Captive At The Sicilian Billionaire’s Command Page 16

  ‘Where is your wedding ring? Why have you taken it off?’

  Why was he looking at her as though she had committed some heinous crime? ‘It’s a bit loose and I didn’t want to lose it.’

  ‘Liar. You took it off because you didn’t want to be reminded of me whilst you lay there imagining your precious James pleasuring you.’

  They stared at one another, as though neither of them could quite believe what Rocco had said.

  ‘That’s not true,’ Julie denied.

  ‘Isn’t it? I’m not a fool. It was obvious when I came in here where your thoughts were—as obvious as the sensuality of their nature. Your body can’t lie about that even if you want to do so.’

  Before she could stop him Rocco had drawn his fingertip swiftly down her wet skin to the curve of her breast, unintentionally exposed when she had sat up in surprise. He moved along it to the flushed peak of her nipple, eagerly flaunting its erotic arousal.

  ‘Now tell me that you weren’t thinking about your lover,’ Rocco challenged her angrily.

  Julie tilted her chin. Her heart was thudding—with anger, she assured herself, even though she knew perfectly well that those jerky, fast-paced unsteady thuds within her ribcage were born more of excitement than anger, and that the sharp thrill of sensation shooting through her was pure, desire-driven heat.

  ‘Very well, then,’ she told him dangerously. ‘Yes, I was thinking about my lover.’ It was true, after all, even if he had mistaken the identity of that lover, not realising that it was Rocco himself she had been longing for and not James. ‘And why shouldn’t I if I want to?’

  Now she really had shocked herself. And yet there was a thrilling sense of wanton delight in having said those words.

  ‘Why shouldn’t you?’ Rocco’s lips thinned, his eyes almost black as he stared down at her. ‘Do you really need to ask me that? It’s less than twenty-four hours since I took you as my wife.’

  Fiery, illicit pleasure poured through her at the sound of those words, reinforcing for her everything she already knew about her own feelings.

  She wasn’t really actually trying to egg Rocco on to physically possess her, was she? And if she was? He was her husband, after all, so she had the right…

  The right? To what? To torment a man into making love to her when he didn’t really want to? Hot shame burned her conscience.

  ‘I think you should leave,’ she told Rocco unsteadily. The bathwater had gone cold and she was starting to shiver, chilled as much by her self-disgust as the cooling water.

  ‘Really?’

  Rocco’s voice was as soft as silk, wrapped around the wicked danger of a sharp stiletto blade—like whispers from the shadows that held a Pandora’s box of enticing delight laced with unknown dangers.

  ‘Well, I think I should do this.’

  His iron grip already held her shackled, but it was her own desire for him that really held her imprisoned and was her greatest enemy, Julie recognised as he lifted her from the bath with one easy movement that barely moved his chest, ignoring the water cascading from her as easily as he ignored her feebly voiced protests. In the background the music rose to a crescendo of pleading, but Julie no longer needed to plead for her lover.

  ‘Your clothes are wet.’ What an inane comment to make.

  ‘Then, like a good wife, you’d better take them off for me.’ Rocco mocked her.

  Undress him? Julie felt boneless with the melting heat of her own longing.

  The signs of her desire were clearly evident, but that desire was not for him, Rocco warned himself. Her thoughts had been with another man when she had lain there beneath the water, thinking of his touch.

  He wanted her. He was her husband.

  He took her hands and placed them on the wet fabric that covered his chest. ‘Undress me,’ he commanded.

  If she did as he was demanding she would be lost.

  ‘No,’ she refused, shaking her head. ‘I don’t want to.’

  It was a lie, but he couldn’t know that. For a minute, when he released her hands, she thought he was going to let her go and walk away. But then he cupped her face and started to kiss her—oh, so slowly and deliberately—in such an intensely focused way that she knew exactly what the punishment for refusing him was going to be.

  She tried to resist, keeping her lips tightly locked together, keeping her eyes wide open and refusing to look at him, tensing her whole body against his slow, sensual seduction of her.

  It had to be someone else who was making that small husky sound of pleasure. Another Julie who was tipping back her head and closing her eyes as she willingly offered herself up for his caress, who trembled wildly in a paroxysm of fevered arousal when his fingertips gently brushed her throat and then her breasts, whilst his mouth coaxed and tormented her own into eager participation in the kind of kiss that ravished her senses and laid bare her longing for him.

  She wanted him so badly. She wanted him body to body with her, flesh to flesh, touch to touch. Her hunger for him was fed by the thrust of his tongue against her own and the touch of his hands on her naked body, caressing her naked breasts, shaping the indentation of her waist and the curve of her hip. His fingers dipped into her own secret wetness, sending showers of fireworks of liquid pleasure exploding through her.

  She had to touch him as he was touching her. Impatiently she started to tug buttons through buttonholes in the urgency of her need, meeting and matching the passion of his kisses as the sensation of his skin beneath her fingertips accelerated her arousal.

