‘If you don’t want to discuss this then forget it. I just thought that while we’re both here it might be better to talk face to face than for us to return to London and have lawyers do it on our behalf. I mean, divorce is a really personal thing.’
‘And most divorces usually go down a slightly different route.’ He raked his hands through is hair, outraged that she would stubbornly persist with this even though it must be obvious to her that it was an inappropriate topic of conversation. More to the point, it was a conversation he didn’t want to be having.
‘Most people usually end up facing one another across a desk with lawyers at their sides after they’ve spent years rowing and arguing. By the time most people hit the divorce courts, they’d tired and fed up of the arguments and they’re ready to bow down to the inevitable. That’s a personal divorce, one where emotions have been exhausted. This isn’t one of those instances.’
‘It doesn’t make it any less personal.’ She thought of her parents and their lousy marriage. There hadn’t been years of shouting and arguing, just a quiet destructive undercurrent with insults and criticism delivered in a moderate tone of voice. Unless, of course, her father had been rolling drunk but even then he had never been a crashing around the house kind of drunk. Theirs had been a silent, failing marriage and was nothing like what she and Dio had.
‘You’re right. It’s not.’ She stared off into the distance quietly. ‘But not all marriages that break down end up that way, after years of shouting and throwing plates. Some marriages just end up broken and useless with no shouting at all. In fact, shouting can be a good thing in a marriage. Anyway, I don’t know why we’re talking about this...’ She shook her head and looked at him, resting back against the pillows. ‘I shouldn’t have brought this up in the first place.’
She did that.
Opened a conversation in which he had no desire to participate and then got him to a point where his curiosity had been stirred, only to back away, leaving him with a bit between his teeth.
Did she do that on purpose or was it just some fantastic ingrained talent she had managed to hone over the years?
He just knew that he now wanted to find out what she was thinking, why her expression had suddenly become so pensive. He wanted to know what the heck was going through her head.
‘What are you going on about?’ He placed one finger under her chin and directed her head so that she had no choice but to look at him. ‘One minute you’re telling me that you want to discuss our divorce so that you can make sure you get your financial settlement—’
‘That’s not what I said!’
‘And the next minute you’re generalising about broken marriages where there’s no arguing. Are you talking about any marriage in particular?’ It was a stab in the dark and he could see, immediately, that he had hit the jackpot. Her eyelids flickered and her mouth parted on some unspoken denial, her fingers compulsively twisting the thin sheet covering her.
‘Some friend of yours, Lucy? Aunt? Cousin?’ She didn’t reply. ‘Your parents?’ he asked softly, for want of any other name to pull out of the hat, and she gave a terse nod.
Dio was astounded. He drew in a sharp breath and looked at her narrowly to see whether she was having him on but her eyes were wide and unblinking.
‘I’ve never told anyone before.’ Her head was beginning to throb. She closed her eyes, part of her knowing that she should just shut up because the fever and the aching limbs were a potent mix, making her want to say things she knew she shouldn’t.
‘And there’s no need to now,’ he murmured, instinctively knowing that once certain doors were opened they could never again be closed, and suspecting that this might just be one of those doors.
Did he want his assumptions overthrown?
Did he want to hear about her parents and their occasional well-bred tiffs? Frankly, when you thought about it, any wife in her right mind wouldn’t have been able to stand Robert Bishop for longer than five minutes, because the man was a disaster area.
But the picture he had always had of the Bishop family had been one of the perfect nuclear unit blessed with beauty and wealth all round...
‘You probably think that I had a great childhood,’ she murmured drowsily. ‘Actually, lots of people think that. Well, except for very close family friends and some relatives. Not many.’ She slid her eyes over at him and smiled. ‘In our circles,’ she said with a trace of irony in her voice, ‘it doesn’t do to wash your dirty linen in public.’
‘You should get some sleep, Lucy.’
‘Maybe you’re right. I guess I should.’ She sighed and Dio grudgingly pinned his silver grey eyes to her flushed, rosy face.
‘Tell me,’ he commanded gruffly.
‘Nothing much to tell,’ she yawned. ‘It’s just that...we’re going to be getting a divorce and I don’t want you to go away thinking that I’m a prim and proper, pampered little princess who was born with a silver spoon in her mouth.’
‘Which bit of that statement is not true?’
‘You’ve always thought the worst of me, Dio.’
‘God, Lucy. I didn’t come over here so that we could end up having long, meaningful conversations about where we went wrong.’
‘Because we should just have been out here pretending that we could spend time in one another’s company and get through it with sex alone.’
‘I thought we were managing just fine on that front.’
With every bone aching, Lucy still felt a crazy quiver at the wolfishness of his smile and the sudden flare of heat in his lean, handsome face.
A mosquito-borne virus made her feel less wobbly than his lazy, brooding eyes.
