in a room warm enough to allow him to do so in comfort. Julie kissed his bare tummy, and laughed when he tightened his fingers in her hair, gently releasing them. He was smiling up at her so happily. Emotional tears filled her eyes. He was James’s child. She was sure of it.
‘You're so precious—do you know that?’ she told him, adding softly, ‘And your daddy would have loved you so very much.’
‘Whoever his daddy actually was.’
Julie’s heart lurched and rolled into her chest wall with a crash that seized her breath.
She hadn’t realised that Rocco had come back, and that he was now standing in the doorway between the nursery and her bedroom. His voice was as hard as diamonds on glass, and able to penetrate her defences just as easily.
‘You may think that I want your half-brother to be Josh’s father because your family is rich, but the truth is that I hope he isn’t,’ she retaliated fiercely, as soon as she could speak.
‘Liar. If that was the truth then you wouldn’t have made contact with Antonio to tell him that you were pregnant, and you certainly wouldn’t have accepted £25,000 from him to buy you off. There’s no point in denying it. The cheque went through Antonio’s bank account.’
Judy had taken money from Antonio Leopardi? She had never said anything about that to Julie. But then that was typical of Judy, and she would have known how much Julie would have disapproved. All Judy had told her was that Antonio Leopardi didn’t want to know that she was pregnant, and that she intended to tell James that the baby was his, having broken off their engagement just before she had gone to Cannes, but knowing that James adored her and would take her back. Which of course he had.
‘Strange and extremely clever, the way you’ve reinvented yourself as such an adoring mother—ready to go without herself in order to benefit her precious child.’
‘There’s more to being a good mother than buying expensive baby clothes,’ Julie defended herself.
‘Yes, and the first of those things is knowing who your baby’s father is. Unless, of course, you do know but you are keeping quiet about it in the hope of getting more money. If that’s the case let me warn you that you’re wasting your time. I’ve already told you what the terms of any deal will be for any child proved not to be Antonio’s.’
‘How typical of a man like you that you think of everything in terms of money. What I want for Josh can’t be bought.’
‘A man like me?’
He had left the doorway now and was striding towards her like some dark avenging Lucifer, intent on her destruction. Julie scrambled to her feet to stand protectively in front of Josh.
‘You, of course, are an expert on the male sex, aren’t you? So tell me. What exactly is a man like me?’
He was standing too close to her. Far too close to her.
‘You’re arrogant and … and selfish. You think that all that matters is what you want, and that just because you want—’
‘Just because I want what? You? Is that what you think?’
Julie was horrified. How on earth had the situation got so out of control so quickly?
‘No, of course not,’ she denied. The way he was looking at her and the silence he was maintaining unnerved her, and so fatally she rushed into it, adding frantically, ‘Why should you want me? I—’
‘You what? You want me to want you? You want me to tell you that every centimetre of you is now committed to my memory and engraved on my sexual responses? That in future I shall never be able to look at or touch any woman without comparing her to you? That from now on the pattern of woman carved on my desire is your image? Is that what you want?’
Without waiting for her response—which was just as well, Julie acknowledged inwardly, because she was in no state to think or say anything after hearing what he had just said—he continued dryly, ‘Of course such things come at a price, don’t they? And for that price I am sure that you would be very willing to assuage my longings and help me expunge those images. We are not, after all, talking of anything here other than a very basic form of lust.’
His voice was soft and mocking, and yet underscored with something age-old, man to woman, that was recognised deep within her. Recognised and responded to, Julie admitted apprehensively. She wanted to run from him, from the unwanted senses deep within her that he had aroused. But—dangerously—even more she wanted to stay. She abhorred what he was saying, and yet a wild, wilful something deep inside her wanted, if only for once, to be the kind of woman who would respond easily to such a challenge and enjoy arousing and sharing his lust—who would feel triumph in having aroused it and who would satisfy it and then walk away from it and from him without a single second of guilt or regret.
Very few women walked away from a man like this one, Julie suspected. It would be very empowering to be a woman who could do so. Judy could have done so, of course—but would she have? Would any woman if she thought—If she thought what? That she could tame Rocco and keep him?
What kind of foolish thoughts were those? In Rocco’s eyes wasn’t she already that woman she had just been describing mentally to herself, since he believed that she was her sister? What would it be like for once in her life to live that role? To know the power of being a woman who gloried in her sexuality and who used it to get whatever she wanted. What would it be like to walk that other road, live that other life, and know her sexuality?
Was she mad? She had other far more important things to think about than finding her own sad, repressed sensuality. She had Josh to think about and to protect.
Rocco gave her a heavy-lidded look of slanting sensuality that heated her blood, spreading arousal through her body unstoppably, like a swift floodtide flowing swiftly under the drag of a full moon. Inescapable and undeniable, it took her and possessed her, running wild and free within her.
‘Nothing to say?’ he challenged her.
It would be his fault if she took up his challenge. And he owed her something, didn’t he, after the way he had behaved towards her? Why didn’t she just take what she wanted? Her heart thumped unsteadily with the enormity of her own unfamiliar thoughts. What she wanted? She didn’t want him, did she? No, of course not. But there was a temptation there—a fierce, yearning surge as volcanic as Etna itself, demanding expression. Maybe so. But it could not be allowed that expression, Julie warned herself sternly.
What she was thinking was far too dangerous, and a form of madness. Perhaps it was a symptom of her anaemia, she thought shakily, like the weakness in her legs and the pounding in her heart.
‘No, I have nothing to say,’ she answered him. ‘You are not Antonio, after all.’
What on earth had she said that for?
‘No, I damned well am not.’
The quietly savage words told her all she needed to know about the extent of her folly—and her danger.
She tried to sidestep it—and him—but it was too late. He caught her as easily as he had lifted and carried her the previous night, his hands curling round her upper arms, making it impossible for her to escape.
‘You might think you are being very clever,
