He shoved his hands in his pockets and clenched his jaw, refusing to give in to the swirl of fury that filled every pore and fibre of his being at the thought of her possible infidelity.
When he had embarked on Robert Bishop’s company buyout, this was not at all what he had envisaged.
He had envisaged a clean, fatal cut delivered with the precision of a surgical knife, which was no less than the man deserved.
Never one to waste time brooding, Dio allowed his mind to play back the series of events that had finally led to the revenge he had planned so very carefully.
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