the opportunity to tell Lucca that you are hopelessly broke—’
Vivien flinched. ‘I couldn’t!’
‘Then I won’t be able to look after Marco,’ her sister countered without hesitation.
Frustration and embarrassment fought inside Vivien. ‘All right…I’ll raise the subject and see if something can be sorted out…’
Her capitulation made Bernice smile with amused triumph. ‘Fine…then just this once I’ll babysit. Let’s hope that when Lucca sees you grovelling, he feels excessively generous.’
Informed of Vivien’s arrival, Lucca rose and called a five-minute break in the meeting he was chairing.
Able to view his estranged wife through the glass partition that surrounded the reception area, Lucca stilled on the landing above. In the vast, opulent space below, Vivien looked small, slight and insignificant. Her brown top and skirt were shapeless and ill fitting and she probably owned at least three sets of the same outfit. She hated shopping and buying in triplicate helped her to avoid it. Shorn of his care and attention, she had regressed from the standards he set at shocking speed and barricaded herself back into her unfashionable shell. Her nails were unpainted, her silky blonde hair caught up rather messily in a cheap plastic clip.
In her current guise, she was not a woman likely to turn male heads at first glance. Yet she possessed a luminous beauty that not even the dullest presentation could conceal. His keen gaze lingered on the visible slice of narrow shoulder blessed with skin as opalescent as a pearl and moved on to the delicate perfection of her profile and the tantalising femininity of her slim, restive hands and slender ankles. A raw flame of desire blistered through his big, powerful frame and rage at his own lack of control surged in its wake and balled his own hands into hard fists.
Once, he recalled bleakly, he had thought her sweet and unspoilt and loyal unto death. Her warmth and modesty had enchanted him and her honesty and kindness had made a huge impression on his cynical view of the world. There had been nothing false about her. He had truly believed he had struck gold. He had believed that his marriage would work where so many others broke down. He was a man to whom failure of any kind was anathema and he had chosen his wife with great care and caution. Yet she had proved completely unworthy of the ring he had put on her finger.
Righteous derision made him look away from her and the chill of intellectual control soon cooled the fire in his blood. For what good reason had he walked straight out on an important meeting? His essential courtesy had momentarily misled him, he decided, swinging on his heel to return to the conference table. After all, he had not invited Vivien to storm his office in the middle of his working day and demand his attention.
Her response to Jasmine Bailey’s confession in print was, however, very typical of her and he could have predicted it, Lucca conceded grimly. He knew Vivien well. Indeed, he had once prided himself on the reality that he excelled at everything at which she was useless. For all her apparent outward calm, Vivien could react with staggering impulsiveness and wildly undisciplined emotion. She was always uniformly blind to the darker motivations of others. She was a leading authority on rare ferns but she could neither recognise nor protect herself from the arts of calculation and manipulation. She would struggle to find a redeeming quality in even the most dislikeable human being.
But Lucca had no desire to be redeemed in her eyes. He did not wish to see her either and regarded her spontaneous arrival at his office as a piece of foolishness, likely to plunge her into embarrassment. To stage her descent on the same day that Jasmine Bailey confessed her lies to the world was exceptionally bad timing. Had Vivien no sense whatsoever? He had often thought not. If the press realised where she was, the paparazzi would arrive in hordes. Angling his wide shoulders back beneath his superbly tailored grey suit jacket, Lucca strode back to his meeting.
Unaware that she had been under observation, Vivien took a seat. She was flustered and uneasy at the covert stares she was attracting. On the train, she had tried to contact Lucca by phone and failed. Once she had had a private number for his mobile phone but that number was no longer operational. He had been ‘unavailable’ when she’d phoned the Saracino building. When she had asked for the means to contact him in person, she had been coolly told that only Lucca could give out that information. Dismayed by the confidential wall holding her at bay, she had rung off again without requesting an appointment. Told on arrival that Lucca was exceptionally busy, she prepared herself for a long wait and comforted herself with the reflection that at least Lucca was in the building and not abroad on business as he might well have been.
At five that evening Lucca closed his meeting and instructed a member of his staff to show Vivien into his office. Having waited for almost three hours without a word of encouragement and with steadily shrinking expectations, Vivien was hugely relieved to be escorted out of the reception area. But she was a jelly of nerves at the very thought of seeing Lucca again after so long. She did not know what she was going to say to him. She had no idea how to bridge the enormous chasm between them. His supposed infidelity had formed a giant barrier between her and her emotions and now that barrier was gone and with it the script of how she was to behave.
Flustered and unsure of herself, Vivien walked through the door.
Lucca stood centre stage in his cool, contemporary office, effortlessly dominating his surroundings. Six feet three inches tall and gifted with the superb build of a natural athlete, he was an exceptionally good-looking guy with an overwhelmingly physical impact. All the oxygen Vivien needed to breathe seemed to vanish from the atmosphere. Her mouth ran dry and her heart thumped. Colliding with his stunning dark eyes was like falling on an electric fence. She was embarrassed and rather ashamed that at such a crucial moment she could still be so immediately aware of his magnetic attraction
‘So…’ murmured Luca, whose machinations in business had once led to him being described as smooth as black ice and twice as treacherous. His gorgeous accent sizzled along the single drawn-out word and sent a reflexive shiver down her taut backbone. ‘What brings you up from the country?’
CHAPTER TWO
DISCONCERTED entirely by that greeting, Vivien was reduced to gaping at Lucca in bewilderment. ‘But you know why I’m here!’
An aristocratic ebony brow ascended in polite disagreement, for he had exquisite manners. ‘How could I know?’
‘You sent me that newspaper,’ Vivien reminded him rather tautly, for her extreme nervous tension was being heightened by an awful sense of foolishness.
Lucca shifted a fluid brown hand and spread dismissive fingers in a tiny, almost infinitesimal movement. ‘So?’
Vivien tried and failed to swallow past the lump lodged in her throat. ‘Naturally I came straight here to see you.’
Lucca vented a soft, amused laugh that nonetheless contrived to create a chill somewhere deep down inside Vivien. ‘Naturally? Would you care to explain how this sudden uninvited visit of yours could possibly be described as natural?’
Recognising the dangerous tension in the atmosphere, Vivien was daunted. Her own nature was too open for her to comprehend Lucca’s darker and infinitely more complex temperament. She considered their meeting of overwhelming importance. His cool detachment disorientated her. ‘It’s like you’re not really listening to me. Don’t be like that, don’t act like this is a game in which the highest score wins!’
‘Don’t make assumptions, cara. You’re not inside my head and can have no idea what I’m thinking.’
‘I know that you have to be very, very angry with me—’
‘No, you’re wrong,’ Lucca traded. ‘Anger over a long haul is unproductive. Even dinosaurs move on eventually.’
Vivien was too wound up to hold back the frantic words bubbling to her lips. ‘I know you hate me and have to blame me for everything that’s gone wrong…and that’s OK, only what I deserve,’ she conceded humbly.
‘Don’t waste my time with this,’ Lucca urged, cold as ice.