Pride: Captive At The Sicilian Billionaire's Command

Julie fumed as Rocco carried Josh through into the nursery, leaving her to drop his leather coat onto her bed and hurry after him, protesting, ‘There’s no need for you to do that. You might wake him up.’

He was still ignoring her, laying Josh on his changing table with unexpected expertise and then efficiently removing his outdoor suit. Josh slept on obliviously.

‘Perhaps you’d like to check his nappy and change him as well?’ Julie suggested sarcastically.

‘What I’d like is to feel that he’s got someone in his life who takes a responsible attitude towards his care. But right now, much as I’d like to think that, I can’t,’ Rocco told her pointedly.

Guilt and pride warred with one another inside Julie’s heart. She hated having her care of Josh questioned, but at the same time she was guiltily aware that she had allowed herself to be blinded by her own stubborn determination not to let Rocco dictate to her what she could and could not do.

‘If anything had happened to Josh I’d never have forgiven myself,’ she admitted in a low, tortured voice, her guilt and honesty winning the battle.

Rocco hid his surprise at her admission. Somehow it was out of character for the kind of woman he knew her to be—and yet, if he was honest, this wasn’t the first time in their short acquaintanceship when she had surprised him and challenged his perceptions of her. Nor the first time either that she had driven him to the point where she had tested his self-control way beyond its normal limits, he admitted—and not just the self-control that governed his temper. He was still battling to deny the extent to which she aroused him sexually—and failing, as his body was telling him very clearly right now.

How was it possible for him to want a woman he could only despise? A drowned rat of a woman who ricocheted between stubborn folly, aggressive antagonism and the kind of passionately intense sexual response to him that his head told him had to be manufactured, given her history, but that this body swore was the adult version of being a child let loose in a sweet shop.

Deftly, Rocco slid Josh into his cot and covered him up.

‘Maria said to tell you that she’s making you a special dish of liver cooked to her special recipe for dinner, along with a good helping of spinach. Or perhaps I should have said warn you,’ he told Julie dryly.

Maria had taken the doctor’s dietary suggestions for Julie to heart, with the result that iron-rich meat and greens had been served to her at every meal since the doctor’s visit apart from at breakfast, when she was served her iron in the form of eggs.

Julie managed a wan smile. ‘I was hoping to persuade Maria that cannelloni filled with spinach and ricotta cheese would be just as beneficial.’

‘You need to get out of those wet clothes.’

‘Yes.’ Rocco was walking past her and heading for the bedroom door. Julie took a deep breath and told him reluctantly, ‘Thank you for … for coming to find us.’

Her head was bowed, so she didn’t see the way his gaze rested on her before he said coolly, ‘There’s no need to thank me. After all, I have a vested interest in protecting Josh.’

He’d gone before Julie had time to raise her head and look at him—much to her relief. The last thing she needed right now was to endure the discomfort of having him realise that his pointed reminder that it was Josh who mattered to him and not her had hurt her. Hurt her? How crazy was that? How could a man she had only known four days possibly be able to hurt her emotionally?

It was possible for one heart to recognise another in the space of a single heartbeat, with all that that meant, she reminded herself. But she and Rocco didn’t have hearts that recognised each other, did they? In fact Rocco probably didn’t have a heart at all.

No heart? Then what was pumping the blood round that magnificent body?

And it was magnificent. The way in which his damp shirt had clung to his flesh had shown her that. Julie rubbed her eyes. She was cold and wet, and in need of a hot shower and probably a rest. A sudden gust of wind drove the rain against her bedroom window, making her shiver as she contemplated what might have so easily happened if Rocco hadn’t come to look for them. He might not have said it in so many words, but she knew he thought that she wasn’t fit to have charge of Josh, and perhaps he was right. She hadn’t done a very good job so far of looking after her little nephew, had she? It was only since he had been here that Josh had finally started to thrive and put on weight.

What was going to happen if he did turn out to be Antonio’s child?

Did she really need to ask herself that? Rocco and his brothers would take Josh from her. They would find him a proper, suitable substitute mother; they would surround him with all the care that Leopardi money could buy; they would cherish and protect him.

But she would love him, Julie told herself fiercely. And surely that meant something?

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE sight of the buggy, its wheels solid with mud and grit, abandoned in the hallway, acted on Rocco’s temper like a match to a highly flammable substance, representing as it did everything about the current state of his life—both professional and private—that infuriated and irked him.

