by Lynne Graham
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.