Pride: Captive At The Sicilian Billionaire's Command

Rocco turned his head to look at her, but didn’t remove his hand.

Protectively, Julie went round to the other side of the cot to look anxiously at Josh, only able to relax when she recognised that he was breathing safely and easily. That should have been enough to steady her, but the sight of

Josh’s small hand curled tightly round Rocco’s finger caused a fresh lurch of her heart—this time from angry pain rather than fear for the little boy.

Rocco had no right to enter the nursery and watch over the child in a way that should have belonged only to Josh’s father. Julie had to fight not to snatch Josh up and hold him tightly, but she had to satisfy herself with demanding, ‘Why are you in here?’

‘Because I choose to be. This is after all my home, and Josh could be my nephew. It’s only natural that I should want to check that he hasn’t taken any harm from the reckless behaviour of his mother.’

His suave response, with its reminder of things she’d rather forget, increased Julie’s anxiety—but that was nothing to the sudden downward plunge of her heart when Rocco gently eased his finger free of Josh’s grip and urged Julie back into her own room with a calm, ‘I have news.

‘Unfortunately my father is aware that you and Josh are on the island,’ he began, ‘and even more unfortunately he has decided that he will know Antonio’s son, without recourse to a DNA test, the minute he sets eyes on him. I realize, of course, that you will probably be delighted by the thought that my father in his desperation to find his grandson may well decide that Josh is Antonio’s child.’

‘Well, that is where you are wrong,’ Julie denied immediately. ‘Surprising though you might find it, the truth is that I do not want Josh to be Antonio’s son. I’d much rather that James is his father—after all, James was prepared to marry … me, and bring Josh up as his own.’

The minute the hot words were out Julie wished desperately that she had not said them. But it was too late for those regrets now. Rocco was giving her a very grim look indeed, and as she watched he strode over to her bedroom door and closed it, turning round to confront her.

‘So there is another man whom you know could be Josh’s father?’ he demanded coldly.

‘Not is—was,’ Julie was forced to admit. ‘He’s dead now. Killed in a rail accident.’

‘Why have you not said anything of this before?’

‘You hardly gave me the chance. All you cared about was proving whether or not your half-brother was Josh’s father.’

‘You say you do not want Josh to be Antonio’s, and yet you contacted Antonio to tell him that you were having his child. He gave you money to buy you off.’

Rocco was angry—furiously, savagely angry—at the thought of all the time that had been wasted when with a few simple words she could have said right from the start that Antonio was not Josh’s father.

‘Was there ever any chance that Josh might be Antonio’s? Or was it all a scam cooked up between you and your lover to get money out of Antonio for a child that you knew all along was not his? Answer me,’ he demanded harshly, ‘unless you want me to shake the answer out of you.’

‘I don’t know,’ Julie admitted.

CHAPTER EIGHT

ROCCO stared at her.

‘You don’t know what?’ he demanded caustically.

‘I don’t know who Josh’s father was,’ she told him truthfully. ‘But I do know that I want it to be James and not Antonio.’

‘You loved him? This James?’

What was he doing? What possible difference did it make what she had felt, and why should he care?

‘Yes.’ The tears Julie didn’t want to shed blurred her vision and her voice.

‘But you still had sex with my brother.’

His voice might be flat, but there was no mistaking the contempt it held.

‘James and I had quarrelled. I thought it was over. I went on holiday and … and it just happened …’

‘It just happened?’ Rocco mimicked her. ‘Just like that? A moment of weakness when you were missing the man you really loved. Is that what you mean?’

Julie swallowed. That was what had happened to her when she had for those awful, dreadful minutes actually wanted him, Rocco, wasn’t it? The betrayal of her longstanding love for James had merely been a shameful moment of madness and weakness.

‘Yes,’ she agreed woodenly.

Rocco strode towards her, his hands gripping her shoulders so tightly that his fingers dug painfully into her tender flesh. He half shook her as he told her bitingly, ‘Liar. What “just happened”, as you call it, was that Antonio hired you—along with another girl—to indulge him in his sexual fantasies. We know that because we found the receipt amongst his papers—although of course you and the other girl who put on that shabby little show for him weren’t the only entertainment he paid for during his visit to Cannes. At least the madam he used ensured that her girls had regular health checks—the cost of those was on the bill as well. I must say, though, that I’m surprised you used your real name instead of a fictional name of some kind.’

Rocco made a sound of disgust, and released her with so much force that Julie fell back against the bed. She was trembling so much that she had to sit down. This was awful—dreadful—worse than anything she had ever imagined having to face. She had known that Judy was sexually promiscuous, of course, but not this. Poor James. He had loved her so very much. Thank goodness he had never known what she was really like. It also answered the riddle of why Rocco had never questioned the discrepancy in their names. Judy had used Julie’s name while in Cannes, betraying her yet again. Hot tears seared the backs of Julie’s eyes.

‘Did you tell James how you spent your time in Cannes?’ Rocco demanded, as though he had somehow guessed the direction of her own thoughts.

‘That’s none of your business,’ Julie told him, almost spitting the words at him in her determination to protect the man she had loved.

‘That’s where you’re wrong. You’ve made it my business by being here. Did you plan the whole thing between you? You and this James? Did he procure you for Antonio, setting him up so that the pair of you could blackmail him with the threat of a child? That would certainly make you two of a kind.’

Julie sprang up off the bed, her face burning with the heat of her anger.

‘James was a decent, kind and gentle man. He was worth a thousand men like you and your half-brother—arrogant, selfish, emotionally barren men, who think they can buy whatever they want.’

‘What? You dare to put me in the same category as Antonio?’

‘Why not?’ Julie shot back. ‘You both carry the same blood in your veins, after all.’

‘Why, you—’

He was bending over her, dragging her to her feet. Frantically Julie fought to break free of his manacling grip on her wrists.

‘I loved James,’ she told him. ‘But someone like you could never understand that.’ Her voice caught and then broke.

Stifling an oath, Rocco released one of her wrists to cup her chin and lift it, so that he could look into her eyes. She looked like a martyr, all trampled pride and virtue, defending a lost love.

‘You say that now,’ he told her savagely, ‘but you were still prepared to give yourself to me.’

‘No. I loathe the thought of you touching me.’

‘Like this, you mean?’

He was going to regret this when he had calmed down,

Rocco knew, but right now his pride was asserting its need to be assuaged in a way that was driving out everything else.

Whilst she protested, he bent his head and silenced her with the pressure of his mouth on hers.

Julie told herself that she didn’t want him, that she truly did loathe him, but some irresistible form of alchemy was taking place, transforming those feelings into their exact opposite. Her free hand lifted to his jaw—rough with nearly a full day’s growth of beard, prickling the tender pads of her fingertips—to keep his mouth on her own.