Pride: Captive At The Sicilian Billionaire's Command

Julie didn’t want to think about that. It was easier and safer to focus on the anger Rocco aroused in her rather than the pain James had caused her. She could never imagine someone like Rocco Leopardi being so gentle with an unwanted ex-lover. He would have no compassion for a woman he no longer wanted in his bed or in his life, and yet when he did desire a woman Julie sensed that his desire would burn white-hot, driven by the kind of sensual sexuality that was still a mystery to her. But then she wasn’t really the kind of woman who ignited that kind of desire in a man, was she? She and James had been friends—good pals, who had enjoyed one another’s company, whose friendship had grown into love. With James Julie had felt safe from the awkwardness and the dread of mockery and rejection she had experienced so much growing up in Judy’s shadow.

During their teens she had had to learn to accept that boys wanted Judy and found her desirable, and that she paled in comparison—just as she had had to learn to put a brave smile on her face when Judy had mocked her publicly in front of those boys for her lack of allure and sexual experience.

When she had gone to university and Judy had gone to train as a beautician Julie had carried with her the hangups of her teens. Julie had met James when she’d started a postgraduate course. He had been doing the same course, but had been a year ahead of her—twenty-four to her twenty-two. He had laughed gently at her when she had explained self-consciously and uncomfortably to him that she was still a virgin and why.

Their lovemaking had been tender and caring, but somehow Julie had always felt conscious of trying not to overwhelm James with her own passionate need. She wondered now if that might have been because she had sensed deep down inside herself that, despite the fact that he had said that he loved her, his love had been more the feelings of a friend than a lover? Because she had feared even whilst she was in his arms that somehow she was not good enough, not worthy of a man’s real passion?

If James hadn’t felt passionate about her then a man like Rocco certainly wasn’t going to be, was he?

Julie was aghast at the speed with which her mind had summoned up such an inappropriate question. Why on earth should she want Rocco to desire her? She didn’t. Not at all—not even one tiny little bit. The very thought of being in his arms and his bed made her feel. Julie could feel her face starting to burn as she fought to reject exactly what it did make her feel.

She couldn’t imagine Judy feeling humiliated because a stunningly handsome and obviously sensual and sexually experienced man had seen her naked. Far from it. Her late sister would have been the first to take advantage of that kind of situation—she’d have been posing and preening and generally making sure that Rocco was so turned on by her body that he couldn’t resist her. Judy had been wholly confident about her own sexuality. Her attitude had been that men found her irresistible. They always had and they always would.

Sometimes Julie wished she could have a little of her sister’s self-confidence, although she shrank from the thought of sleeping around in the way that Judy had done. It would have been good, though, to be able to put Rocco in his place by knowing that she had the power to ensure that if she wanted to do so she could make him want her.

Not that she would have wanted that, of course. The mere thought of being in bed with a man like him, who could probably do things to a woman’s senses with just the touch of his hands on her naked flesh that she couldn’t even imagine, was enough to have her heart thudding in wary warning.

To her shock, Julie realised how far her thoughts had strayed from thinking how much she hoped that Josh was James’s son.

One thing she was determined on, though, no matter who had fathered Josh. She was his legal guardian and she was not going to give him up—to anyone.

‘What will I have to do, if I am anaemic?’ she asked the doctor, seeing that he had finished putting everything back in his bag.

‘That will depend on how severe your anaemia is. You will certainly need iron tablets, and I think perhaps some of our good warm Sicilian sunshine might do you some good—although you will have to wait a week or so longer for that. Shall I tell Rocco that I am ready to test the little one now, with your agreement?’

Julie nodded her head, watching him as he walked over to the door and then opened it, disappearing through it only to return within a matter of minutes, accompanied by Maria, who was carrying Josh, and Rocco.

Josh was wide awake, his face breaking into a wide smile the minute he saw her.

Julie’s heart melted with love.

‘He is still a bit underweight,’ she told the doctor defensively as she thanked Maria and took Josh from her.

