice-maiden thaws...’ He slowly unlooped his belt from his trousers and then pulled down his zipper. He was utterly confident when it came to his own nudity and he really liked the way she was still looking at him. He pulled down the trousers and his boxers in one easy movement, and her eyelids fluttered as she took in the impressive girth of his erection.

‘Your turn now...and then you can touch...’ He loosely held himself and noted her quick, sharp intake of breath. Just one more of those little hot reactions and he knew that he wouldn’t be responsible for what happened next.

Their eyes held and she wriggled her jeans down until she was left only in her panties. She couldn’t stop looking at his big hand holding himself.

‘Let me feel you first,’ Dio said raggedly. He reached down and slipped his hand to cup the moist mound between her legs, then he pushed his finger in before sliding it along the slippery slit until he felt the throbbing nub of her clitoris.

Lucy gave a long, low groan and parted her legs.

There was no room in her head to contemplate her absolute lack of experience.

He would find out soon enough...

CHAPTER SIX

DIO STRADDLED HER and for a few seconds he just looked down at her. His fingers were wet from where he had touched her and felt her excited arousal.

She still seemed unable to meet his eyes in the shadowy darkness of the room and he gently tilted her face so that she was forced to look at him. He wanted to take her fast and hard...he was so aroused that he could scarcely breathe...but he could sense her nerves and, with a sigh, he lay down alongside her then hitched himself up on one elbow.

‘Tell me you’re not in the grip of second-thought syndrome,’ he murmured, stalling her attempts to cover herself with his duvet.

Lucy’s burst of self-confidence was fading fast. Her husband was the most beautiful man she had ever laid eyes on and, having spent far too long fantasising about him, she was even more bowled over at his beauty in the flesh. No fantasy could do him justice. He was a man in the very peak of his prime. No part of his impressive body was untoned. His stomach was washboard-flat, his shoulders broad and muscled. His sheer perfection not only made her teeth chatter with nerves but also made her very, very much aware of her lack of experience.

He would have slept with countless women. You could tell that just from the way he was so comfortable in his own skin. He was a man who didn’t mind women feasting their eyes on him, who probably enjoyed it.

She didn’t imagine that his teeth were chattering with nerves at the thought of hopping into the sack with her.

She had to fight off the urge to leap off the bed and make a sprint for her clothes on the ground.

‘No, of course I’m not,’ she said, dry-mouthed. If he’d been short-tempered or impatient at her sudden shyness, she might have found sufficient anger to rally her mental forces and shrug off her attack of nerves. But his voice was low and curiously gentle and it reached something deep inside her that she hadn’t revealed in the long months of their marriage.

Something vulnerable and hesitant. Gone was the hard veneer she had manufactured to protect herself.

‘Then why the sudden reticence?’ He traced the circle of her breast, running his finger in a spiralling motion until he was outlining her luscious pink nipple. He watched it stiffen and lowered his head to flick his tongue over the toughened nub.

Lucy took a dragging breath and stifled a groan.

‘I... I just never thought that we would find ourselves in this situation,’ she confessed, expecting the barriers that had existed between them to shoot back into place but, when he replied, his voice was pensive.

‘Nor did I, not that I didn’t want it.’

‘I’m afraid,’ she laughed nervously. ‘The package without clothes might not be exactly what you’d expected.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘I’m not the most voluptuous woman on the planet,’ she said lightly. ‘Too flat-chested. When I was at school, and all the other girls were developing breasts and hips, I just developed height and everything else stayed the same. I barely need to wear a bra. Men like women with big boobs. I know that.’

‘You know that, do you?’ He teased her throbbing nipple with his tongue and felt her melt under his touch.

‘Yes. I do. Why else do you think those men’s mags have always been so popular?’

‘I can’t say I’ve ever given it a passing thought. I’ve never read those things. What’s the point of looking at a picture of a woman when you could be lying in bed with one?’ Dio told her truthfully. He hadn’t actually banked on doing a whole lot of talking in this arrangement. He had wanted the body she had deprived him of. And since when had sex involved long, soul-searching conversations?

Certainly they never had with him.

In fact, before Lucy, women had been pleasant interludes in a hectic, stressful work life. He had never become emotionally attached—had never encouraged any woman to think that he was, had never given any of that a passing thought. Meaningful conversations had been thin on the ground.

