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Adam had always wanted the opportunity to show Bianca he was no longer the sexual klutz he’d been at eighteen, but she would never give him that opportunity. Her mind was fixed against him, her preconceptions set in concrete. He’d thought he’d come to terms with this, but now he realised he hadn’t. Not for a moment.
He wanted her now more than ever, and could not bear the thought of spending a single second in the same bed as her without being able to touch her.
Which was what she would surely ask of him if he agreed to go along with this masquerade of a marriage. She would expect him to allow her to climb into his bed every night for the duration of her mother’s stay. And she would also expect him not to lay a single hand on her.
Such a prospect was beyond the pale. He would not do it. He was a man, not a mouse, and it was high time Bianca recognised that fact.
Uncurling his white-knuckled fingers, he placed the empty glass down on a side-table and stood up.
‘No, Bianca,’ he said, his face stony, his voice quite cold. ‘No.’
And he stalked off down the hallway towards his room.
CHAPTER TWO
‘WHAT do you mean...no?’ she shouted after him as he disappeared down the hallway.
‘I mean no!’ he called back over his shoulder. ‘I won’t go along with it. You married us, Bianca. Now you’ll just have to divorce us.’
Bianca gaped after him for a moment before snapping her mouth shut. Exasperation mixed with irritation as she rolled her eyes. She’d had a feeling he was going to be difficult about this. And she’d damned well been right!
Underneath, however, she still felt confident she could bring him round. Michelle always said she could twist Adam around her little finger. Bianca wasn’t fond of that phrase, but she could not deny there was some truth in it. Just as there was some truth in Michelle’s belief that her brother was still in love with his old schoolfriend.
Bianca sometimes felt guilty about taking advantage of Adam’s lingering and largely unrequited passion for her. She’d shamelessly used his affection for her in the past. She supposed she was still doing it to a degree.
Though, to be fair to herself, she’d warned him never to hope things would change. She loved him to death but she did not desire him. It was as simple as that.
Actually, now that she thought about it, she wasn’t so sure Adam was in love with her any more. There’d been a steady stream of girlfriends paraded through this place since she’d come to live here a year ago—all blonde bimbo types, with legs that went up to their armpits and busts which made Bianca go green with envy. If he was pining after her, then he was making a darned good fist of hiding it.
This realisation piqued her somewhat. She’d become used to the notion that Adam was still in love with her. It had become a secret balm to soothe her battered ego on occasions, to reassure her that she was worthy of being loved, that there was more to her than being just the flighty piece of goods several men had called her.
Bianca frowned dissatisfaction at this train of thought. It seemed she just wasn’t ready yet to give up Adam’s status as her secret admirer. Knowing he was always there for her was the one steadying factor in her life—he was a rock she could rely on when all else failed.
A type of panic began to set in. She could not bear the thought that he might one day cut her out of his life. For ever. She’d be lost without him. Yet if he wasn’t in love with her any more, then it was bound to happen one day...
Maybe he isn’t still madly in love with me, she amended in desperation. But he does care about me.
Just as she cared about him. Deeply. He’d touched something in her from that first day at kindergarten, when she’d spied him in a corner crying his heart out. All during their school days she’d felt compelled to look after him, for he’d been such a sweetie. And such a hopeless nerd of a boy!
Around sixteen, he’d shot up suddenly—all gangly legs, long, greasy hair and pimples. Talk about unattractive! By their last year at school he’d improved somewhat in looks, but by then he’d become shy and awkward around girls. One day she’d overheard several of his so-called mates taunting him over his lack of success with the opposite sex. They’d called him cruel names and made him look small.
Bianca had felt sorry for him, so sorry that she’d decided to sacrifice her own virginity for the sake of his. It was the least she could do, she’d felt, for her very best friend.
Oddly enough, she still could not think of that night without being besieged by the most confused feelings. He’d been absolutely hopeless at it. And it had hurt like hell. Yet, for all that, she’d been unbearably moved by the experience—had had to battle hard not to cry afterwards. There had been something so incredibly sweet about his appalling nerves, not to mention the look on his face.
Bianca tried to blot out the disturbing memory as she launched herself up from the sofa and raced after Adam down the hallway.
