past months telling herself that she hated him and hating him had made it easy for her to ignore the way he made her feel. It had been easy to ignore the slight tremble whenever he got too close, the tingling of her breasts and the squirmy feeling she got in the pit of her stomach.
He’d never been attracted to her, she had thought. He’d just seen her as part of a deal. He’d used her.
But now...
He wanted her; she had felt it in his kiss, had felt his erection pressing against her like a shaft of steel. Just thinking about it brought her out in a fine film of perspiration.
She shoved an onion and some tomatoes at him and told him where to find a chopping board and a knife.
‘Most women would love the kind of lifestyle you have,’ Dio murmured as he began doing something and nothing with the tomatoes.
‘You mean flitting from grand house to grand house, making sure everything is ticking over, because Lord help us if an important client spots some dust on a skirting board?’
‘Since when have you been so sarcastic?’
‘I’m not being sarcastic.’
‘Don’t stop. I find it intriguing.’
‘You told me that most women would envy what I have and I told you that they wouldn’t.’
‘You’d be surprised what women would put up with if the price was right.’
‘I’m not one of those women.’ She edged away, because he was just a little too close for comfort, and began busying herself by the stove, flinging things into the saucepan, all the ingredients for a tomato-and-aubergine dish, which was a stalwart in her repertoire because it was quick and easy.
Dio thought that maybe he should have tried to find out what sort of woman she was before remembering that he knew exactly what sort of woman she was. The sort who had conspired with her father to get him where they had both wanted him—married to her and thereby providing protection for her father from the due processes of law.
If she wanted to toss out hints that there were hidden depths there somewhere, though, then he was happy enough to go along for the ride. Why not? Right now he was actually enjoying himself, against all odds.
And the bottom line was that he wanted her body. He wanted that itch to be scratched and then he would be quite happy to dispose of her.
If holding her to ransom was going to prove a problem then what was the big deal in getting her into his bed using other methods?
‘So, we’re back to the money not being the be all and end all,’ he murmured encouragingly. ‘Smells good, whatever you’re making.’
‘I like cooking when I’m on my own,’ she said with a flush of pleasure.
‘You cook even though you know you could have anything you wanted to eat delivered to your doorstep?’ Dio asked with astonishment and Lucy laughed.
He remembered that laugh from way back when. Soft and infectious, with a little catch that made it seem as though she felt guilty laughing at all. He had found that laugh strangely seductive, fool that he had been.
‘So...’ he drawled once they were sitting at the kitchen table with bowls of steaming hot pasta in front of them. ‘Shall we raise our glasses to this rare event? I don’t believe I’ve sat in this kitchen and had a meal with you since we got married.’
Lucy nervously sipped some of the wine. The situation was slipping away from her. How many women had he sat and drank with in the time during which they had been supposedly happily married? She hadn’t slept with him but that didn’t mean that she wasn’t aware that he had a healthy libido. One look at that dark, handsome face was enough to cement the impression.
She had never, not once, asked him about what he did behind her back on all those many trips when he was abroad, but she could feel the questions eating away at her, as though they had suddenly been released from a locked box. She hated it. And she hated the way that fleeting moment of being the object of his flirting attention had got to her, overriding all the reasons she had formulated in her head for breaking away from him. She didn’t want to give house room to any squirmy feelings. He had turned on the charm when they had first met and she knew from experience that it didn’t mean anything.
‘That’s because this isn’t really a marriage, is it?’ she said politely. ‘So why would we sit in a kitchen and have a meal together? That’s what real married couples do.’
Dio’s mouth tightened. ‘And of course you would know a lot about what real married couples do, considering you entered this contract with no intention of being half of a real married couple.’
‘I don’t think it’s going to get either of us anywhere if we keep harping back to the past. I think we should both now look to the future.’
‘The future being divorce.’
‘I’m not going to get into bed with you for money, Dio,’ Lucy told him flatly. For a whisper of a second, she had a vivid image of what it would be like to make love to him—but then, it wouldn’t be love, would it? And what was the point of sex without love?
‘So you’re choosing the poverty option.’ He pushed his bowl to one side and relaxed back in the chair, angling his big body so that he could extend his legs to the side.
‘If I have to. I can make do. I...’
‘You...what?’ His ears pricked up as he detected the hesitancy in her voice.
‘I have plans,’ Lucy said evasively. And she wasn’t going to share them with him, wasn’t going to let her fledgling ambitions be put to the test by him.
‘What plans?’
‘Nothing very big. Or important. I just obviously need to think about the direction my life is going in.’ She stood up and briskly began clearing the table. She made sure not to catch his eye.
Dio watched her jerky movements as she busied herself around the kitchen, tidying, wiping the counters, doing everything she could to make sure the conversation was terminated.
So she wanted out and she had plans.
To Dio’s way of thinking, that could only mean one thing. A man. Maybe not a rich one, but a man. Lurking in the background. Waiting to get her into bed if he hadn’t already done so.
The fake marriage was going to be replaced by a relationship she had probably been cultivating behind his back for months. Maybe—and the red mist descended when he considered this option—she had been cultivating this relationship from way back when. Maybe it had been right there on the back burner, set to one side while she’d married him and had done what she had to do for the sake of her father.
It might have come as a shock that she would face walking away empty handed but clearly, whatever her so-called plans were, they were powerful enough to override common sense.
Faced with this, Dio understood that first and foremost he would find out what those plans were.
Simple.
He could either follow