Against all odds, considering she should have been the last woman on earth he would want to have any sort of relationship with, Lucy had been the one woman to lodge underneath his skin. He had never delved deep into asking himself why that was. He had assumed that it was because she was also the one woman who hadn’t made bedding him a priority.

Which—and why wouldn’t this have been a natural conclusion?—was why he wanted her; why he had been unable to treat the marriage as the sham it had turned out to be and carry on playing the field. It had irritated the hell out of him that she had not given a damn one way or another whether he fooled around or not during their marriage and that, in turn, had been a source of slow-burning anger and dissatisfaction.

Now that she was within reach and he could see that burr under his skin finally being dislodged, he thought that conversation was the least he could do.

If she wanted to talk, then why not?

He couldn’t, however, understand the self-denigration. Where had that come from? She had led a pampered, privileged life, the only child of wealthy parents. True, her father had been no better than a common criminal, but that didn’t nullify all the advantages she had had.

She was, literally, the golden girl. Seeing her in action over the past year or more had really shown him just how easy she found those social graces; just how at home she was moving in the circles which he had been denied, thanks to her father.

He couldn’t care less because he had made it to the top but he couldn’t seriously credit that the self-confidence she had always oozed was anything but bone-deep.

He wondered where she was going with this and reluctantly was curious to find out.

He kissed the corner of her mouth and she squirmed and manoeuvred her body so that they were facing one another.

‘Have you any idea how tough this is for me?’ Dio asked her roughly and Lucy blushed.

‘What?’

‘Feeling your sexy little body pressed up against me. No, I take that back. I think you have a very good idea of how tough this is for me because you can feel my desire against your skin. That says it all.’

‘You’re...you’re very big,’ Lucy whispered, and Dio grinned.

‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

‘I mean...have you ever found that a problem?’

Dio frowned. ‘What are you talking about? Why would I have found that a problem? A woman’s body is engineered to accommodate a man of my size.’

‘There’s something I feel you ought to know,’ she whispered, heart beating fast. ‘I’m not as experienced as you probably think I am.’

‘I never thought you were the sort of woman to sleep around.’

‘I’m not. In fact, actually, I haven’t slept around at all,’ she admitted awkwardly and Dio edged back from her.

‘Are you telling me that you’ve never made love to a man before?’

‘It’s not that big a deal,’ she returned defiantly.

Dio remained silent for so long that she wondered whether he was trying to concoct an excuse to withdraw from the situation which he had been so keen to engineer.

‘How come?’

‘I don’t feel comfortable having this conversation. I just thought that...that it was something you should know before...well...’ She laughed nervously. ‘When you’re disappointed, then you’ll understand why.’

Dio sat up.

His wife was a virgin. Incomprehensible. How had she managed to withstand the advances from men, looking the way that she did? Why had she? He raked his fingers through his hair then swung his legs over the side of the bed.

Lucy took advantage of the moment to yank the duvet over her.

This was a nightmare. What on earth had possessed her? Dio was a man of experience, a guy who had married her as something convenient that came as part of the package deal. He wasn’t into virgins and he certainly wouldn’t be into holding her hand while she lost her virginity.

She must have been mad.

Mortification swept over her in a hot wave.

Typically, he hadn’t bothered to get dressed. While she had felt an urgent need to cover herself, he was as comfortable having this hideous conversation in the buff as he would have been in one of his hand-made Italian suits. He had moved to sit in the chair by the mahogany desk by the bay window.

‘How come?’ he repeated. ‘And please don’t tell me again that you don’t feel comfortable having this conversation.’

‘It just never happened for me.’ Bright patches of colour delineated her cheekbones.

There was no way she intended pouring her heart out with some little-girl story of how unhappy her childhood had been; how she had witnessed her mother’s miserable stoicism in the face of her father’s selfishness and philandering. She wasn’t going to drone on in a self-pitying manner about her lofty determination only to have sex with the man she truly loved which, frankly, would have been a confession too far—especially considering the man she had thought she loved had turned out to be just the kind of man she should never have got mixed up with in the first place.

‘No testosterone-filled boys creeping through the windows of your prim and proper boarding school to have their wicked way with the innocent virgins?’

His lightly teasing tone was so unlike him that she felt herself begin to relax.

‘None of that. There was always the house mistress on red-hot alert, waiting with a rolling pin for any daring intruders.’

