The Mistress Wife

by Lynne Graham

  ‘You deserve a smart ass like him!’ Bernice flung in raging mortification and she flounced out of the room.

  ‘Yes. I think I finally do,’ Vivien agreed and she finally let herself glance at Lucca.

  Lucca appeared to be in a rare state of shock and riveted to the spot.

  ‘Give me five minutes,’ she begged and hurried off in Bernice’s wake.

  Her sister was standing in the hall in floods of tears.

  ‘Stay the night here,’ Vivien proffered gently. ‘I don’t want you rushing off when you’re feeling like this.’

  ‘I can’t stand you being nice to me after what I’ve just tried to do!’ Bernice gasped. ‘You should hate me!’

  ‘You’re my sister and you’re unhappy. That’s all that really matters.’

  But Bernice could not face the prospect of seeing Lucca again and insisted on leaving. She planned to head straight back to the airport. Vivien made her promise to keep in touch.

  Lucca watched Vivien walk back into the room and released his breath in a slow hiss. ‘You were amazing, cara mia. I was so scared you might listen to her.’

  ‘I knew the minute Bernice arrived that she was up to something because she was putting on such an act.’ Vivien grimaced. ‘You should have told me about the loan you’d given her. It would have been better for her if she had had to take some responsibility for failing to repay that money. Instead she went on to get herself into more debt.’

  ‘She is addicted to spending money she doesn’t have. She needs professional support to sort her out. But must we talk about your sister’s problems now?’

  Vivien went pink. ‘No…’

  ‘Can you forgive me for the way I behaved last night?’ Lucca asked her then.

  ‘You’re a caveman under those Armani suits. I had no idea.’

  Colour marked his strong cheekbones and he winced. ‘When you stood up, I thought you were about to go off and have a drink with that guy. That’s why I hit him.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have done something like that!’

  ‘When you said you wouldn’t marry me, it was like the roof fell in. I’d had a few drinks. I was jealous…’

  Vivien studied him with wide-eyed fascination. ‘Why are you telling me all this?’

  ‘I don’t want to lose you again,’ Lucca confessed roughly, his accent very thick.

  ‘Would that matter so much?’ she whispered.

  He vented a rueful laugh. ‘How can you ask me that? All I have ever really cared about is you. Possibly you think I have a strange way of showing that but in my own defence…I didn’t know how much you meant to me until you walked out two years ago.’

  Vivien was very still, almost afraid to move in case she spooked him into silence. ‘How did you feel?’

  ‘Like death for months and months and months, bella mia.’ Lucca raked a not quite steady hand through his cropped black hair and fixed strained dark golden eyes on her. ‘It was about a year until there was another woman and I had to pretend she was you…’

  That gruff, low-pitched admission petered out with a look of pain and forced her to wrinkle her nose to will the hot tears back. ‘So, why didn’t you come and see me?’

  ‘You were right about my pride. I believed you’d come back to me. When you didn’t, you showed yourself to be strong. But once you’d demonstrated that, how could I be weak enough to chase after you?’ Lucca asked heavily, watching enlightenment cross her face closely followed by appalled regret. ‘I wouldn’t admit how miserable I was even to myself.’

  ‘I couldn’t bear to be that miserable ever again,’ Vivien confided chokily. ‘It was the worst pain ever.’

  ‘So when you showed up in my office I was being torn in a dozen opposing directions. I wanted you and I didn’t want you. I didn’t want to be hurt again either,’ he confessed with obvious difficulty. ‘I believed I wanted to punish you and then slowly it started to occur to me that that wasn’t really what I was trying to do…’

  ‘It…wasn’t?’ Vivien was getting lost in his explanation.

  ‘I let the divorce go through because I needed to see that you would stay with me even if we weren’t married. I was testing you out like a stupid kid…I wanted you to prove that you loved me—’

  Her swimming eyes overflowed. ‘I wanted you to prove the same thing…so that’s OK.’

  Troubled dark golden eyes assailed hers. ‘I don’t know how to prove I love you.’

  She thought of the fight he had started in the club the night before. She thought of the fear he had betrayed just minutes earlier. She thought of the natural bravado behind which he hid his human moments of uncertainty. And lastly, she thought of the way he was sacrificing his cool front and forcing himself to talk because he was afraid of losing her. She flung herself into his arms and held him tight. ‘Just tell me and I’ll believe you.’

  ‘I love you, amata mia.’

  A cocoon of blissful happiness enclosed her. ‘I love you too. Will you marry me?’

  Lucca tensed. ‘I thought that was my line.’

  Vivien was amused. ‘But you’re not that hot at it, so I thought it would be easier if I took care of it. Well, will you or won’t you?’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘OK …now there are one or two little conditions,’ Vivien added winsomely.

  ‘Conditions?’

  ‘Nothing too onerous…just shorter working hours, only occasional foreign trips, another two children—’

  ‘Lots and lots of sex.’ Lucca was getting into the spirit of the occasion. ‘You never, ever take your wedding ring off. So when do we get married again?’

  ‘As soon as you like,’ Vivien told him blissfully, certain that this time around they would get everything right.

  A year later, Vivien became the mother of a baby girl called Pia.

  Eleven months earlier, Lucca and Vivien had re-married in a quiet London ceremony with the already-married Serafina and Umberto acting as their witnesses. For a long time after that life had literally been one long glorious honeymoon for Lucca and Vivien. With Marco young enough to travel freely, his parents had flitted between Italy and England according to their mood. They had been entirely self-indulgent.

  Lucca had set up an office in Florence and built an experimental fernery for Vivien in a special glasshouse at Il Palazzetto. While she’d been pregnant with Pia she’d written a very entertaining book about the history of fern exploration, which had sold well to botanists. Bernice had met and married a wealthy banker and occasionally met up with Vivien for lunch in London. Vivien thought love had cured her sister of her extravagance. Lucca thought the banker had cured it with his wealth.

  Jock had become a jet-set dog with a fake diamond collar. He had even featured in a spread in a fashionable magazine as a former rescue dog and he would have become quite unbearable had he been able to read. Lucca and he had become very fond of each other but neither one of them would have admitted it. Jock waited at the front door for Lucca every evening and was rewarded with giant bones and chocolate treats. Lucca said the rewards were training aids required to keep Jock from falling back into his old antisocial habits. Basically all that meant was that Jock only chased male visitors when Lucca was not around.

  Three months after Pia’s birth, Vivien was more madly in love with Lucca than she had ever been. He came up into the nursery while she was tucking Pia into her cot. Their daughter regarded them with sleepy brown eyes and yawned. Marco, whose days were packed with relentless activity, was already fast asleep.

  Lucca laughed softly. ‘They’re so quiet at this time of day.’

  ‘This place is magical,’ Vivien contended, for she revelled in the peace they always found at Il Palazzetto.

  Lucca let long fingers slide into her hair, his palm curving to her delicate jawbone. His brilliant gaze met hers with loving appreciation. ‘You’re the gold dust in our lives, amata mia.’

  Leaning into his tall, powerful frame, she let her soft lips open under the hungrily s
ensual onslaught of his mouth. She felt gloriously happy and loved. Home was inside the safe circle of his arms.

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-6711-8

  THE MISTRESS WIFE

  First North American Publication 2004.

  Copyright © 2004 by Lynne Graham.

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  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

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