Of course there’d been something incredibly sweet about it, she dismissed with irritable impatience. Adam was an incredibly sweet person. Thank God. And as such, he could not keep saying no to her once she pointed out how much the truth would distress her mother. He liked her mother, almost as much as her mother liked him.
Bianca made it into his bedroom just in time to see him slam the en suite bathroom’s door shut. She heard the lock snap into place, followed by the sound of the shower being turned on full.
Pummelling on the door didn’t seem like a good idea, so she decided to wait patiently for his return. Meanwhile she picked up the clothes he’d strewn around the room in his anger.
Bianca shook her head in disbelief as she hung up his shirt and trousers. Messiness was as unlike him as his outburst of anger. The adult Adam was a quiet, coolly controlled individual—a highly intelligent but rather reserved man who liked order and tidiness. He was a maths lecturer at Sydney University, and his chief hobby was working out mathematically based systems for winning money at the races.
With some success apparently, since he was now driving a new BMW. His salary alone would not have provided that, and his family had no more money than hers.
She was tucking a sock into each shoe when the bathroom door was wrenched open. A cloud of steam emerged first, through which strode Adam, swathed from neck to ankle in his favourite red towelling robe which was as huge as it was thick.
Amazingly cold grey eyes settled on her as he sashed it tightly around his waist. ‘That won’t work either,’ he said brusquely.
‘What?’
‘Picking up after me. Sweet-talking’s a waste of time too. You’ve overstepped the mark, Bianca, and I’m not going to save your butt this time. Your mother will probably live for donkey’s years and I’m not going to be permanently saddled with the ridiculous role of pretending to be your long-suffering husband.’
‘R-ridiculous!’ she spluttered. ‘Long-suffering?’
A coating of dry amusement brought a gleam to his steely gaze. ‘You don’t honestly think any sane man would want to be your real husband, do you? Only a fool or a masochist would volunteer for that job.’
Bianca blinked her shock. This was her sweet Adam talking to her like this? And looking at her like that?
‘You look surprised, darling,’ he went on with chilling indifference as he casually raked his hands through his wet dark hair. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve believed all that rubbish my sister’s been feeding you all these years about my still being in love with you?’
Bianca’s mouth fell inelegantly open. Adam’s laugh scraped down her spine like chalk on a blackboard.
‘Michelle’s such a romantic,’ he said, his voice as cynically amused as his eyes. ‘I admit I had the most awful crush on you all through school. I even clung to my warped passion through our university days. But I finally outgrew it—for which I have you to thank, Bianca.
‘You really made me see the truth that night you turned twenty-one. I was wasting my time wanting you. So I turned my futile fantasies from fiction to fact with another female later that evening, and frankly I haven’t looked back since.’
Bianca was stung to the quick by his words. And by the images they evoked. ‘You mean I wasted my guilt on you that night?’ she burst out angrily. ‘There I was, thinking I’d broken your heart, when in truth you were off...you were off...’ She huffed and puffed to stop herself saying the crudity which had sprung onto the tip of her tongue.
‘I was off making some other more grateful girl happy?’ he suggested sarcastically.
‘Who was it?’ she demanded to know, her mind racing along with her heart. ‘Not that awful Tracy. My God, she’d sleep with anyone, that trollop!’
‘Thank you for the compliment, darling. But, no, it wasn’t Tracy. It was Laura.’
Laura!
Bianca was speechless. Laura had not been one of their group. She’d been a friend of a friend of a friend, who’d somehow been at her party by accident. Thirty if she was a day, but an absolutely stunning blonde with an absolutely stunning figure.
‘I don’t believe you!’ she choked out, hurt beyond belief by this almost ancient betrayal of his so-called love for her.
‘Don’t you? Poor Bianca.’ His smile was not at all sweet. ‘Has someone stolen your lollipop, darling? Won’t naughty Adam play the game any more?’
Her mouth returned to its earlier goldfish imitation.
Adam reached out and flicked her chin upwards, so her teeth snapped together. His eyes were narrowed and cruel-looking. He was nothing at all like the Adam she knew and loved.
‘I suggest you toddle off now, sweetheart, and make up a new story to tell your mother. I’m sure you can come up with one, being such an inventive and imaginative little minx. If you’re really stuck, you could always try the truth!’
Bianca’s startled tongue-tiedness didn’t last for long, and was quickly replaced by indignant and sceptical outrage. ‘I don’t believe any of this! Have you been drinking? Did you lose all your money at the races? This isn’t like you at all, Adam.’
