Pride: Captive At The Sicilian Billionaire's Command

His terse ‘No’ compounded those feelings, which hardly inspired her to hand over Josh. But then her ineffectual scrabbling one-handedly in the bag suddenly caused it to tilt upwards, disgorging some of its contents onto the wet street, including her purse, an assortment of bills that belonged to Judy, her keys and their passports—Josh’s a sad reminder of the honeymoon her sister had been so excited about, their first holiday as a family. Rocco frowned as he looked down at the wet pavement and saw the passports amongst the other detritus that had spilled from the woman’s handbag.

Ignoring Julie’s gasp of protest, he bent down to retrieve her possessions, picking up the now wet bills and the two passports before casually flicking them open. Both passports were in his hand—a providential accident or a potent sign that this task might after all be simpler and easier than he had thought? What kind of woman carried passports around with her? he wondered, and then grimaced as he found the answer to his own question.

Obviously the kind who expected that the opportunity to leave the country might occur at any time and wanted to be prepared for it. He imagined it was the kind of thing that would be quite common where high-class hookers were concerned.

But this pathetic and unappealing-looking woman couldn’t have looked less like anything high-class. Rocco reached for her purse, frowning as he felt its emptiness, and then picked up her keys.

He was handing everything back to her, including her keys. Julie exhaled shakily in relief. She wasn’t sure just what she had been fearing, but now she admitted she did feel a bit more relaxed—or at least she did until he said autocractically, ‘The baby needs to be out of this rain and wind.’ He put his hand on her arm, nodding in the direction of his car as he told her, ‘My car’s over there.’

Had she moved of her own volition, or was it a combination of the wind and his hand on her arm that had somehow brought her so close to his car that she was standing with it on one side of her and him on the other, hemming her in? Julie shivered.

What were his intentions? What did he really want? Not her. Not a man like this one, whose every movement and expression suggested a certain contempt for everything and anything that was not of the very best—including the speed with which his hand had dropped from her arm. All she needed to do was simply ask him to move. She could even push past him. Her hand was beginning to feel numb from clinging on to her possessions, and Josh was an increasingly heavy weight on her arm, despite his slightness. Carefully she tried to adjust Josh’s position to ease her arm.

‘Let me take him.’ He was reaching for Josh, Julie recognised immediately, all maternal anxiety, his hands long-fingered, lean and tanned against the baby’s shabby suit.

‘What is it you want?’ she demanded. ‘Who sent you here?’

‘No one sends me anywhere,’ he told her coldly. ‘And it isn’t who I am from you should be asking, but where.’

‘Where? I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’

‘No? Try this, then. I’m from the country and the family to whom the boy belongs.’

Julie’s eyes were as grey and drained of warm blue as London’s March sky, and they registered shock and then fear as the meaning of his words slammed into her heart, causing it to thud so heavily that she could hear its beat in her own ears.

‘You’re from Sicily?’ she guessed.

‘I’m from Sicily,’ he agreed.

Of all the possibilities she might have envisaged, this had not even come close to being one of them—and that alone was enough to fling her headlong into mindless panic as she demanded, ‘Who are you?’

Rocco wasn’t used to having his identity questioned. He looked down at her contemptuously from his six-foot-three height, folding his arms across his chest. The fine wool of his handmade Italian suit moved with him as easily as though it was his flesh.

‘My name is Leopardi—Rocco Leopardi. And now that I have answered you perhaps you will be good enough to give me the child—my nephew—and get into the car?’

His nephew. So this was not Antonio—the rich, louche Sicilian playboy with whom her sister had had an affair in the South of France early last May, which may or may not have been responsible for Josh’s conception—a fact which she had forced Julie to promise to keep a secret from James. A feeling akin to relief which there was absolutely no justification for her to feel warmed the icy sting of Julie’s rain-chilled body, temporarily making her drop her guard and momentarily relax her tightly protective hold on the sleeping baby.

Fearing that she was about to drop the child, Rocco immediately reached for him, lifting him bodily out of Julie’s arms before she could stop him and then opening the rear passenger door to the car.

‘What are you doing?’

Fresh panic and fear filled Julie as she watched Rocco place Josh into a baby seat in the back of the car. Everything about the way he handled her nephew was gentle and protective of the small, vulnerable life, but for some reason the fact that he was being so careful, so caring, actually increased Julie’s fear. For herself and her own position in Josh’s life?

‘I’m simply putting the baby out of harm’s way whilst we talk. You almost dropped him.’

‘No, that’s not true,’ Julie denied. ‘You’re trying to take him away from me, aren’t you?’ she guessed. ‘You’re trying to steal him.’

Rocco gave her a tight-lipped look. He might have known she’d be the high-drama hysterical type.

Fear and panic had seized Julie. Did he know that she wasn’t really Josh’s mother? Was he going to try and claim that she had no rights where Josh was concerned? He was the kind of man from the kind of family who would stop at nothing to get what they wanted, and if they wanted her nephew … Julie’s heart was thumping frantically. She could see a man and a woman coming towards them on the opposite side of the road. She opened her mouth to call out to them for help, her instinctive need to protect her relationship with Josh overwhelming her normal dislike of any kind of scene.