He was in the middle of a building project on which every day of work lost cost money and which the heavy rain of Sicily’s always unpredictable pre-spring weather was already threatening to delay; his site manager—a passionate Lombardese whose personal life was more dramatic than anything that had ever been put on at La Scala—had just informed him that he was taking a week’s leave because his wife was threatening to leave him over an affair he had been having with an underwear model and he needed to go home to sort things out; somehow his grandfather had got wind of Josh’s presence at the villa, and according to Maria there had been five telephone calls from the castle since the morning, commanding Rocco’s presence at his father’s bedside, and on top of all that a woman who should have meant nothing whatsoever to him at all was disturbing and disrupting his thoughts and emotions as well as his desires, in a way that made him feel furious at his own inability to control what he was experiencing.

And as if all of that wasn’t enough, that same woman had had the idiocy to put both herself and her child at risk because she had felt that the baby needed some fresh air. Had she no sense of her own vulnerability? Had she really thought she was well enough to push a buggy up a steep incline over thick mud, when only days ago she had hardly been able to climb a flight of steps? If her child was Antonio’s son then she would soon learn that his father wouldn’t tolerate or make allowances for her stubborn foolishness in the way that Rocco had.

Rocco looked at his watch. He had better drive over to the castle before his father brought on his own end with a self-induced heart attack, he acknowledged grimly.

Julie looked longingly towards her bed. Josh—fed, bathed and content—was clearly not suffering any setback from their walk, but she was exhausted, she admitted, and still cold inside right through to her bones, despite her shower and the warm, dry clothes she was now wearing.

It was only half past three—plenty of time for her to have a rest before dinner.

At least she was over her latest bout of whatever alien weirdness it was that was taking her over and somehow convincing her that she needed to experience the full intimacy of raw, passionate sex and with Rocco Leopardi, Julie thought with relief as she lay down on top of the bed, too exhausted to even think of getting undressed. It shocked her not just that she could even feel like that, but also because of the unwanted and upsetting anger she had discovered within herself—especially against James. After all, it wasn’t his fault that he had not wanted her as passionately as she had done him. It would be far safer and make far more sense for her to simply accept that she was not the sort of woman to inspire intense sexual passion in the kind of man she could love.

And that other kind of man? The kind like Rocco Leopardi? That kind of man she did not want to love—the kind of man to whom intense sexual passion came as naturally as breathing and meant nothing other than an appetite to satisfy. It simply wasn’t possible for her to want to have sex with a man she knew despised her. Her pride and her self-respect would not allow it. And anyway, that had all been a silly mistake brought on by the fact that she hadn’t been feeling well. She didn’t really want him at all, Julie told herself firmly, before finally allowing herself the luxury of sliding into sleep.

His interview with his father over, Rocco felt the familiar surge of relief that always accompanied his departure from the castle. His father had tried to pressure him into taking Josh to the castle for him to inspect, claiming that he ‘would know Antonio’s child immediately,’ but Rocco had remained steadfast, pointing out that in law it was the DNA test result that would be accepted as prove of parentage, not his grandfather’s recognition. Naturally the older man hadn’t liked that, and the kind of argument familiar to Rocco from his youth had ensued, during which the Prince had accused all three of his sons from his first marriage of having their own agenda, claiming that they had always resented his second wife and their half-brother.

This had led on to the Prince stating that Rocco and his brothers were deliberately trying to keep his grandson from him, despite having given him their word that they would find him—all of which Rocco had refuted, refusing to allow his father to bully him or, when that failed, use emotional blackmail to force Rocco to bring Josh to the castle.

‘I am not yet the powerless old man you think me,’ the Prince had told Rocco. ‘I still have my friends, and I warn you, Rocco, that no one will keep my Antonio’s child from me.’

‘No one wants to keep him from you, Father,’ Rocco had pointed out. ‘But first we have to ascertain if the child is in fact Antonio’s.’

‘You should let me, his father, be the judge of that. What man does not know his own flesh? No man who dares to call himself a true man,’ the Prince had countered theatrically.

It was a pity that his father had found out about Josh’s presence on the island, Rocco admitted, because it could only complicate matters.

