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.
