Читать книгу The Mistress Wife - Линн Грэхем, Lynne Graham - Страница 7

DISCONCERTED entirely by that greeting, Vivien was reduced to gaping at Lucca in bewilderment. ‘But you know why I’m here!’

An aristocratic ebony brow ascended in polite disagreement, for he had exquisite manners. ‘How could I know?’

‘You sent me that newspaper,’ Vivien reminded him rather tautly, for her extreme nervous tension was being heightened by an awful sense of foolishness.

Lucca shifted a fluid brown hand and spread dismissive fingers in a tiny, almost infinitesimal movement. ‘So?’

Vivien tried and failed to swallow past the lump lodged in her throat. ‘Naturally I came straight here to see you.’

Lucca vented a soft, amused laugh that nonetheless contrived to create a chill somewhere deep down inside Vivien. ‘Naturally? Would you care to explain how this sudden uninvited visit of yours could possibly be described as natural?’

Recognising the dangerous tension in the atmosphere, Vivien was daunted. Her own nature was too open for her to comprehend Lucca’s darker and infinitely more complex temperament. She considered their meeting of overwhelming importance. His cool detachment disorientated her. ‘It’s like you’re not really listening to me. Don’t be like that, don’t act like this is a game in which the highest score wins!’

‘Don’t make assumptions, cara. You’re not inside my head and can have no idea what I’m thinking.’

‘I know that you have to be very, very angry with me—’

‘No, you’re wrong,’ Lucca traded. ‘Anger over a long haul is unproductive. Even dinosaurs move on eventually.’

Vivien was too wound up to hold back the frantic words bubbling to her lips. ‘I know you hate me and have to blame me for everything that’s gone wrong…and that’s OK, only what I deserve,’ she conceded humbly.

‘Don’t waste my time with this,’ Lucca urged, cold as ice.

Vivien raised anguished green eyes to his lean, strong face and willed him to listen to her and recognise her sincerity. ‘Sorry is a very inadequate word and may even be horribly aggravating in these circumstances but I have to say it—’

‘Why?’ Brilliant dark eyes lit by a tiny inner flame of gold rested on her in blatant challenge. ‘I’m not interested in hearing your apologies.’

‘You sent me that newspaper…’ Vivien reminded him again, but this time half under her breath.

Lucca shrugged a wide shoulder in a gesture of magnificent disregard.

In the silence that stretched, Vivien sucked in a deep, shuddering breath and pressed on. ‘You wanted me to know that I’d misjudged you. You wanted me to see the proof that you were innocent.’

‘Or maybe I wanted to make you squirm,’ Lucca suggested silkily. ‘Or maybe my pride demanded I have the last word. Whatever my motivation, it’s not important now.’

‘Of course, it’s important!’ Vivien was no longer able to restrain her teeming emotions. ‘Jasmine Bailey destroyed our marriage—’

‘No,’ Lucca slotted in with lethal quietness. ‘All the honours of that achievement go to you. If you had trusted me, we would still be together.’

Vivien fell back a step as if he had struck her. He had stripped the facts down to their bones and reached his own cruelly straightforward baseline. ‘It’s not that simple.’

‘I think it is.’

‘But you let me leave you!’ Vivien protested in desperation. ‘How hard did you try to persuade me that that horrible woman was lying?’

‘Guilty until proven innocent…is that how you rationalise what you did? You shifted the burden of proof back onto me. But there was no way I could prove that Bailey had concocted her story. I slept alone that night and every night during that week in the Med but only I can know that for a fact,’ Lucca pointed out, wide sculpted mouth grim. ‘Bimbos target rich men. You knew that when you married me. The first line of defence in our marriage should have been trust and you fell at the starting gate.’

‘I might have had more trust if you had been more vigorous in your denials!’ Vivien argued, half an octave higher in volume, for she was aghast at his complete lack of emotion and utterly crushed by his disinterest. ‘But it seems that you were too proud to try and convince me that I’d made a mistake and misjudged you—’

His intense gaze flashed gold and veiled. ‘Get a grip, cara. This visit is an embarrassment for us both and it gives me no pleasure to tell you that.’

‘You won’t let me say sorry, will you?’ Vivien grasped unhappily.