The sudden, unplanned surge of power that came from his foot pressing hard on the accelerator of his car warned him of the danger of his antagonistic feelings over the fact that Julie had been Antonio’s lover. His lover? Rocco’s mouth twisted. Since when had the kind of shallow, meaningless sex Antonio had indulged in ever had anything to do with love? He pitied Josh, knowing as he did himself what it did to the soul to know that your life had been created by an act divorced from any kind of emotional communion.

Given her obvious determination to do exactly the opposite of whatever he said to her, even when that meant risking Josh’s life, Rocco suspected that he would be wasting his time, having decided he ought to warn Julie that his father might seek to trick her into taking Josh to see him. Nevertheless, his own conscience was insisting that it was something he must do, he acknowledged, as he tapped on her half-open bedroom door before pushing it fully open and going in.

The sight of Julie lying fast asleep and fully dressed on top of the bed checked him, causing him to frown in a renewal of the fury he had felt when he had first seen her pushing the buggy uphill along the muddy track, looking so frail that she’d seemed almost on the point of collapse.

He had used the Leopardi authority he rarely needed to resort to with Dr Vittorio after the doctor had examined Julie, to find out if hegenuinely thought that Julie was merely suffering from a lack of iron or if he suspected that something more serious might be wrong.

At first Luca Vittorio had refused to answer him. But Luca and Rocco had played together as boys. When Rocco had pointed out that he simply wanted to know so that he could ensure Julie received the treatment she needed, Luca had relented and shaken his head, saying that he was fairly sure her symptoms were caused by an iron deficiency, but that that did not mean that it wasn’t serious—dependent upon the extent of the deficiency and its cause. The iron tablets Luca had prescribed were a stop-gap solution, designed only to boost her energy levels pending the results of the tests.

Julie knew the situation as well as Rocco did, and yet she had still risked potentially causing more damage to her health. She infuriated him in ways he had not known existed until she came into his life, Rocco admitted grimly. Just as she—Just as she what? Aroused him in exactly the same intense and extraordinarily all-encompassing way?

She did not arouse him. He was a man. A man who had been living the life of a monk for the better part of a year. And since that was more by accident than design, because of the amount of work he had taken on, it was only natural that when a woman threw herself at him as she had done he was going to respond. The fact that he had even momentarily been tempted by her filled him with selfderision.

The door between the bedroom and the nursery was open, drawing Rocco towards it. How could his father expect anyone to believe that it was possible to ‘know’ an unknown child’s bloodlines? Rocco looked down into the cot, where Josh lay fast asleep. Being here was doing Josh good. He had put on weight, and his skin looked less sallow, warmer.

Rocco leaned closer and studied the sleeping baby. His fluff of dark hair had a slight curl to it. All the Leopardi men had thick dark hair with a curl, even if in adulthood Rocco had chosen to have his own hair cut so short that its curl couldn’t be seen. Josh’s eyelashes fanned out across his cheeks. His eyes were growing darker in colour. But what, after all, did that mean? Rocco could see nothing in Josh that reminded him of Antonio, but that would not stop his father from doing so if he was so minded. His father might now be bedridden, and living in the shadow of his own death, but he was still a very powerful and autocratic man—a man who was used to making sure that his will prevailed, no matter what the cost to others.

Rocco could see a difficult future ahead for this child lying so peacefully asleep in his cot if he did turn out to be Antonio’s son—and an even harder one for his mother. For all that he would welcome Josh into the family, Rocco knew his father would feel very differently about Josh’s mother. The Prince had indulged and spoiled Antonio from the moment he had been born, turning a blind eye to all his excesses as he grew to adulthood. How much had that indulgence been responsible for Antonio’s lifestyle and ultimately for his death?

Rocco smoothed the cover over Josh’s sleeping body, smiling at the small star-shaped little hand and watching Josh’s fingers curl round his own index finger, as though even in sleep the baby instinctively reached for the security of an adult touch.

The first thing Julie saw when she woke up was Rocco, bending over Josh’s cot, with one hand on the side of the cot and the other inside it. Her heart lurched into her chest wall. Rocco might deny it, but neither he nor his brothers had any reason to love Josh. They certainly hadn’t loved their own half-brother. Maria had gossiped to her, saying that all three brothers were independently wealthy, and there was certainly no question of any child of Antonio’s usurping their right to inherit their father’s titles. But if their father chose to leave his grandson money they had assumed would be theirs …

Immediately her protective instincts had her on her feet and hurrying into the nursery, demanding sharply, ‘What are you doing?’