She’d already told him about Josh’s post-birth health problems.

The doctor nodded his head, but he was concentrating on checking Josh over.

‘He is a little small for his age,’ he agreed, before asking Julie to hold Josh whilst he did the DNA test.

A few seconds later, watching as he swabbed the inside of the baby’s mouth, Julie’s heart gave an uncomfortable little thud.

That was how you took a sample for a DNA test? Had the reason he had swabbed the inside of her mouth been because he intended to test her DNA? That he might do so had never occurred to her. What did it matter if he did? she asked herself. She and Josh were related, after all.

Related, yes, but she was not Josh’s mother. How accurate would the DNA test be? She didn’t dare ask. But Rocco, it seemed, did.

‘How accurate an indication of the child’s paternity will this test be, and when will we have the results of it?’ he asked the doctor.

‘It will be accurate enough to make it clear whether or not Antonio is the little one’s father,’ Dr Vittorio answered him, smiling at Julie and thanking her for holding Josh steady for him. ‘And I should have the results through within a week.’

Julie couldn’t, of course, ask if he was testing her, and if it was possible to establish her relationship to Josh from the swabs he had taken. They would be suspicious if she did. And besides it didn’t matter anyway, did it? She was Josh’s legal guardian. But Rocco thought that she was Josh’s mother, and she wasn’t.

So what? It wasn’t her fault that Rocco had got things wrong, was it?

She could have and perhaps should have told him the truth in London.

The Leopardi family were obviously used to getting their own way and making their own rules. If Josh was Antonio Leopardi’s son then it might suit the Leopardis merely to have Josh’s legal guardian to deal with and not his birth mother. Instinctively Julie knew that if Josh was Antonio’s son then the Leopardis would do everything in their power to bring him up as one of their own, despite Rocco’s assurance to her that he and his brothers considered the mother and baby bond sacrosanct. After all, she was not Josh’s mother.

The doctor, Rocco and Maria had all gone, and Julie was free to put Josh down on the beautiful baby mat she had found, along with all the other expensive baby equipment, in the room off her own bedroom which had been fitted out as a nursery.

Josh loved lying on his back, and having the freedom to kick and wave his arms in a room warm enough to allow him to do so in comfort. Julie kissed his bare tummy, and laughed when he tightened his fingers in her hair, gently releasing them. He was smiling up at her so happily. Emotional tears filled her eyes. He was James’s child. She was sure of it.

‘You're so precious—do you know that?’ she told him, adding softly, ‘And your daddy would have loved you so very much.’

‘Whoever his daddy actually was.’

Julie’s heart lurched and rolled into her chest wall with a crash that seized her breath.

She hadn’t realised that Rocco had come back, and that he was now standing in the doorway between the nursery and her bedroom. His voice was as hard as diamonds on glass, and able to penetrate her defences just as easily.

‘You may think that I want your half-brother to be Josh’s father because your family is rich, but the truth is that I hope he isn’t,’ she retaliated fiercely, as soon as she could speak.

‘Liar. If that was the truth then you wouldn’t have made contact with Antonio to tell him that you were pregnant, and you certainly wouldn’t have accepted £25,000 from him to buy you off. There’s no point in denying it. The cheque went through Antonio’s bank account.’

Judy had taken money from Antonio Leopardi? She had never said anything about that to Julie. But then that was typical of Judy, and she would have known how much Julie would have disapproved. All Judy had told her was that Antonio Leopardi didn’t want to know that she was pregnant, and that she intended to tell James that the baby was his, having broken off their engagement just before she had gone to Cannes, but knowing that James adored her and would take her back. Which of course he had.

‘Strange and extremely clever, the way you’ve reinvented yourself as such an adoring mother—ready to go without herself in order to benefit her precious child.’

‘There’s more to being a good mother than buying expensive baby clothes,’ Julie defended herself.

