The Sicilian's Baby Bargain

The Sicilian's Baby Bargain
PENNY JORDAN

Claimed by the most powerful man in Sicily! Annie has only her baby… But the most precious part of her life is now at risk! Falcon Leopardi has come to claim his late half-brother’s child – and no one refuses the dark-hearted tycoon! But back in Sicily family duty wars with justice.Annie and her baby are caught in the midst of a dynastic battle. The magnificent Falcon will protect Annie with the kind of searing passion only the most powerful of Sicilians can bestow…The women of the sultry island will mourn: Falcon Leopardi is taking a wife!The Leopardi Brothers Sicilian by name. . . Scandalous, scorching and seductive by nature!

‘Falcon.’

Annie could hear the relief in her own voice as she half ran and half stumbled across the room, all but flinging herself into Falcon’s arms, but she simply didn’t care.

‘They’re trying to take him from me. They’re trying to say that I’m a bad mother.’

‘The child is a Leopardi,’ she could hear the old Prince insisting. ‘His place is here with—’

‘With me.’ Falcon stopped his father in mid-rant. ‘And that is exactly where Oliver will be from now on. With me and with his mother, since she has agreed to be my wife. I shall be formally adopting him as my son.’

Falcon’s arm was round her, supporting her, tightening in warning as she made a small, shocked sound of protest.

‘And I should warn you that there is no law in this land or any other that will remove from me the right to be the guardian of my stepson, a child of my own blood, and the protector of both him and his mother.’

THE LEOPARDI BROTHERS

Sicilian by name…Scandalous, scorching and seductive by nature!

Three darkly handsome Leopardi men believe it is their duty to hunt down their missing heir—as Sicilians, as sons, as brothers!

Falcon has found the child, and he has found its mother…but he has also discovered the dark secrets of his late half-brother.

‘There is something I have to say to you,’Falcon told Annie. ‘Your right to your sexuality hasbeen stolen from you by a member of my sex, and thedamage that has been done has been compounded by amember of my family. As a Leopardi, and the eldest ofmy brothers, I have a duty to make recompense to youand to restore to you what has been taken away. Thatis the law of the Leopardi family,and the code by which we live.’

In November look out for Penny Jordan’s new Modern™ Romance just in time for Christmas!

Penny Jordan has been writing for more than twenty years and has an outstanding record: over 170 novels published, including the phenomenally successful A PERFECT FAMILY, TO LOVE, HONOUR AND BETRAY, THE PERFECT SINNER and POWER PLAY, which hit the Sunday Times and New YorkTimes bestseller lists. Penny Jordan was born in Preston, Lancashire, and now lives in rural Cheshire.

Recent titles by the same author:

THE SICILIAN BOSS’S MISTRESS (The Leopardi Brothers) CAPTIVE AT THE SICILIAN BILLIONAIRE’S COMMAND (The Leopardi Brothers) TAKEN BY THE SHEIKH THE SHEIKH’S BLACKMAILED MISTRESS VIRGIN FOR THE BILLIONAIRE’S TAKING

THE SICILIAN’S BABY BARGAIN

BY

PENNY JORDAN

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

PROLOGUE

FALCON LEOPARDI grimaced in distaste. This was supposed to be a memorial gathering to mark what would have been the birthday of his late half-brother Antonio. It was their father’s idea, and one that strictly speaking Falcon did not approve of—especially not an excuse to get drunk. But then the majority of Antonio’s so-called friends obviously shared his late half-brother’s love of over-indulgence just as they had shared his love of a louche lifestyle.

One of them was breathing alcoholic fumes over Falcon now, as he leaned drunkenly towards him confidingly and spoke to him.

‘Did Tonio ever tell you about that woman whose drink he spiked in Cannes last year? He swore to us all that he’d get his revenge on her for turning him down, and he did that, all right. Last I heard she was trying to claim that he’d fathered the brat she was carrying.’

Falcon, who had been about to move away in disgusted irritation, turned back to look at the unpleasant specimen of manhood now reeling unsteadily in front of him.

‘I seem to remember him mentioning something or other about the situation,’ he lied. ‘But why don’t you refresh my memory?’

The drunk was more than happy to oblige.

‘We’d seen her at Nikki Beach. She wasn’t joining in the fun like the other girls there, even though she was with one of the film outfits. Always turned up in a blouse and skirt, looking like a schoolteacher. Antonio soaked the shirt with champagne for a joke, trying to get her to lighten up, but she wasn’t having any of it. Really got his back up, she did—the way she treated him. Rejecting him like she was something special. He told us all he was going to have his revenge on her, and he certainly did that. He found out where she was staying, then he bribed one of the waiters to slip something into her drink. Knocked her out flat. It took three of us to get her back to her room. Of course Antonio swore us to secrecy, threatened us with a whole lot of bad stuff if what he’d done ever got out. ’Course, me telling you now is different, ’cos he’s dead and you’re his brother.’ He hiccupped and then belched, before continuing. ‘Tonio made us keep guard outside. He told us afterwards that she was so tight she must have been a virgin.’