‘I tried hard to forget that you only married me because you figured I would make a suitable wife.’
About to remove the tray of half eaten food on the bed, Dio paused and looked at her narrowly.
Fever made a person semi-delirious and he could tell that her fever was back. However, she sounded calm and controlled, even though her eyes were over-bright and there was a sheen on her face.
‘A suitable wife...’
‘Right background. You know.’
‘Do I?’ He sat back down. ‘I’m not so sure that I do. Enlighten me.’
Lucy twisted the sheet between her fingers. ‘On our wedding night,’ she said so quietly that he had to lean forward to catch what she was saying, ‘I overheard you talking to my father. Well, more of a heated conversation, to be honest. I heard you telling him that he had got what he deserved and that you were going to make sure that you took what was owed to you. The company...and everything that went with it...’
Dio cursed fluently under his breath as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle slotted into shape. She had heard snatches of conversation; she might have cast her own interpretation on what she had heard, but...
Was he going to provide a fuller explanation? No. He’d wanted revenge. It was something that had eaten away at him since he had been a young adult. He’d got it. But now he felt strangely disconcerted as he questioned that driving passion that had propelled him forward for years.
Stupid.
The man had deserved everything he had got, and not only because of what he had done to his father, but for what he had done to the people who had held shares in the company, the people he had been happy to throw to the wolves by embezzling their money.
So he’d been diverted by Lucy, had married her for not entirely honourable reasons, but her life had been pretty damn good.
Except...
‘He told me that you married me because I was the sort of person who could give you social credence, you know. He said that...’
‘That what...?’
‘That you came from a deprived background and what you wanted was someone who could promote your chances to go through doors you would
n’t normally be allowed to go through. That you might have made a lot of money but...but you didn’t have...have...what it took to gain entry into certain circles.’
For a few seconds, Dio actually thought that he had misheard her, but as the meaning of her words sank in rage engulfed him.
If Robert Bishop hadn’t been safely six foot under, he might have been tempted to send him there.
‘And you believed him?’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’ Lucy asked, confused. The dark anger on his face, which he was struggling to control, made her wish that she’d never broached the topic. ‘Anyway, I’m beginning to feel really tired. Plus my headache’s coming back and the fever...’
Fetching painkillers gave Dio a few minutes during which he suppressed a violent urge to punch something very hard.
Then, just like that, his thoughts veered off in a different direction and he was moderately calmer when he sat back down and watched her swallow the tablets and then lie back with her eyes closed.
‘You’re not going to fall asleep on me now, are you, Luce?’
Lucy didn’t say anything. He hadn’t called her that for a very long time, not since they had first started going out; not since they had been on one of those few early dates...
She was aching all over but still alert, fired up by the fact that she had confided in her husband for the first time in many long months. It felt liberating because what did she have to lose?
‘When you said that your childhood wasn’t what everyone assumed,’ Dio said thoughtfully, ‘what you really meant was that your father wasn’t the man the world thought him to be.’
Her eyelids flickered and she sneaked a glance at him to see if she could figure out what was going through his head but Dio only ever revealed what he wanted other people to see. She knew that and right now he wasn’t revealing anything at all about what he was thinking.
‘Was his abuse...physical?’ Just voicing those thoughts out loud was sickening but he had to know and he felt a wave of relief when she shook her head in denial.
‘He was brutal to me and Mum but it was only ever verbal. My mother was such a gentle creature...’
‘So you overheard our conversation and your father convinced you that the only reason I married you was because I wanted to use you to gain social entry to... God only knows where. It never occurred to you that I couldn’t give a damn about gaining social entry to anywhere? No...’ He pensively provided his own answer to that question before she could confirm his suspicions. ‘It wouldn’t because he appealed to all your insecurities...’ And yet a lifetime of good schools where an ability to mask emotion and project the right image had stood her in good stead when it came to maintaining an air of cool.
‘You mean you didn’t...use me?’
‘I mean...’ Guilt seared through him as he trod carefully around his words. ‘If you think I married you because you had the right background, or because I thought you could open doors for me, then you’re very much mistaken.’ He stood up, unwilling to go down any further roads, because those roads were riddled with landmines. ‘And now, get some sleep, Lucy. Doctor’s orders...’
CHAPTER NINE
LUCY WAS VAGUELY aware of time passing by over the next couple of days. The fever came and went in phases, as did the pain in her joints, making her feel as weak as a kitten.
However, when she did surface from the virus, her recovery was swift. She awoke to a room awash with pale light sifting through the closed shutters and the muslin drapes and the soft, overhead whirring of the fan.
A quick glance at the clock by the bed told her that it was a little after eight in the morning. Dio wasn’t in the room.
She took time out to mull over certain flashbacks that floated to the surface.