She lowered her eyes but could still feel him staring thoughtfully at her and she didn’t like that. It made her feel exposed.

‘And I suppose daddy was just as protective with his little girl?’ His voice was hard-edged.

Lucy shrugged. Yes, he’d seen off potential boyfriends all right, not that there had been many of them, but only because he had been such a crashing snob that no one had fitted the bill.

In retrospect, taking into account his dire financial situation, none of them had had the necessary bank balances to provide a rescue package anyway. Dio had certainly fitted the bill and he had not been on her father’s ridiculous social-climbing radar.

Watching her, Dio saw a shadow cross her face, gone as quickly as it had come, and he was struck by a sudden intense curiosity to find out what lay behind that shadow.

‘I would completely understand if you’d rather call it a day right now.’ She laughed a little unsteadily. ‘It was a stupid idea, anyway. You can’t just have a honeymoon and pretend that all the stuff that’s happened between us never took place.’

‘You’d be surprised,’ Dio murmured.

He stood up and strolled over to the bed. She was a virgin. The thought rocked him, brought out a fierce possessiveness which he never knew he had. All those nervous little looks and shy glances now made sense. He’d never have guessed, but then he hadn’t been looking, had he? He had accepted the cover version of her, the cool, elegant woman born into wealth and comfortable with it.

He hadn’t thought to look any deeper. She had deceived him, as far as he was concerned, that that was the end of the story. He had closed the door and it had been a lot easier to keep it closed.

‘I’m surprised,’ he murmured, ‘to think that you have never made love to a man before...shocked, even...but not turned off. I have no idea where you got that notion from, my dearest wife.’

His voice was low and husky, his grey eyes glittering with intent.

‘But can I ask you one thing?’ He returned to the bed, depressing the mattress with his weight, and very slowly pulled down the duvet which she had dragged up to her neck in a vain attempt at modesty. ‘Why choose the husband you’re keen to divorce? Seems an unusual option.’

Lucy felt that if he listened hard enough he would be able to hear the steady, nervous thump of her heart.

Now, wasn’t that a question?

‘I fancy you.’

‘And fancying me is enough to paper over the fact that you don’t like me?’

Lucy felt that she could say the same about him, but men were different from women, weren’t they? Women looked for love and men sought sex. That was why Dio had never been tempted in the past to hitch his wagon to any of the many women he had slept with. There had been no broken engagements or heart-rending tales of thwarted love. When they had been dating, during that brief window when she had actually believed that he was interested in her for herself, he had laughed when she had asked him whether he had ever been in love.

Dio might have used her, and certainly did not feel anything for her, not even affection—but he would still have no problem getting into bed with her because, as far as he was concerned, that was part of the marriage contract which he had been denied and, besides, he didn’t think she was half bad-looking.

It was slowly dawning on her that she might hate him for stringing her along—might hate that core of coldness inside him that had allowed him to be the kind of man who could do that—but there was still something deep in the very heart of her that wasn’t quite as immune to him as she would have liked to be.

She would rather have chewed her own arm off than ever admit that to him.

‘Why not?’ she asked.

Dio frowned. Their marriage had been little more than a business transaction and he wasn’t sure why he now found her attitude unsettling.

‘I was young when I married you, Dio. I’m only twenty-four now. Before you came along, I was totally wrapped up doing my maths degree and it didn’t leave a whole lot of time for men.’

‘You mean I was the first guy you really ever fancied...’

‘You’re a good-looking man.’

To his ears, that sounded like agreement, which made him wonder why she had retreated to her ivory tower the second the ring was on her finger.

‘Then why wait until now?’

‘Because maybe I’ve discovered that I’m more like you than I wanted to admit, even to myself.’ She breathed with the panicked sensation of someone treading on thin ice.

So much safer when she had been able to keep her distance and set aside all the uncomfortable thoughts now besieging her.

‘Now that we’re going to be getting a divorce—’

‘That’s a matter that’s still up for debate...’

‘I know the conditions and I accept them,’ Lucy told him bluntly. And then she added for good measure, for just that little bit of protection, ‘And you’re right—I can’t see a way forward if I leave this marriage with nothing. I’ve never known what it was like to be broke.’

‘Because Daddy protected you even when he was going under and all but waving a white flag...’