‘Yes, and the first of those things is knowing who your baby’s father is. Unless, of course, you do know but you are keeping quiet about it in the hope of getting more money. If that’s the case let me warn you that you’re wasting your time. I’ve already told you what the terms of any deal will be for any child proved not to be Antonio’s.’

‘How typical of a man like you that you think of everything in terms of money. What I want for Josh can’t be bought.’

‘A man like me?’

He had left the doorway now and was striding towards her like some dark avenging Lucifer, intent on her destruction. Julie scrambled to her feet to stand protectively in front of Josh.

‘You, of course, are an expert on the male sex, aren’t you? So tell me. What exactly is a man like me?’

He was standing too close to her. Far too close to her.

‘You’re arrogant and … and selfish. You think that all that matters is what you want, and that just because you want—’

‘Just because I want what? You? Is that what you think?’

Julie was horrified. How on earth had the situation got so out of control so quickly?

‘No, of course not,’ she denied. The way he was looking at her and the silence he was maintaining unnerved her, and so fatally she rushed into it, adding frantically, ‘Why should you want me? I—’

‘You what? You want me to want you? You want me to tell you that every centimetre of you is now committed to my memory and engraved on my sexual responses? That in future I shall never be able to look at or touch any woman without comparing her to you? That from now on the pattern of woman carved on my desire is your image? Is that what you want?’

Without waiting for her response—which was just as well, Julie acknowledged inwardly, because she was in no state to think or say anything after hearing what he had just said—he continued dryly, ‘Of course such things come at a price, don’t they? And for that price I am sure that you would be very willing to assuage my longings and help me expunge those images. We are not, after all, talking of anything here other than a very basic form of lust.’

His voice was soft and mocking, and yet underscored with something age-old, man to woman, that was recognised deep within her. Recognised and responded to, Julie admitted apprehensively. She wanted to run from him, from the unwanted senses deep within her that he had aroused. But—dangerously—even more she wanted to stay. She abhorred what he was saying, and yet a wild, wilful something deep inside her wanted, if only for once, to be the kind of woman who would respond easily to such a challenge and enjoy arousing and sharing his lust—who would feel triumph in having aroused it and who would satisfy it and then walk away from it and from him without a single second of guilt or regret.

Very few women walked away from a man like this one, Julie suspected. It would be very empowering to be a woman who could do so. Judy could have done so, of course—but would she have? Would any woman if she thought—If she thought what? That she could tame Rocco and keep him?

What kind of foolish thoughts were those? In Rocco’s eyes wasn’t she already that woman she had just been describing mentally to herself, since he believed that she was her sister? What would it be like for once in her life to live that role? To know the power of being a woman who gloried in her sexuality and who used it to get whatever she wanted. What would it be like to walk that other road, live that other life, and know her sexuality?

Was she mad? She had other far more important things to think about than finding her own sad, repressed sensuality. She had Josh to think about and to protect.

Rocco gave her a heavy-lidded look of slanting sensuality that heated her blood, spreading arousal through her body unstoppably, like a swift floodtide flowing swiftly under the drag of a full moon. Inescapable and undeniable, it took her and possessed her, running wild and free within her.

‘Nothing to say?’ he challenged her.

It would be his fault if she took up his challenge. And he owed her something, didn’t he, after the way he had behaved towards her? Why didn’t she just take what she wanted? Her heart thumped unsteadily with the enormity of her own unfamiliar thoughts. What she wanted? She didn’t want him, did she? No, of course not. But there was a temptation there—a fierce, yearning surge as volcanic as Etna itself, demanding expression. Maybe so. But it could not be allowed that expression, Julie warned herself sternly.

What she was thinking was far too dangerous, and a form of madness. Perhaps it was a symptom of her anaemia, she thought shakily, like the weakness in her legs and the pounding in her heart.

‘No, I have nothing to say,’ she answered him. ‘You are not Antonio, after all.’

What on earth had she said that for?

‘No, I damned well am not.’