He’d been around all the time. She could remember waking to find him sitting in the room with his laptop at a little table he had brought from some other part of the house. She could remember him bringing her food, which had been largely left uneaten, and making her drink lots of fluids. He had bathed her and helped her with whatever she had needed.
He hadn’t signed up to look after her. She was pretty sure that he had never had to do anything like that in his life before and who knew? Maybe if they hadn’t been stuck on an island where normal life had been temporarily suspended he would have called in people to pick up the slack so that he could remove himself from the thick of it, but they were on this island and he hadn’t had a choice.
But he had risen to the occasion. Admirably.
She remembered something else, stuff they had talked about, and she was sure it wasn’t her mind playing tricks on her. She had finally opened up about what her home life had really been like. Not given to personal confidences of that kind, it had been an enormous relief to let it all out. Growing up, not even her friends had known how much she had hated her father’s mood swings, the sneering way he had of putting her down and putting her mother down, the atmosphere of tension that had been part and parcel of growing up. Her mother had maintained the front and a stiff upper lip and so, in the end, had she.
The last person she would ever have imagined talking to was Dio, yet she had, and she hadn’t regretted opening up because he had proved to be a good listener.
And she’d been wrong. He hadn’t used her. He’d said so. Her father had lied, had told her that Dio was a trumped up nobody who had married her for her social connections and her ability to fit in to the world he wanted to occupy—a world, her father had said, that was denied to him because he didn’t come from the right background and didn’t have the right accent.
She could have kicked herself for not really questioning that assumption. She should have known that Dio was so confident in himself, so much a born leader of the pack, that he wouldn’t have cared less about any social pecking order.
But he’d hit the nail on the head when he had told her that her father had known how to manipulate her own insecurities.
She’d been wrong about Dio.
Whatever his reasons for buying her father’s company, and whatever bits and pieces of that awful conversation she had heard, she had misconstrued.
She’d had a lot of champagne and she had added up two and two and arrived at the wrong number and, because of that, they had had a sterile marriage in which all lines of communication had been lost. Indeed, she had ensured that those lines of communication had never been opened and he was far too proud a man to have initiated the sort of touchy-feely conversation he loathed.
He was proud, he was stubborn and...she was madly in love with him.
Her heart skipped a beat and she licked her lips, glad that she was alone in the room, because she would have felt horribly naked and vulnerable if he had been sitting in the chair, looking at her. Those amazing eyes of his saw everything.
She had fallen for him from the very first second she had laid eyes on him and she had papered over that reality with bitterness and resentment once they were married. She had told herself that he was just the sort of man she should have avoided at all costs; had told herself that the man for her was gentle, kind, thoughtful and considerate and that Dio was spectacularly none of those things.
How could he be when he had ruthlessly used her and married her for all the wrong reasons?
Now she felt as though the scales had been ripped from her eyes.
Not only had he proven just how considerate he could be, just how thoughtful and caring, but he was no longer locked up in that box that she had turned her back on.
The divorce, which she had insisted on, was a mocking reminder of how stubbornly she had held on to her misconceptions and panic swept over her in a rush.
She’d hankered after a bright, shiny new life, free from someone who didn’t give a damn about her, who had used her and who didn’t care about whether she was happy or not.
But Dio...
She frowned.
Did he really care about her? She loved him. She knew that now. She had always loved him, which was why she had never been able to be in the same room as him without all her antennae being on red alert. She had fumed and raged but had still been so aware of him that her breathing became ragged whenever he was close to her.
But he had always been guarded around her and even here, making love, in the throes of passion, he had never—not once—let slip that he felt anything for her beyond lust.
She knew that she should take something from that, yet hope began to send out alarming little shoots.
Would he have been so solicitous if he didn’t feel something for her?
Putting damp cloths on her forehead and cooking food, even if the food was usually the same fare of scrambled eggs and toast, counted for something...didn’t it?
Alive to all sorts of possibilities, and feeling as right as rain, Lucy took herself off to have a shower. Then she slipped on the silk dressing gown hanging on the back of the door, making sure to leave her bra behind, and also making sure to wear some sexy lacy underwear, one of the few items of clothing she had brought with her.
She found him in the kitchen, some papers in one hand whilst with the other he stirred something in a frying pan. His back was to her and she took her time standing by the door, just looking at him.
She was seeing him in a whole new light. She had given herself permission to have feelings for this guy and now she appreciated the strength and beauty of his body, the muscular length of his legs, the powerful yet graceful arch of his back and the way his dark hair curled at the nape of his neck.
‘I think you might be on the way to burning those eggs...’
Dio started and it took him a few seconds to register that Lucy was in the kitchen and looking so... So damned fresh-faced and sexy that it took his breath away.
The Wedding Night Debt: Christmas at the Castello (bonus novella) Page 14