‘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.
The Wedding Night Debt: Christmas at the Castello (bonus novella) Page 2