She was so earnest, so straightforward, so disastrously naïve, Lucca acknowledged. She was asking for trouble, inviting it in by calling open season. When he had married her, he reflected bitterly, he had planned to protect her from every evil. It had never occurred to him that he would find himself exiled to the enemy camp and the only escape route would entail compromising his own ideals. Sunlight distracted him from his brooding introspection as he studied her upturned face. The fine-grained perfection of her creamy skin illuminated green eyes with the depth and clarity of jewels and a wide, soft, vulnerable mouth as juicy and inviting as a ripe cherry. His body reacted with infuriating immediacy and hardened.

Vivien connected unwarily with riveting black eyes that turned her bones to water. She felt hot, weak and dizzy, her physical response to his aggressive masculinity instant and familiar. Black lashes as lush as his infant son’s snapped down over his gaze, narrowing them to a vibrant glimmer, and he stepped back with measured cool.

‘I don’t know why you’ve come to see me,’ Lucca stated with a cutting lack of expression.

‘Yes, you do…you know absolutely why!’ Vivien reasoned tautly, cheeks hotly flushed with agonised self-consciousness. She was struggling to concentrate rather than cringe at the suspicion that he had noticed her humiliating reaction to his proximity.

‘But possibly I don’t wish to engage on that subject,’ Lucca fenced in a tone as smooth as black velvet. ‘Why don’t you tell me instead how Marco is doing?’

Vivien blinked and then the tense anxiety etched on her face was softened by the warm beginnings of a loving smile. ‘He’s doing wonderfully well…he learns everything so fast, you know—’

Even that hint of a smile increased Lucca’s anger. ‘No, I don’t know.’

‘Sorry?’ Vivien didn’t understand. She had hoped that talking about their son, currently the only shared element in their lives, might take some of the chill out of the atmosphere.

‘I said that no, I don’t know how fast Marco learns because I don’t see enough of my son to make that kind of judgement. Obviously, he’s always doing or saying something new and different by the time I see him again.’

Vivien shrank at that icy clarification. ‘I suppose he must do.’

‘Evidently, it hasn’t occurred to you either that I also missed out entirely on his first smile, his first step and his first word.’

Over-sensitive tears lashed and stung the back of Vivien’s eyes and she had to keep them very wide to prevent them from spilling out and betraying her.

‘I suppose that I should count myself lucky that he seems to recognise me from one visit to the next,’ Lucca completed with the same cold, flat intonation.

For the first time, Vivien was confronted by his bitterness where their child was concerned. In shock, she swallowed so hard she hurt her throat and had to look away until she had control of herself again. Understanding how he must have felt at being excluded and essentially left unaware of all the most important moments in his toddler son’s life, how could she blame him for his hostility? It seemed beneath her to remark that he was talking like a much fonder father than she would ever have expected him to become. One of her least favourite recollections was Lucca’s annoyance when she had fallen pregnant.

‘I wish I knew what to say,’ she began awkwardly.

‘Not the overworked, ever-cheerful English cliché for the occasion…please,’ Lucca derided. ‘Perhaps it is now sinking in on you that, like most divorced couples, we don’t have much to talk about.’

‘We’re not divorced yet—’

‘As good as, cara mia,’ Lucca contradicted with an insolent insouciance that flayed her to the bone. ‘Before you leave—I’m sure you don’t want to be late—is there anything else you wish to discuss?’

Feeling harassed and unable to get her thoughts into any kind of useful order and horrendously loaded with guilt and unbearable regret, Vivien recalled her reluctant promise to her sister.

‘Money…’ she said abruptly.

Lucca frowned in surprise.

Vivien turned a beetroot colour and shifted uneasily off one foot onto the other. ‘I mean, I’m having a little trouble managing at present. I’m also well aware that it was my choice to accept only minimal financial assistance from you after we separated—’

‘We didn’t separate,’ Lucca interposed. ‘You walked out on our marriage.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Embarrassing you?’

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

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

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

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

‘We’re virtually divorced—’

‘We’re not…stop saying that!’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Breakfast.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Vivi…be sensible.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Signora Saracino…?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I can’t think about anything else.’

‘That doesn’t make sense.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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