The quietly savage words told her all she needed to know about the extent of her folly—and her danger.

She tried to sidestep it—and him—but it was too late. He caught her as easily as he had lifted and carried her the previous night, his hands curling round her upper arms, making it impossible for her to escape.

‘You might think you are being very clever, taunting me, but I promise you that I shall extract full payment.’ His voice was harsh against her skin, grazing its sensitivity with needle-sharp darts of warning.

‘Fine—but you’ll have to extract it via your insults, because you won’t be getting it any other way,’ Julie responded promptly, trying to make her voice sound far more determined and self-confident than she felt.

‘No?’ The heavy golden leopard’s eyes focused on their prey—her.

This had gone too far. What had started out simply as an intention to underline his contempt for Julie had somehow or other twisted and then turned itself around, so that his own weapon was now hurtling back towards him, Rocco admitted grimly. The words he had intended to use to distance himself from her had actually rebounded on him, conjuring up images of her inside his head that were now making him ache with an extremely inconvenient and an even more unacceptable desire.

How could he want a woman like this one? It should have been impossible, based on her sexual morals alone, and doubly so given the fact that he knew she had been one of Antonio’s playthings. It should have been impossible, but it wasn’t. The sight of her crouched on the floor, her face alight with love as she kissed her baby, had pierced the defences he had thought impenetrable, forcing him into direct contact with his own feelings about the loss of his mother. That in turn had filled him with anger—against himself for being vulnerable, and against her for causing that vulnerability—and now that anger had burned itself into a fierce male desire that was raging out of control inside him.

For his own emotional safety he needed to separate her inside his head from that unwanted image he now had of her as a devoted mother. And the best way to do that was to let his body fill his head with some very different images of her. That was the only reason he wanted her. Out of selfprotection. Nothing more.

When he kissed her and she responded to him as he knew she would his brain would register exactly what she was. He looked at her mouth and felt her tremble in sensual awareness of his intent. Beneath the silk blouse she was wearing—the blouse he had paid for, like all the other expensive clothes now hanging up in the room’s wardrobes—he could see quite clearly not just the tight thrust of her nipples but also the faint raised edge that marked the place where the areolae of her breasts rose from the surrounding flesh. Almost absently he removed his right hand from her arm and slowly traced the raised line.

Julie shuddered violently, and closed her eyes in shocked awareness of how deep the abyss of her own sexuality actually was—and how dangerous. If a simple touch like this one could have such an effect on her, then what would his kiss do to her? How far would it take her down into the hot velvet darkness of that place she had never been? She felt dizzy and light-headed—with longing? With lust? Because she was anaemic? Did it matter why? Wasn’t it only important that somehow she didn’t want to resist what she was feeling, that she wanted to bring it and the man who was the cause of it closer instead of pushing them away?

His touch on her nipple, stroking it between his thumb and forefinger, shot pangs of erotic sensation deep into her. She looked up at his mouth, so beautifully carved that it could have been painted by a Renaissance artist, indenting at the corners, his bottom lip sensually full. Once against her own mouth it was both a possession and a caress, drawing her deeper under the spell of her own sexuality. She could feel his breath—warm, scented with maleness—as he urged her closer, and the hand that had been holding her arm pressed flat into the arch of her spine, so that her body fitted itself to his. Weakly she leaned into him, savouring the sensation of his hand on her breast, her own weight against his thighs, soft flesh against hard muscle, the one accommodating the other, her softness excited by that accommodation of his hardness and wanting to take things further.

Here in this unknown place where she now was there was no need for her to watch or regulate her reactions, no need for her to care how she might be judged, or to feel humbled as she had done with James—grateful for his love, knowing that his passion did not match her own, and desperate not to do anything that would tip the balance of his acceptance into male revulsion of too much female sexual need.

Here she could step away from the image her life had moulded her into and find out what it was like to be free to truly be herself. Softly the siren song of her own desire whispered its addictive message of persuasion to her.

