Two-Week Wife. Miranda Lee
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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