Pride: Captive At The Sicilian Billionaire's Command

When he removed his sleek-fitting white boxer shorts Julie sucked in her breath.

Had she actually ever seen James naked? If so, suddenly she not only couldn’t remember but didn’t really care. This—Rocco’s body—was surely physically male sexual perfection? She had never given any thought to wondering if one day she might look at a naked man and want to feast her gaze on his sexuality. She simply hadn’t thought in those kind of terms. She had loved James as a person, not for sex, and she was not the kind of woman who had ever been interested in going on a girls’ night out to watch male strippers. She had believed that desiring a man came from loving him, but now, shockingly, she realised that just looking at Rocco was making her feel positively faint with lust.

Rocco watched Julie looking at him with a slanting halfhidden glance. Her lips were parted, her tongue pushing between them to dampen them, and her heart was thudding visibly and unevenly against her ribs. Her nipples were gathered and hard, but it was the look of open and awed delight he could see in her eyes that his own flesh registered first and responded to.

It was a look that said she was paying him the greatest compliment a woman could pay a man who had not yet been her lover. A look that aroused him even as it honoured and welcomed him.

He lay down on the bed beside her, kissing her slowly and with deliberately erotic intensity, using his tongue to tease and enflame her until she was reaching for him, her hands curling into the hard muscles of his arms, her mouth opening beneath his and her body arching up against him in open abandonment.

He cupped her breast and rubbed the pad of his thumb against her nipple as he kissed her neck, and then her shoulder, feeling her whole body jerk up against him in hot pleasure. He took her hand, lacing his fingers with her own and kissing the inside of her wrist as he played sensually with her nipple, before drawing her hand down to place it against his erection.

She made a semi-mute sound, her eyes widening as though with confusion and uncertainty. Her fingers trembled as they brushed against him, and then closed round him whilst she released her breath in a ragged exhalation.

His flesh felt hot and slick and heavy, moving almost of its own volition within her hold, causing her hand to tighten around it in possessive female delight. She released him to touch and stroke the full length of him, from the hard and shiny tip to the thick hair growing round the base that prickled against her fingers and then back again, until the sensation of his mouth against her breasts pierced her with such unbearable pleasure that her hand automatically gripped him. She was unable to enclose him fully, but still she tightened her fingers around him as the movement of her hand mirrored the slow, deep tug of his mouth against her nipple.

Rocco reached down and slid his hand into the open silk organza leg of her knickers, probing the already swollen and unfolding protective outer lips of her sex. Just as her tongue-tip had tempted him earlier, so the hard arousal of her clitoris tempted him now.

What was Rocco doing? James had never. But of course she knew what he was doing, Julie realized, and as she lay back, panting softly under the intensity her own pleasure. She wasn’t that naïve, even if she had not experienced such a pleasure before. It gripped her and took her, softening some muscles and tightening others, opening her legs, lifting her hips, making her tremble violently, ready to throw herself into the heart of the volcano if necessary, rather than be denied pleasure.

Pleasure that Rocco’s touch was promising her with a long, lazy caress that went the full length of her eager wetness in a way that made her ache and long feverishly for the thrust of his flesh within her own. She opened to his touch and cried out beneath the onslaught of sensation, her senses overloaded by the movement of his fingers against her clitoris.

Impatiently Rocco tugged off Julie’s silky knickers, and then tensed as he realised what he was doing. She was lying naked and ready for him, her hips arched to allow him to remove her underwear, exposed intimately to his gaze. He tracked the frantic and unsteady pulse he could see beating beneath her skin. He didn’t have a condom, and he didn’t trust her. She had been his half-brother’s plaything, and that of heaven alone knew how many other men. It was unthinkable that he could want her—and even if he did it was more unthinkable that he should take the risk involved in having sex with her. He started to move away from her, and then checked when she made a small agonised sound.

She was looking at him with helpless need and longing, pleading silently with him, pain and pride mingling with her shock at the extent of her wanting. She wasn’t making any attempt to hide from him what was happening to her. The look on her face could have been that of a virgin who had never known such pleasures before, who was still half-afraid of them. But of course she was no such thing.

Rocco sighed and placed his hand on her thigh to push it closed against its twin, so that he could reject her without having to say the words he knew would humiliate her. Where had it come from, this extraordinary feeling he had of wanting to be gentle, of not wanting to hurt her? And more importantly why?

Her eyes closed, tears seeping from their corners, and a deep shudder racked through her.

She was in his hands—literally as well as figuratively. His to take or leave; his to pleasure or leave unfulfilled; his …

Something about her need for him, and the manner in which she was so helplessly vulnerable to it and to him reached out to him, touching his heart and making it impossible for him to deny her.

Rocco leaned over her, kissing her closed eyelids, tasting the salt of her tears, stroking her until her flesh quickened to his touch beyond the point of no recall.

It should have ended there, with the sound of her ragged breathing soft in his ear and the frantic pump of her heart easing back under the post-orgasm tremors seizing her body. He had, after all, given her what she had wanted, but in doing so he had unleashed his own passion, and now it was his turn to ache and burn for her beyond sanity or safety.

Her arms held him, wrapping around him. Her body was sweat-slick against his own. He lifted her hips and gave in to his need to sink into her, slowly, deeply, letting the mind-destroying pleasure take him as her flesh caressed him, her muscles holding him tighter than he had imagined possible.