‘Whatever.’ She took a deep breath and did her utmost to disconnect from the contempt she felt for a man who had betrayed her mother and herself for pretty much all of his life. ‘Now we’re going to part company for ever in a couple of weeks’ time, why deny the fact that I find you an attractive man? It makes sense to sleep with you, Dio. Like you said to me, it won’t be a hardship.’

Pretty much everything she said got on Dio’s nerves even though there was not a single thing he didn’t agree with, not a single thing that shouldn’t have eased his conscience.

‘And what if I told you that you could have the money you want without the sex?’ he heard himself ask.

Lucy looked at him, surprised.

‘You mean that?’

‘What if I told you that I did?’ For a man who didn’t deal in hypotheses, he discovered that he was a dab hand at dishing them out. He had seen nothing wrong with going after what he wanted, what he was owed, and likewise he had seen nothing wrong in using whatever tools were at his disposal to get there. After all, he owed nothing to a woman who had been his wife in name only for reasons that had suited her at the time. Why should he care about a woman who had turned out to be no better than a gold-digger?

Annoyingly, it now irked him to think that she was only going to hop into bed with him because he had dangled that money carrot in front of her. So she fancied him. Big deal. From the age of thirteen he had known what it was like to be fancied by the opposite sex. But did she fancy him enough to sleep with him if she didn’t think that it made financial sense?

He loathed the direction his thoughts were taking but seemed unable to stop the flow now that it had begun.

‘Are you? Because, if you’re just speculating, then I don’t want to be having this conversation. You’re free to walk away cash in hand, Lucy, and you don’t have to sleep with me as part of the deal.’ He flung himself onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. If this was what it felt like to be the good guy, then he could say in all honesty that he’d felt better.

‘Really?’

‘Feel free to show your true colours, my beloved wife,’ Dio said acidly, still staring up at the ceiling but conscious of her naked, sexy body next to his with every treacherous pore of his being.

‘I meant what I said when I told you that I want to sleep with you—money doesn’t have anything to do with it.’

Dio inclined his head to look at her. He couldn’t credit the soar of triumph that greeted her unsteady admission.

‘Is that the sound of you telling me that you’re using me...?’ He shifted so that he was lying on his side and lost himself in a shameless observation of her beautiful body, even though it was costing him not to touch that beautiful body. Yet.

‘And what would you say if I told you that I was?’

‘I’ll live with it,’ he murmured. ‘Now, lie back. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much talk before sex in my life before.’

Lucy’s eyelids fluttered and she obeyed, sprawling with feline satisfaction, arching slightly so that her small breasts were pushed up.

With an unsteady groan, Dio planted a trail of kisses along her neck, then lower across her collarbone. He found heaven when he finally took one nipple into his mouth. It was sweet and succulent and he suckled on it, feeling it tighten in his mouth and hearing her moan as he swirled his tongue across the sensitive surface before drawing it long and deep into his mouth once again.

Gently he cupped her other breast, massaging it, and then rolling his fingers over her nipple, a warm-up for his mouth.

It was pure agony taking his time but he refused to let himself forget that she was a virgin. His virgin. His virgin bride. The thought of that fired him up on all fronts and appealed to the very essence of his masculinity.

He took his time as he straddled her, pushing her legs wide open to accommodate him, and gently stilling her instinct to snap them shut.

He was so aroused that he could scarcely breathe. If he began telling her what he wanted to do with her, he knew that he would find it impossible not to come.

This was a first for her and in some ways it was a first for him as well. The slight tremble which he knew she was trying hard to contain gentled his natural raw instincts.

Her other nipple was waiting for him and he took it gently into his mouth and teased and licked and sucked until she was writhing underneath him, arching up, her fingers curled into his hair so that she could push him down against her breast.

Her nipple was taut and glistening as he finally drew away. Hands flat on either side of her, he continued to trace a path along her rib cage, over her stomach, pausing to circle her belly button and then lower still...

Lucy’s eyes flew open as his mouth moved to caress her inner thigh.

‘Dio...’

He looked up and smiled. ‘Dio...what...?’

‘I... I...’

‘Relax. Trust me. You’re going to enjoy me kissing you down there.’ The scent of her filled his nostrils. ‘And don’t close your eyes,’ he commanded. ‘I want to know that you’re watching me when I begin licking you...’

Lucy moaned as her imagination took wonderful flight. She was so wet for him, wanted him so much. She marvelled that she had spent so many months primly keeping her distance, little knowing that he had the power to melt every bone in her body until she was as pliant as a rag doll.