He gripped her shoulders and pushed her down into a sitting position on the end of the bed. ‘Yes, I’ve been drinking,’ he agreed in a steely tone. ‘And, yes, I did lose a good deal at the races today, which didn’t please me at all. But you’re quite wrong when you think this isn’t like me. It is. It’s the new me.’
‘The new you?’ she repeated blankly.
‘I’ve been too soft with you for too long, Bianca. It’s done your character no good. No good at all. You think you can do as you please where I’m concerned. You think you can run rings around me. Well, you can’t anymore, sweetness. I’m awake to you now. Actually, I have been for ages, but it didn’t suit me to make a stand. It does now.’
‘Why now?’ she threw back up at him, feeling suddenly angry. How dared he let her think he loved her all this time when he didn’t?
‘Because I’ve met someone,’ he said. ‘Someone I intend asking to marry me. Hard to do that when I’m pretending to be married to someone else, don’t you think?’
Bianca felt her world go slightly out of kilter for a moment. Adam had fallen in love? He was going to get married?
Her heart squeezed tight. Her stomach flipped over. ‘I don’t believe you!’
He straightened, laughing. ‘You do seem to be having trouble with believing me today. Tell me what you don’t believe.’
She levered herself to her feet, shaken to find that her legs felt like jelly. ‘I don’t believe you’ve met someone. You haven’t brought a girl home here once this last month. You’re just making her up.’
But at the back of her mind Bianca was remembering all those nights Adam hadn’t come home lately. She’d presumed he was sleeping over in his room at the university, which he sometimes did. Now she saw there could be a very different explanation for his many absences.
He laughed again. ‘You’re really grasping at straws, you know that? The reason I didn’t bring Sophie here was because I wanted our relationship to last. What chance did I have with any of my other girlfriends after they’d met you as my flatmate?
‘They always took one look at you and were instantly jealous and suspicious. Nothing I could ever say would convince them our friendship was purely platonic. They were all convinced we were secret lovers. An impression you deliberately seemed to foster, I might add.’
‘I did not!’ she denied hotly. But underneath she knew she had. She’d never felt any of those bimbos were good enough for Adam. She’d only been protecting him by getting rid of them.
‘You never wanted me, Bianca,’ he swept on, a cold rage settling into his eyes. ‘But you didn’t want anyone else to have me either. You’ve been a very greedy little girl. And very selfish. It’s time you stopped thinking of no one but yourself.’
‘But that’s not true,’ she wailed, hating this new Adam and the way he was making her feel. ‘I was thinking of my mother when I told her...what I told her.’ Tears filled her eyes, tears of temper more than distress. ‘You have no right to say these rotten things to me. You’re being so hateful!’
‘The truth often hurts.’
The truth, she thought savagely. The truth was that her Adam was going to marry someone else! Just the thought of it was like a dagger in her heart. God knows why. She didn’t want to marry him herself. She didn’t want to marry any man.
Marriage, in Bianca’s opinion, would be a living death for someone like her. She was just like her father in that respect, craving change and excitement all the time. She didn’t like the idea of settling down and having children any more than he had.
Her dad had married in the throes of a whirlwind passion, then spent the next twenty years finding satisfaction outside of the marital bed. Bianca suspected she might be just as fickle. There hadn’t been a male yet to hold her sexual interest beyond six months. She suspected none ever would.
‘So who is this Sophie you’re going to marry?’ she demanded to know.
‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ Adam retorted with a dry chuckle. ‘I’m going to keep her well away from you, Madam Mischief-Maker.’
‘Where do you sleep with her?’
‘None of your business. Do I ask you where you copulate with your latest boyfriend?’
‘You can, if you like. But Derek and I have parted company. He was beginning to bore me.’
‘Gee whiz, what happened? Didn’t you fall asleep straight afterwards one night? Were you actually forced to make conversation with Mr Macho-Man?’
Bianca could feel a smile begin to tug at her lips. It was a good description for Derek, who was a professional weight-lifter with more muscles than mental capacity. ‘Something like that,’ she said.
