Читать книгу The Wedding Night Debt - Кэтти Уильямс, Amanda Cinelli, Cathy Williams - Страница 9

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