She watched as he settled between her legs, hands against the soft flesh of her inner thigh preventing her from closing her legs, making sure that she was open for him.

Delicately he slid his tongue between the soft folds, finding the throbbing bud of her roused clitoris with ease and tickling it.

The pleasure was exquisite.

She wanted to keep her eyes open so that she could see his dark head moving with purpose between her legs but she couldn’t. She tilted her head up and arched her back, an instinctive response to what he was doing.

When he plunged his finger into her, whilst keeping up the insistent pressure of his tongue on her clitoris, Lucy could no longer hold herself back.

The waves of pleasure were too much, far too much. She didn’t want this...she wanted him in her... But with a long, shuddering groan she gave in to the ripples that increased into an unstoppable riptide of her orgasm.

She came against his mouth, rising up, crying out, moving wildly as his tongue continued its ruthless plunder.

Her own lack of experience stared her in the face as she gradually came back down to earth.

‘I’m sorry.’ She turned away as he moved up to tilt her chin gently so that they were looking at one another.

‘Only tell me you’re sorry if you didn’t enjoy it.’

‘You know I did,’ she whispered. ‘But I... I should have been able to hold off. I shouldn’t have come...not like that...not when I want you in me...’

‘I wanted to bring you to an orgasm, Lucy. This is just the foreplay...’

‘It’s pretty mind-blowing,’ Lucy returned shakily.

‘You’re so beautiful and wet that I’ll be able to slide into you, and I’ll be gentle. I don’t want to hurt you.’

Lucy found it remarkable that this powerful, ruthless man, accustomed to getting his own way at all costs, could be so tender between the sheets.

Yet, wasn’t that the hallmark of the expert lover? That was what she told herself because it was bad enough that he was climbing out of the box into which she had securely placed him. She just didn’t need yet another side of him to hit her in the face and overturn yet more preconceptions.

He said that she should trust him and that he didn’t want to hurt her but some little voice inside cautioned her that it was within his power to deliver a great deal of hurt.

He already had! Surely the proof of the pudding was in the eating? He had married her so that he could socially elevate himself. Her father had been cruelly clear on that count. He had turned her into the cynical woman she was now! It would be wise to remember those things. She knew that the most important thing in the world was self-preservation.

She wanted a divorce, wanted to rid herself of a marriage that was a joke, and tellingly he hadn’t argued against that. He wanted her but, once he got that out of his system, he would be more than ready to ditch her and move on with his life, find himself some woman he actually had feelings for and wanted to settled down and have children with.

That woman would never be her.

But, Lord, it was hard to marshal her thoughts when her whole system was in crazy free fall!

She felt him nudge against her and, just like that, a slow burn began. She wrapped her arms around him, loving the hardness of his body.

‘Tell me what to do,’ she whispered. Those were words that Dio had never heard from any woman and they were curiously thrilling.

‘Do nothing but what feels good for you, and lose yourself, Lucy. It’s what making love is all about.’

That sounded like a pretty scary concept to her but she nodded obediently and then stopped thinking altogether as he began to kiss her, slowly, taking his time.

She could taste herself as their tongues meshed. She reached down to hold him; he was massive, a hard shaft of steel that sent her senses spinning.

But she wasn’t scared. She knew that he was going to be gentle.

And she wasn’t filled with regret either. So what if this didn’t make sense? So what if he had offered her the way out she had asked for without the blackmail? He had told her that she could walk away and that she wouldn’t walk away penniless and she believed him.

But walking away would have opened the door to, if not regret, then a life of wondering what this husband of hers would have been like in bed, what it might have been like to have touched him.

No. She was doing the right thing.

He cupped her breast and played with it, idly stroking her roused nipple while he remained kissing her until she felt like she was drowning.

Then slowly, oh, so slowly, his hand smoothed over her stomach to cup the mound between her legs. Only then did he caress her down there, but so lightly that she had all the time in the world for her body to crank back into full gear, until she was throbbing and aching for more.

She wanted to push his hand in deeper, but instead she twisted so that she could taste him.

She’d never done anything like this before. She took him into her mouth and heard his sharp intake of breath as she began to lavish attention on the rigid shaft. She ran her tongue exploratively along it, sucked it, filling her mouth; cupped him between his legs and felt him expand under her attentions.