His mouth was skilled and knowing. This was sexuality stripped bare, raw and urgent, binding her to its will and her own need. His tongue probed the seal of her closed lips, his hand kneading her breast, so that the twin assault on her senses made her body ache in time to his rhythm. She could hear the sound of her own breathing in all its ragged and charged betrayal of her need. She melted into him—and then tensed as she heard Josh cry.

Immediately she snapped back to reality, ignoring Rocco as he released her to let her go to Josh.

If there had been a moment when they had looked at one another, sharing regret, then she did not want to think about it.

‘I have some business matters to attend to. If there is anything you need for the child, please inform Maria.’

Julie kept her back to Rocco, nodding her head to signify that she had heard him, not daring to so much as breathe properly, never mind turn round, until she was sure he had left the room.

Her hands trembled as she held Josh. She was icy-cold with reaction to her own behaviour. What on earth had possessed her? The emotions and feelings she had experienced had been so frighteningly alien to everything that she felt about herself.

Or had they? Had they instead been a reflection of the anger that had been locked inside her for so long? Because the reality Julie admitted was that she had been angry for a very long time: angry with Judy, angry with herself, even angry with James. So much so that the anger Rocco Leopardi had made her feel had been the burning spark that had ignited a positive volcano of emotion.

Well, she had certainly confirmed his opinion of her as someone little better than a call girl, Julie acknowledged shakily as she dressed Josh. A wanton hussy who had offered herself to him. A wanton hussy who didn’t have the first idea of what it was like to truly experience sexual passion—who had, in fact, subdued her longing to do so with the only lover she had known.

It was just as well Rocco didn’t really want her. If he had made love to her he might just have fired her passion to the extent that her desire for him would have burned out of control.

What would it be like to really be wanted by a man like Rocco? To be desired by him, to be taken to his bed and kept there until he had aroused and then slaked their mutual passion past the point where either of them was in control of themselves or their destinies? How dangerous it would be to crave that kind of intimate possession from a man like him. How much safer she had been walking the path she had, where her desires and her emotions had been closeted and controlled.

CHAPTER SIX

IT WAS three days now since she had arrived on Sicily, and finally the wind had dropped and it had stopped raining.

This morning for the first time Julie had woken up to blue skies, with the dazzling beauty of a snow-capped Etna visible for once without its veil of mist and rain.

Sicily’s weather like Sicily’s history, was turbulent and demanding, Julie had learned, and now its passion was softened in the aftermath of its own excess, as if sated by the demands it had made at the height of its need to prove itself.

Whilst Josh had napped she had walked slowly through the formal salons of the piano nobile, gazing with awe at their magnificence. The most homely—if such a word could be used to describe such wonderful rooms—was the Sala degli Arazzi, with its priceless tapestries, from which a set of double doors opened out into the library, with row upon row of leather-bound volumes and silk curtains woven, so Maria had told her, in Lyons, to a design that had later been destroyed so that no one else could ever use it.

The rooms led one into the other in the classic enfilade style of the eighteenth century—the library giving way to the Chinese Salon, with its lacquered furniture, and then the Egyptian hallway, rectangular and galleried, with niches housing marble busts. Beyond that was a large square room with late eighteenth-century allegorical frescoes and elegant gilt wood furniture, its chairs and sofas covered in a blue silk that had also been specially woven in Lyons.

The last room overlooked an inner courtyard garden dominated by a large baroque fountain ornamented with mythical creatures spouting water into the stone pool beneath it. And yet for all its magnificence the house still had the definite air of being a home. Fresh flowers in ornate priceless bowls set on equally priceless furniture, filled the air with their scent, and Maria orchestrated her own army of skilled workers to keep the house clean.

Now, Julie made her way downstairs to the kitchen.

Through the open door she could smell the scent of citrus for the first time, wafting into the courtyard on the soft caress of a breeze from the orange and lemon groves that lay beyond the villa.