‘Look—’ Rocco had begun intending to point out that she was overreacting, only to stop when he saw that Julie was looking across the road at a couple who were walking towards them. Instantly guessing what she was going to do, he reacted immediately. She was already standing close to the car, so it was easy to hold her there in his arms, and easier still to silence her planned cry for help with the pressure of his mouth on hers.

Normally the last thing he’d have contemplated doing was kissing a woman like this one. She appealed to him almost as little physically as she repulsed him morally—thin, blonde, pale-skinned, and ready to have sex with any man who asked her just so long as he was rich.

Rocco liked strikingly attractive, intelligent women, who showed their pride in themselves in everything they did and were. His father might be the head of one of Sicily’s oldest aristocratic families, and he himself might have a courtesy title, but Rocco was a billionaire in his own right, through his own endeavours, and he took pride in that achievement. When the time eventually came that he was ready to settle down—which most definitely was not yet—he wanted a partner who was exactly that: a woman who was equal to truly being his partner. Someone who understood the demands that came with his birthright but who at the same time had made her own way in the world and knew the value of having done so—a woman who was equally at home in society as she was in the corporate world; a woman who held herself aloof from the cheap sexual thrills beloved of his half-brother and his cronies, and who disdained them and everything they represented as much as he did himself; but at the same time a woman who understood and shared his own deep-rooted core sensuality.

One thing she must not do, though, was fall in love with him or expect him to fall in love with her. Bitterness gripped its ever-ready fist tight on his emotions. His mother had loved his father and that love had destroyed her. That was never going to happen to him, nor did he want to be responsible for the pain of it in someone else. He had no intention of becoming either the victim his mother had been or the callous enforcer of that victimisation that was his father.

The child’s mother had stiffened in his hold, and he could feel the frightened race of her heartbeat.

Frightened? Of what? Not him? Rocco was outraged. The thought of creating fear within anyone, but especially in someone weaker and vulnerable, was totally abhorrent to him. How could a woman who had given herself to his depraved late half-brother possibly be afraid of him? From what he knew of Antonio, a woman who was frightened of a man’s touch was hardly his style. And from what Falcon’s sources had discovered about her, this one had been very much Antonio’s style—a so-called glamour model. Not that there was anything remotely glamorous about her now …

And yet somehow her lips were unexpectedly soft and full, and her slenderness within his arms disarmed and distracted him, making him want to hold her close, tempting his tongue-tip to explore the shape and tease apart that closed line of denial.

Rocco wasn’t used to women who denied him.

The reason why Julie had ended up in Rocco’s arms had become buried beneath a surge of other feelings and a very different kind of panic. James was the only man she had ever wanted to hold her like this and kiss her like this, Julie thought painfully, but somehow—either through exhaustion or fear or both—she could feel her will to resist him giving way to the warmth emanating from him. It was as though her weakness was irresistibly drawn to his strength, her woman to his man, the softness of her lips to the hard command of his mouth, until the determined male pressure of his tongue was melting her resistance as easily as the heat of a Sicilian summer sun could melt winter snow. Her starving senses were betrayingly greedy for the sensual pleasure of his kiss.

This was how she had once dreamed of James holding her and kissing her—before they had become lovers, before she had lost him to Judy.

It had been bad enough having to listen to James telling her gently that, whilst he liked her and valued their time together, he had fallen in love with Judy, but it had been even worse having to listen to Judy confessing in a drunken moment that she was not sure who was the father of the unwanted child she had been carrying.

It could, she had admitted, be the wealthy Sicilian playboy with whom she’d had an affair but who had since ditched her and was refusing to answer her letters. But she was going to tell James that it was his—because, as she had told Julie smugly and with open malice, it actually could be, seeing as James had rushed her into bed the minute she had returned from Sicily.

Having to listen to Judy telling her about them making love had been pure torture. Julie clung fiercely to Rocco. It had been her kisses she had wanted James to long for, her touch, her body. Lost in her own emotions, she felt the man holding her become James, and the intensity of her emotions dictated her actions, so that she was kissing him with all the fierce longing and pride of her love for James.

Julie’s sudden passion caught Rocco off guard. She was pressing her body into his, opening her mouth beneath his, and her breathing was altering to become as unsteady as her heartbeat.

Unaware of the reason for it, instinctively he responded to it, shaping her body to his own, taking the sweetness her parted lips were offering, and letting the soft moan of assent she gave at the first thrust of his tongue be the signal that brought his hands sweeping down her body to bring her intimately close to his own flesh.

The sensation of hard male thighs pressing against her jolted Julie back to reality.

This man was not James.

As soon as he felt her struggle Rocco stopped kissing her, sliding his hands back up over her body more out of habit than desire, as distaste for his own actions filled him. Since when had he ever wanted Antonio’s leavings?

It was unthinkable that he should want a woman like this one—a pathetic excuse for a real woman.

He had stopped kissing her, but he was still holding on to her, Julie recognized, shivering in his hold. Why had she kissed him like that? He wasn’t anything like James. The couple she would have called out to for help had now, of course, gone.

As much as he wanted to turn his back and walk away from her, and from his own momentary betrayal of himself and his values, Rocco knew that he could not do so. On this occasion his duty to his family must come before any duty to himself.

‘There are matters we need to discuss,’ he told Julie coldly.

‘I will not let you take my baby away from me,’ Julie warned him fiercely, blinking back the tears caused by the overload on her emotions.

Rocco frowned at her.