This time, he was the one spiralling out of control, but he pulled back before she could do what he had done to her and bring him to an orgasm with her mouth only.

Their bodies were slick with perspiration.

‘Don’t be nervous,’ he whispered as he settled between her legs.

‘I’m not nervous.’ She felt the thickness of his erection and shivered with a mixture of wild excitement and apprehension.

‘No?’

Lucy heard the amused disbelief in his voice and some of her apprehension drained away. ‘Okay. Maybe a little.’ Though he was someone whose very being posed a threat—who could be daunting and intimidating; whose presence she had contrived to avoid as much as possible from the very instant she had overheard that conversation on her wedding night—she trusted him wholly and completely with her body.

‘You’re so wet,’ he murmured unsteadily, barely able to control his shaking hands as he blindly reached for protection in the little drawer by the bed, fumbling like an amateur. He nudged into her, feeling her tightness expand to hold him and fighting against a natural urge to ram himself in her right up to the hilt. ‘You’re going to enjoy everything I do...’

‘I already have,’ Lucy confessed honestly. She sensed him taking his time and knew that it must be difficult for him. She didn’t think that her husband was at all accustomed to taking his time with anything if he wanted it badly enough. It just wasn’t in his nature. But he was taking his time now, gently probing deeper, but making sure to ease out before continuing to penetrate her in little stages.

‘I like that.’ He whispered things in her ear, sexy things he wanted to do with her, that had her blushing to her hairline. With each nudge, her nerves dissipated until she was desperate to feel all of him in her, desperate for the surge of his formidable strength inside her.

With the intuition of experience, Dio felt the change in her and offered a prayer of thanks because holding back was sheer torture.

He thrust deeper and more firmly inside. Rearing up on both hands, unable to hold back any more as he gazed down at her small, perfectly formed breasts, Dio moved with assurance, building up a rhythm until each thrust took her closer and closer over the edge.

Lucy had never thought that sex could feel so good. He’d been right. He had fitted into her as perfectly as a hand fitted into a glove; had fitted into her as though their bodies had been crafted to slot together. And now...

Her fingers dug into the small of his back as he continued to thrust, deeper and deeper, until she felt as though they were fusing into one. It was indescribable.

She hurtled over the edge in a wave of pure ecstasy. There was no room in her head for thought or analysis. Pure sensation took over. Every part of her body was on fire, soaring high, swooping thrillingly, until at last the crashing waves of pleasure became ripples and finally subsided, leaving her limp and utterly sated.

She clung shamelessly to him as he withdrew. Her mind was still in a whirl. She couldn’t think straight; her body was tingling and burning and as weak as a kitten.

‘Enjoyed?’ Dio didn’t immediately feel his usual compulsion to vacate the bed the second love-making had come to an end but, then again, he told himself that it wasn’t every day he made love to a virgin who also happened to be his lawfully wedded wife.

‘It was lovely.’

‘Lovely?’ He gave a low growl of laughter and swept her damp hair away from her forehead. ‘I prefer sensational...’ And she had come to him without any pressure at all. Triumph made him heady with renewed desire.

‘So, I guess that now we’ve...made love...’ She shifted to disentangle herself from his embrace and he tightened his grip.

It had been easy not to think when she had been caught up in the wonder of making love but now reality began to drip in.

This was her first time and, yes, sensational was definitely the word to describe the experience. But for him this was all routine stuff. He had already given her a time limit of a fortnight, after which he anticipated getting bored, but perhaps she should establish a bit of cool and restraint herself. She’d acted like a limpet and the last thing she wanted was for him to get the idea that this strange situation was one that was out of her control.

Out of control were her physical responses. But that was where it ended.

She wasn’t the foolish romantic she’d once been. She’d toughened up.

‘Yes?’

The low timbre of his voice was a drag on her senses. ‘Would you say we’ve put this thing between us to rest?’ She chuckled lightly.

‘What do you think?’ Dio murmured. He’d been prepared to do the decent thing and let her escape with the money she wanted but things had changed since that bout of decency. He curved his hand possessively between her thighs and felt the slick moisture between her legs.

‘You had your chance to fly away, my dearest wife, and you decided not to. Well, fair’s fair, wouldn’t you say? Ten days of happily wedded bliss and then we part company. Like I’ve said to you, Lucy, it won’t be a hardship for either of us...’

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