Love Islands: Passionate Nights. Louise Fuller
man has to do.’ Dio shrugged, not bothering to deny the accusation. ‘Although, if we’re going to be completely accurate, I didn’t follow you. Jackson, my driver, did. When he alerted me to your location, I drove here to find out what was going on.’
‘That’s as good as following me yourself!’
‘It’s better because I gather you took the tube and the bus to get here. It might have been difficult getting onto the same bus as you without you recognising me.’
‘But why? Why now?’
‘Why do you think, Lucy?’
‘You never seemed to care one way or another what I got up to in your absences.’
‘I never expected my wife to be running around with some man when I wasn’t looking. I didn’t think that I had to have you watched twenty-four-seven.’
‘You don’t. Didn’t.’ She flushed, recognising the measure of trust he had placed in her. She had met many women, wives of similarly wealthy men, whose every movement was monitored by bodyguards, who had little or no freedom. She had once mentioned that to Dio and he had dismissed that as the behaviour of paranoid, arrogant men who were so pumped up with their own self-importance that they figured the rest of the world wanted what they had.
It cut her to the quick now that he might think that his trust had been misplaced.
She hated him, she told herself stoutly, but she wasn’t the sort of girl who would ever have fooled around.
Suddenly it seemed very, very important for her to make him believe that.
‘I would never have done anything behind your back, Dio,’ she said evenly. ‘And I haven’t. Mark and I are work mates.’
‘Come again?’
‘I follow a local website,’ she told him. ‘All sorts of things get posted. Advertisements for used furniture, rooms to let, book clubs looking for members. Mark posted a request for anyone interested in teaching maths to some of the underprivileged kids around here. I answered the ad.’
Dio stared at her, astounded at what he was hearing.
‘I remember telling you once that I wanted to go into teaching.’
‘I wanted to be a fireman when I was eight. The phase didn’t last.’
‘It’s not the same thing!’
‘Strange that you wanted to teach yet ended up marrying me and putting paid to your career helping the underprivileged.’
‘I didn’t think I had a choice!’ Lucy answered hotly.
‘We all have choices.’
‘When it comes to...to...family, sometimes our choices are limited.’
Dio wryly read the subtext to that. There had been no way that she was going to leave Daddy to pay the price for his own stupidity and greed. Better that she put her own dreams and ambitions on hold. And of course, saving Daddy had, after all, come with a hefty financial sweetener...
‘And, now your choices are wide open, you decided that you’d follow your heart’s dream...’
‘There’s no need to be cynical, Dio. Don’t you have any dreams you’ve ever wanted to follow?’
‘Right now my imagination is working full-time on getting the honeymoon you failed to deliver...’ And that was precisely how he intended to harness his roaming mind. He had fallen hard for what he had thought was her disingenuous innocence. If she thought that he was mug enough to repeat his mistake, by buying into the concept of the poor little rich wife whose only dream was to help the poor and the needy, then she was in for a surprise.
‘You’re not even interested in hearing about this place, are you?’ she asked in a disappointed voice. ‘When I told you that I wanted a divorce, you weren’t even interested in asking me why.’
‘Would you like me to ask you now?’ Dio looked at her with raised eyebrows and Lucy drew in a couple of steadying breaths because he could be just so unbearable when he put his mind to it. He believed the worst of her and there was no way that he was going to revise his opinions, whatever she told him.
It didn’t matter that he had married her for all the wrong reasons! He played by his own rules.
‘Is all of this going to pay enough to keep the wolf from the door?’ He spread his arms wide to encompass the little room but he kept his eyes fixed on her face. She looked as though she wanted to cry.
‘It doesn’t pay anything at all. It’s all purely voluntary work.’
‘Ah... And what’s your relationship with the man who scarpered when I threatened to beat him up?’
‘He didn’t scarper.’
‘Not the answer I want.’
‘You’re so arrogant, Dio!’
‘I’m interested in finding out whether my wife has a crush on some man she met on the Internet!’
His voice was calm and only mildly curious but Lucy could sense the undercurrent of steel running through it. She shivered because, just for the briefest of seconds, she wondered what it would be like for that possessiveness in his voice to indicate jealousy.
She wondered what it would feel like to have this sinfully good-looking, charismatic and utterly arrogant man...jealous.
She shakily dismissed that insane curiosity before it even had time to take root.
‘I don’t have a crush on Mark,’ she told him quietly. ‘Although, he’s just the sort of guy I might have a crush on.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ Dio was outraged that they were sitting here having this conversation.
‘I mean he’s a really nice guy. He’s kind, he’s considerate, he’s thoughtful and the kids adore him.’
‘Sounds like a barrel of laughs.’
‘He can be,’ Lucy retorted sharply. ‘He can actually be very funny. He makes me laugh,’ she added wistfully and Dio took a deep, steadying breath.
‘And I don’t?’
‘We haven’t laughed together since...’
Suddenly restless, he stood up and began pacing the room and, this time, he actually took in what he was seeing, all the evidence of classes in progress. He flicked through one of the exercise books lying on a desk and recognised his wife’s handwriting. Ticks, corrections, encouraging smiley faces...
‘So, no crush on the hapless teacher,’ Dio eventually drawled. ‘And is that reciprocated?’
For a moment, Lucy considered throwing caution to the winds and telling him that the hapless teacher was crazy about her. Something dark inside her wanted to see if she could make him jealous, even though she already knew that answer to that one.
‘Mark isn’t interested in women,’ she said baldly. ‘Not in that way. He’s very happy with his partner who works for a legal firm in Kent. We’re just good friends.’
Dio felt a bolt of pure satisfaction and he allowed himself to relax. It had been inconceivable that she had been fooling around behind his back. It was also inconceivable that he would allow her to walk away from him without him first sampling the body that had preyed on his mind ever since he had first laid eyes on her.
Whether she knew it or not, she was his weakness, and he was determined finally to put paid to that. The momentary threat of another man had shown him what he had casually assumed. He had allowed his pride to call the shots, to subdue a more primal instinct to assert himself under a civilised, remote veneer that just wasn’t his style. No more. She was his and he wanted her, never more so than now, when she was stripped of the make-up and the designer clothes, when her