How was it possible for a woman of her experience to show so little artifice? To be so held in the grip of her desire that her awe of it shone in her eyes and echoed in her soft cries of pleasure? How was it possible for her to be so sweetly shocked by the way he filled her, murmuring incoherent words of admiration and delight into his ear whilst her lips pressed eager kisses against his flesh? How was it possible—?

But anything and everything was possible when a woman aroused a man the way she had aroused him, Rocco acknowledged as he let the fire take him and burn him, commanding his thrusts and his rhythm in the same way that he was commanding her response to them, possessing them both and driving them through urgency and need to the heart of their shared desire. The volcanic explosion that brought his climax a second ahead of hers let him feel the pressure of her flesh gripping him and releasing him in swift convulsive movements.

It was over, leaving her boneless, mindless … and heartless? Julie closed her eyes. Her body was too sated by the extraordinarily intense power of her orgasm for her to have the energy to think. She reached out and let her fingers drift down Rocco’s back, damp with the sweat she could still taste on her own lips. She felt humbled and awed, almost unable to believe she had known so much pleasure, and she was hugely grateful to fate for giving her both the opportunity to do so and the man who could arouse it as she lay in a post-coital state of euphoric bliss.

Rocco had given her something that James never had, and she would always be grateful to him, and to life, for that.

The post-orgasm scent of their bodies surrounded her, soothing and relaxing. Julie closed her eyes and moved closer to Rocco, burrowing against him, wanting to be close to him …

She was nothing like he had imagined, he thought. She was a voluptuous innocent who had somehow undermined his defences and taken him to a place he had never previously been.

A voluptuous innocent? She was practically a whore, Rocco reminded himself grimly, and if she seemed innocent it was probably because she was experienced enough to know that men who should know better were turned into helpless fools by her toxic masquerade.

And yet still he couldn’t bring himself to leave her.

CHAPTER NINE

JULIE’S hands trembled as she fastened Josh’s nappy and paused to blow a kiss at him as he looked back at her and smiled. Today was the day they would learn the results of the DNA tests, and in fact the doctor was due in less than half an hour, according to the message Maria had given her from Rocco at breakfast time.

Rocco. Julie hadn’t been alone with him since she had gone to sleep in his arms two days ago. It was quite clear what message he wanted to send to her. She had known that the moment she had woken up in the dark alone.

Perhaps she should feel ashamed of what she had done? Rocco probably thought so, but Julie wasn’t ashamed. She wasn’t ashamed of anything—not a single, wonderful second of it. She had wanted to know the depth and breadth of her own sensuality and now she did. And if Rocco Leopardi thought that that meant she was going to pursue him for more of the same then he couldn’t be more wrong.

One day maybe she would meet someone with whom she could fall in love in the same way that she had fallen in love with James, but this time she would know her own sexual nature, and its needs.

Poor James. He had hated hurting people so very much, and she suspected now that he had probably allowed her to believe that he loved her rather than hurt her with the truth that he merely liked her as a person rather than desired her as a woman. His love for her, she was sure, had been that of a friend, not a lover. That made her feel sad and regretful—more for her lack of understanding and awareness than anything else. But the anger she had felt was gone—swept away in the torrent of passion she had known beneath Rocco’s hands and in his arms.

She picked Josh up and cuddled him, in part to distract herself from the direction of her thoughts and to conceal her faint blush, although she never needed an excuse to show her love for her precious nephew. He was growing bigger by the day now, putting on weight and responding to the attention she gave him with smiles and joy that turned her heart over, until it felt as though it was melting with her love for him.

There was nothing she wouldn’t do for him to keep him safe and well.

She wished the ordeal ahead of her was already over, and that she knew one way or the other where Josh’s future lay: here in Sicily or at home in London. But wherever it was she intended to be with him.

‘You’re my baby,’ she whispered lovingly to him. ‘My adorable, gorgeous, wonderful baby.’

His chuckle made her laugh and Rocco, who had heard both her words and her soft loving laughter, paused on the landing outside her bedroom on his way past, immediately rejecting the sensation that tightened round his heart.

She meant nothing to him. How could she? He just hoped that her child would not turn out to be Antonio’s son. That way he could have her on the first flight back to London so that he could get on with his life and forget that he had ever met her, his duty to his family done.

And if the boy was Antonio’s?

The same thing applied. He had his own life. She and the boy would become his father’s responsibility, not his, and the castle her home—if his father allowed her to stay.

It was almost eleven o’clock. He’d been out at the development since seven o’clock, and he needed a shower before Luca arrived. Rocco rubbed his hand over his jaw. He hadn’t been sleeping well, waking up in the night with an ache in his body and a sense of loss and aloneness.

He cursed himself under his breath. Wasn’t it bad enough that he’d had unprotected sex with a party girl, without developing some maudlin sense of thinking that his bed felt empty without her in it?

Julie tried to smile naturally as she walked into the salon which she had previously considered to be the most ‘homely’ of all the villa’s formal reception rooms, but which now felt formidably grand.

Dr Vittorio and Rocco were already there. The doctor was formally dressed in a dark suit, in contrast to Rocco, who was wearing a soft, white, short-sleeved cotton top and a pair of clean but slightly faded chinos. His hair looked damp, as though he had recently been in the shower. Her belly cramped, her muscles compressing against the nowfamiliar ache that accompanied his presence in her thoughts.

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