Pride: Captive At The Sicilian Billionaire's Command

‘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.

‘You have taken your medicine?’ Maria demanded.

Julie smiled and nodded her head. She had been taking iron tablets twice a day for the last two days, on the instructions of Dr Vittorio, who had said he wanted her to take them pending the results of her blood tests. She had to admit that already she was feeling more like her old self.

Julie had grown used to the older woman’s sharpness now, and even if Maria disapproved of her, Julie had to admit that when it came to Josh, Maria was as dotingly protective as though he were a part of her own family.

‘It is just as well that Rocco is a strong man as well as a good one. It will be hard for him to watch the little one.’

‘Because he could be Antonio’s son?’ Julie queried.

‘No. It is seeing you with the child that will be hard for him,’ Maria corrected her firmly.

‘Why?’ Julie asked, her attention more on Josh, who she was feeding, than on Maria who, Julie had learned, enjoyed a good gossip.

‘Because he will have to witness the little one enjoying something that he never had. The love and attention of a mother,’ Maria announced, looking up from the dough she was kneading.

Julie frowned—it was easy and tempting, if unrealistic, to imagine that Rocco had sprung fully formed and armed into adult male maturity without ever going through any process that involved him being dependent on anyone, much less a mere female.

‘The Princess—his mother—died with Rocco’s birth,’ Maria told Julie dramatically. ‘Poor woman. Many said that she did not want to live because of the cruelty of her husband. It was always known that the Prince only married her for her family’s land, and the fact that her blood lines went back as far as his. That is the way with the nobility. She was much younger than him—only seventeen when they married—and convent-reared. Poor girl, she fell in love with him at first sight. But he was not the kind of man to be satisfied with a young, innocent wife. Not when there was already another in possession of his heart.’

Maria was certainly relishing the telling of her story, Julie acknowledged ruefully, although it sounded more like a fictitious drama than any kind of reality. She smiled down at Josh, who was sucking strongly on his bottle, feeding so much better than he had been.

‘I dare say she might have borne it better if there had been many mistresses and not just the one,’ Maria continued. ‘And such a one, who refused to know her place,’ she added darkly. ‘The poor little Princess didn’t stand a chance against one such as her, experienced in the ways of keeping a man within her power. She boasted openly to anyone who would listen to her that the Prince loved her and not his wife. There were no tears shed by either of them when the Princess died, I can tell you that, and I dare say if she could Isabella would have seen her children in Princess Lucia’s grave with her.

‘But the Prince, of course, knew what was due to his blood. The Princess had given him three fine sons, but now she was dead and he was free to marry Isabella. Five years later she had her own son, and the Prince doted on him in the same way that he did on her. No other man could have got away with such shameful behaviour but the Prince answers to no higher authority. The Leopardis are born into pride—they wear it like their skin and cannot be separated from it,’ Maria informed her with obvious relish.

Julie frowned. Rocco had not made any mention of Josh having a grandmother, but maybe that was understandable in the circumstances.

‘Where is Isabella now?’ she asked Maria. Josh had finished his bottle and she lifted him against her shoulder to wind him.

‘Ha! She is where she deserves to be—in her grave. She fell on the top steps of the castle tower and broke her neck. Some say that the ghost of the Princess pushed her, and certainly no one apart from the Prince and her son mourned her death. She had no understanding of the way things are, or of what it means to be a Leopardi wife and the mother of Leopardi sons. She was not worthy.’

Maria might gossip about the Leopardi family, but she was at the same time steadfastly loyal to them, and ready to defend them against anyone who might dare to criticise them, Julie knew.

‘It must have been hard for Rocco, growing up without his mother,’ she agreed.

‘It was hard for all three of them,’ Maria told her. ‘Their father had no time for them, and Isabella made sure they knew that she held the whip hand—sometimes literally, I can tell you. I worked up at the castle then, and there was more than one occasion when someone would come down from the nursery asking for some of Cook’s special salve for Falcon’s wounds. Him being the eldest, he always took the punishment for the other two, you see.’

Poor little boys, Julie thought sympathetically. But Rocco wasn’t a boy now. He was a man. In an attempt to ignore the ache tightening her lower body, she paced the length of the kitchen, holding Josh against her shoulder.

‘I’d like to take Josh outside,’ she told Maria. ‘Perhaps go for a walk. There’s a baby buggy in the nursery.’