The man’s expression began to alter and his manner changed from one of swaggering confidence to something far more sheepish as Falcon’s cold silence penetrated his drink-befuddled state, bringing home to him the true shameful reality of the horrific tale he was relating. ‘Not that Tonio got away with it,’ he rushed to reassure Falcon. ‘He told me that her brother came after him, saying that he’d got her pregnant. But that there was no way he was going to do as she wanted and provide for the kid she was carrying.’

Falcon hadn’t said a word whilst his late brother’s friend had been speaking. He found it easy, though, to accept his late half-brother’s role in the nasty, sordid little incident the other man had described to him. It was typical of Antonio, and underlined—if any underlining had been necessary—exactly why Falcon and his two younger brothers had so disliked their half-brother during his short life and had not mourned his passing.

‘What was her name? Can you remember?’ he asked the drunk now.

The other man shook his head, and then frowned in concentration, before telling Falcon, ‘Think it might have been Anna or Annie—something like that. She was English—I know that.’

As though Falcon’s cold contempt chilled him, the drunk shivered and then staggered away. No doubt keen to find himself another drink, Falcon reflected as he looked across to where his two brothers and their wives were seated with his father.

Their father, the Prince, had worshipped and spoiled his youngest son, the only child he had had with the woman who had been his mistress during his marriage to the mother of his elder three sons’ mother—his wife once she was dead.

He had claimed, after Antonio’s death in a car accident, that Antonio’s last words to him had been to say that he had a child—conceived whilst Antonio was in Cannes—and he had demanded that this child be found.

Falcon had believed that he had left no stone unturned trying to do this—without any success—but now realised that he had overlooked the fact that his brother had lived his life among the slimy waste of humanity that was expert at scuttling away from the too-bright light of overturned stones.

He knew what he had to do now, of course. The only question was whether or not he told his brothers before or after he found the woman his half-brother had drugged, raped and impregnated with his child—because find her he most certainly would. Even if he had to turn the whole world upside down to do so. His honour and his duty to the Leopardi name would accept nothing less. On balance, telling them first would be easier….

CHAPTER ONE

ANNIE rubbed her eyes. Well shaped and an intense shade of almost violet-blue, with thick long eyelashes, they were eyes any woman could be proud of—if they hadn’t been aching with tiredness and feeling as though they were filled with grit. She lifted her hand, its wrist so slender that it looked dangerously fragile, pushing the heavy weight of her shoulder-length, naturally blonde and softly curling hair off her face. Normally she wore it scraped back in a neat knot, but Ollie had grabbed it earlier when she had been giving him his bath, and in the end it had been easier to leave it down. She loved her baby so much. He meant everything to her, and there was nothing she wouldn’t do to protect him and keep him safe. Nothing.

She had been reading all evening. Part-time freelance research work didn’t pay very well—certainly not as well as her previous job, which had been working as a researcher for a novelist turned playwright. Tom had paid her very well indeed, and he and his wife had become good friends. Annie’s face clouded. The lighting in her small one-bedroom flat didn’t really give off enough light for the demanding work she was doing—even if it was energy-efficient.

Next to her work on the cramped space of the small folding table there was a letter from her stepbrother amongst the post forwarded from her old address. She shivered and looked over her shoulder, almost as though she feared that Colin himself might suddenly materialise out of the ether.

Colin was living in the house that had originally belonged to her father, which should have been hers. He had stolen it from her—just as he had stolen… She flinched, not wanting to think about her stepbrother.

But there were times when she had to do so, for Ollie’s safety. Her stepbrother disapproved of the fact that she had kept Ollie, instead of having him put up for adoption as he had wanted her to do. But nothing could make her willingly part with her baby—not even Colin’s attempts to make her feel guilty for keeping him. He had insisted, that someone else—a couple—would give him a better life than she could as a single mother. Colin could be very convincing and persuasive when he wanted to be. She had been desperately afraid that he would win others over to his cause.

Sometimes she felt that she would never be able to stop looking over her shoulder, afraid that Colin had tracked them down and that somehow he would succeed in parting her from her son.

She would never even have told him about her pregnancy, but Susie, the wife of the author she had been working for when ‘it’—her rape by Antonio Leopardi—had happened, had thought she was doing her a favour by writing to him and telling him what had happened. Susie had been thrilled when Colin had offered her a home after Ollie’s birth, and all the support she needed.

Annie had refused his offer, though. She, after all, knew him far better than Susie did. Instead she had stayed in her flat, using the excuse that she wanted Ollie to be born at the local hospital because of its excellent reputation.

Colin had refused to be put off and had insisted on continuing to visit her. Initially he had even pretended that he agreed with her decision to keep her baby once it was born, but that pretence had soon vanished once he’d realised that Antonio Leopardi was not going to respond to Colin’s demand for financial support for his son.

Not that Colin had said anything of this to Susie and Tom, who had been so kind to her.