The Wedding Night Debt: Christmas at the Castello (bonus novella)

by Cathy Williams

  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 d
on’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...’