Their eyes met, and that old camaraderie which had sustained their friendship all these years struggled to the surface. She’d always been able to tell Adam pretty much anything. And she’d never been able to shock him. He’d always listened and always given her sound advice, but never condemned. He was still her best friend, she realised, her heart squeezing tight as a wry smile began to play around his mouth.
Instinctively she reached out to place an intimate hand on his arm. ‘Sophie doesn’t have to know, Adam,’ she said pleadingly. ‘Mum will soon be gone, back to Scotland. Please...I don’t want to spoil her trip by telling her the truth just yet. I promise I’ll write to her after she’s gone back and make up something to get you permanently off the hook.’
She held her breath as he simply stared at her.
Please say yes, she was silently willing him. Please...
His sigh was weary as he removed her hand from his arm. ‘You never know when to give up, do you? Now let me make this quite clear. I am not going to play happy husband for you and your mother. I am not going to let you sleep in my bed while she’s here, unless I’m not in it. I am not going to be at your beck and call, or dance to any tune you might choose to play.’
Bianca’s dismay was only exceeded by her. panic. ‘But whatever am I going to tell her?’
‘Tell her whatever story you fancy, Bianca, only make it convincing. You have a choice: either telling the truth, or inventing a temporary separation or impending divorce. Believe me when I tell you I have somewhere I can lay my head for the duration of that fortnight, so you don’t have to worry your pretty little head about where I’ll sleep.’
Bianca glared at him while he shepherded her out of his bedroom. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get dressed. I’m going out.’ And he firmly closed and locked his door.
CHAPTER THREE
ADAM closed his eyes as he leant against the door.
God damn Bianca for making him lie like that!
He had no intention of asking Sophie to marry him. Hell, he’d only just met the girl the previous week.
He also hadn’t been going to go out tonight. He was tired after his unsuccessful foray at the races. He would have liked nothing better than to settle down in front of the TV with his feet up and have Bianca dish him up one of her interesting meals.
She was a fantastic cook, and spoiled him whenever he was at home in that regard. It was one of the plusses among the many negatives in having her around.
But he’d be blowed if he’d stay at home tonight now! He’d have to sleep over at the penthouse, he supposed, even though it would still smell of paint. He didn’t have a date with Sophie, as Bianca would undoubtedly conclude. But he wished he had.
A night in bed with Sophie would blot Bianca out of his mind for a few hours at least. Sophie was everything Bianca wasn’t. Tall and curvy, with long blonde hair, wide hips and breasts like melons. He’d learnt from Laura many years ago never to date a girl who reminded him in any way of the heartless creature who’d told him she felt nothing when she looked at him. Generally he confined himself to bedding busty blondes, with the occasional redhead thrown in for variety. Brunettes never stood a chance.
Sophie was a minor actress, sleeping her way up in the world with gay abandon. He’d met her last Saturday night at the new Darling Harbour Casino, where she was working as a croupier between bit roles in movies. No doubt she’d thought he was a real high-roller, laying thousand-dollar bets. Which he was, he supposed.
Gambling had always paid off for Adam, because he approached it with a cool head and mathematical skill. Bianca would be stunned at how much money it had brought him over the years...if he ever chose to tell her. She thought he confined his gambling to the races. She also thought he lost more than he won.
Racing was all very well, in small doses, but the really big money was to be made in the casinos. Unfortunately, he had to keep changing venues, because management soon spotted professional gamblers, and had a dim view of clients capable of counting cards or who used other systems which could regularly beat the house.
Bianca had no idea of his weekend trips interstate, to the casinos in Melbourne, Hobart, Adelaide and even Pert, nor of the elegant, sophisticated and very accommodating women who threw themselves at him on those occasions. It stroked his ego to note that they had no trouble with ‘spark’ when they looked at him, as Bianca did. Hell, they fairly went up in flames when he touched them.
Fortunately, the opening of a new casino in Sydney had brought him a much closer venue—for gambling and otherwise. The night he’d met Sophie, he’d been trying one of his newer systems on the blackjack table, though his concentration had been shot to pieces. He’d been thinking about Bianca spending the weekend up the coast at some sleazy motel with darling Derek. She hadn’t been bored with him seven days ago. Far from it!
Sophie had given him the eye as she’d dealt him the cards, so his bruised ego had taken her home to her place after she finished up. He hadn’t given Bianca a single thought till he’d woken the next morning to brown eyes instead of blue, and blonde hair instead of black.
