Lucy vaguely remembered signing something extremely long and complicated and very boring. She decided that she wouldn’t take issue with his accusation that she’d been eager to get him on board; with his accusation that she had been in cahoots with her father to lure him into buying the company with her in the starring role of sacrificial lamb. She wasn’t going to get involved in any sort of argument with him because he would emerge the winner. He had the sharpest brain of any person she had ever known in her life.
She would get out, never see him again. For a fleeting second, something wrenching and painful tugged inside her and she shoved the feeling away.
‘As a rich man,’ he said, ‘I thought it best to protect myself. Here’s what you signed up to. I got the company. Lock, stock and smoking barrel. Just recompense for rescuing it from imminent collapse and saving your father’s frankly unworthy skin. I’m not sure if you know just how much he skimmed off the pension funds, how much I had to inject back in so that your employees didn’t find themselves of pensionable age with nothing but a begging bowl for company? Enough for me to tell you that it was millions.’ He breathed an exaggerated sigh and looked at her from under sinfully thick lashes. It had always amazed him that such a stupendously pretty face, so stunningly guileless, could house someone so cunning. It took all sorts to make the world.
Lucy hung her head because shame was never far away when her father’s name was mentioned. She looked at her perfectly manicured nails and thought how wonderful it would feel never to wear nail polish ever again. She might have a burning-of-the-nail-polish ceremony.
She distractedly half-smiled and Dio, looking at her, frowned. So...what was the joke? he wondered.
More to the point, what was the little secret? Because that had been a secretive smile.
‘As long as you are my wife,’ he informed her, banking down the simmering rage bubbling up inside him, ‘you get whatever you want. There are no limits placed on the amount of money you can spend.’
‘You mean provided you approve of the purchases?’
‘Have you ever heard me disapprove of anything you’ve ever bought?’
‘All I buy are clothes, jewellery and accessories,’ Lucy returned. ‘And only because I need them to...play the part I have to play.’
‘Your choice.’ He shrugged. ‘You could have bought a fleet of cars as far as I was concerned.’
She made a face and his frown deepened. He considered the possibility of giving her a divorce and dismissed the idea, although the reasons for that instant dismissal were a bit vague. Was he that possessive a man that he would hold on to a woman who wanted to escape? He had wanted revenge. And it might have come in a different shape from the one he had planned, but it had still come. He had still ended up with Robert Bishop’s company, hadn’t he? So what was the point of hanging on to Lucy and an empty marriage?
But then, she wasn’t just any woman, was she? She just happened to be his wife. The wife who had promised a lot more than she had ended up delivering. What man liked being short-changed?
‘You leave me,’ he told her in a hard voice, ‘and you leave with the clothes on your back.’
Lucy blanched. She loathed the trappings of wealth but wasn’t it a fact that that was all she had ever known? How would she live? What sort of job had years of being pampered prepared her for? She had never had the opportunity to do the teacher training course she had wanted to do. She had, instead, jumped into a marriage that had turned her into a clone of someone she didn’t like very much.
‘I don’t care,’ she said in a low voice and Dio raised his eyebrows in a question.
‘Of course you do,’ he told her. ‘You wouldn’t know where to begin when it came to finding a job.’
‘You can’t say that.’
‘Of course I can. You’ve grown up in the lap of luxury and, when most other girls would have branched out into the big, bad world, you married me and continued your life of luxury. Tell me, what has prepared you for that ugly, grim thing called reality?’
He would turf her out without a penny. She could see that in his eyes. He had never cared a jot about her and he didn’t care about her now. He had wanted the company and she had been a useful tool to acquire along with the bricks and mortar.
She just recently might have dipped her toe in that grim thing he was talking about called reality, but he was right. A life of creature comforts hadn’t prepared her for striking out with nothing. It would take ages for her to find her feet in the world of work, and how would she survive in the meantime? When he told her that she would leave with nothing but the clothes on her back, she was inclined to believe him. The clothes on her back wouldn’t include the expensive jewellery in the various safes and vaults.
‘I can see that you know where I’m coming from...’ He leaned forward, arms resting loosely on his thighs. ‘If you want out, then you have two options. You go with nothing, or...’
Lucy looked at him warily. ‘Or...what?’
DIO SMILED SLOWLY and relaxed back.
Sooner or later, this weird impasse between them would have had to find a resolution; he had known that. Always one to dominate the situations around him, he had allowed it to continue for far longer than acceptable.
Why?
Had he thought that she would have thawed slowly? She’d certainly shown no signs of doing anything of the sort as the months had progressed. In fact, they had achieved the unthinkable—a functioning, working relationship devoid of sex, a business arrangement that was hugely successful. She complemented him in ways he could never have imagined. She had been the perfect foil for his hard-nosed, aggressive, seize-and-conquer approach to business and, frankly, life in general. He hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he had had to haul himself up by his boot straps, and the challenges of the journey to success had made him brutally tough.
He was the king of the concrete jungle and he was sharp enough to know that pretenders to the throne were never far behind. He was feared and respected in equal measure and his wife’s ingrained elegance counterbalanced his more high-voltage, thrusting personality beautifully.
Together they worked.
Maybe that was why he had not broached the subject of all those underlying problems between them. He was a practical man and maybe he had chosen not to rock the boat because they had a successful partnership.
Or maybe he had just been downright lazy. Or—and this was a less welcome thought—vain enough to imagine that the woman he still stupidly fancied would end up coming to him of her own accord.
The one thing he hadn’t expected was talk of a divorce.
He poured himself another drink and returned to the chair, in no great hurry to break the silence stretching between them.
‘When we got married,’ Dio said slowly, ‘it didn’t occur to me that I would end up with a wife who slept in a separate wing of the house when we happened to be under the same roof. It has to be said that that’s not every man’s dream of a happy marriage.’
‘I didn’t think you had dreams of happy marriages, Dio. I never got the impression that you were the sort of guy who had fantasies of coming home to the wife and the two-point-two kids and the dog and the big back garden.’
‘Why would you say that?’
Lucy shrugged. ‘Just an impression I got.’ But that hadn’t stopped her from falling for him. She had got lost in those amazing eyes, had been