  Her lips followed the eager, explorative journey of her fingertips, tracing the strong column of his throat and the broad sweep of his chest. His body hair was soft against her mouth; her fingers were clumsy on the belt that barred her way to the intimacy she longed for.

  Her protest when Rocco suddenly seized her hands to stay them was a raw sound of female deprivation.

  ‘Hush. Wait,’ Rocco told her, sweeping her up in his arms to carry her from the bathroom into the bedroom, where he placed her on the large bed.

  Looking up at him through the shadows, Julie felt as though her heart was so filled with love for him that it couldn’t contain the intensity of her emotions, that it was spilling from her like tears of acute pleasure. She lifted her hand to his face, tracing its shape wonderingly. If he left her now—But he was removing the rest of his clothes, and her heart lifted on the surging tide of her own desire as she looked at him, visually absorbing and recording every precious detail of his physical presence before finally giving in to her need to reach out and stroke her fingertips along the hard, erect length of him.

  Her intimate touch tipped Rocco over the edge of his self- control. He took hold of her, kissing her mouth and then her breasts, tugging gently on her nipples, and then less gently when he felt the immediate surge of her response and heard her cry out to him. Her hands reached down to hold his head against her body. His hands found her and caressed her, pleasured her to the point where her pleasure was almost more than she could endure.

  ‘My love,’ Julie whispered emotionally, moving feverishly against his touch, commanded by it and yet driven to push past that command to a place where she could command him. ‘My only love.’

  Thought and feeling melded together, burning away the old Julie, setting their mark on her for ever. She didn’t even see the look of dark bitterness shadowing Rocco’s eyes as he listened to her, much less register the moment of tension in his body as he swung between pride and desire, wanting her so desperately and yet filled with a need to reject that wanting, having heard her proclaim her love for another man.

  In the end his desire won. The pleasure his touch gave her was his mark of possession as he waited for her to come down from that place where he had taken her with the knowing stroke of his fingers to the plateau where his own desire waited impatiently for her.

  How well they fitted together—as though she had been made only for him, Julie thought dizzily as he stroked into her, filling her, re-s
ensitising her still-responsive flesh. Her muscles closed possessively around him, wanting him, rocking with sweet erotic pleasure at each movement within her, until the sweetness was stripped away and there was only a dark, raw passion that had her clinging to him as they swung above the chasm. She cried out to him in the darkness, feeling him sweep them both upwards to brilliance so surely that she was both laughing and crying with joy when he held her through the powerful spasms of their shared orgasm.

  It was over. She felt so weak, so lost—and so afraid. Rocco was lying on his back, apart from her instead of holding her as she longed for him to do.

  She had called him her love, but of course he was no such thing, Rocco acknowledged. She had meant those words for another man; the man she had exchanged inside her head for him.

  What a fool he had been not to recognise until he had her exactly what had happened to him. He didn’t just want her. He loved her.

  Rocco was regretting what had happened. Julie could tell. That was why he was lying so far away from her. How was it possible to have known so much happiness and yet now feel such dreadful pain? She longed for him to hold her and to whisper to her that he wanted her love. What a fool she was.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THEY had been married ten days. Maria had informed her again that Rocco had left the villa early to attend a site meeting. Every night Rocco came to her bed and made love to her, and every morning she woke up alone. Painful though it was for her to admit it, Julie acknowledged that she couldn’t avoid knowing that the physical intimacy they now shared had, instead of bringing them closer together, actually destroyed the bond she had felt they were beginning to build. Rocco no longer sought her out to talk with her. He no longer smiled at her, or seemed to want to be with her, and even in bed there was a repressed tension about him that was almost tinged with anger—because he regretted his generosity in marrying her?

  It was Julie’s nature to give generously to those she loved, without counting the cost to herself, and never more so than when it came to Rocco. She hated the thought that she could be blighting his life and shadowing his enjoyment of it. She wanted him to be happy, to see him smile, hear him laugh. But even if that meant it was someone else, another woman, whose presence gave him those things?

  She loved him, and that meant putting his happiness first, Julie insisted to herself as she reached out to unclamp Josh’s too exploratory fingers from the edge of the rug on which he was lying, which he was now trying desperately to tug from beneath himself.

  The patio where Julie was sitting was warm from the morning sun; her body still had that lethargic ache that came from intense sexual pleasure. Julie looked up lazily when Maria suddenly appeared, her laziness disappearing when Maria told her importantly, ‘Il Principe is here to see you.’

  The Prince? Rocco’s father? She had understood from Rocco that his father was suffering from a terminal heart condition and was virtually bedridden. Why on earth would he want to see her?

  ‘Are you sure it is me he wishes to see and not Rocco?’ she asked Maria uncertainly.

  ‘It is you he wishes to see,’ Maria confirmed, adding, ‘Quick—you must hurry and not keep him waiting.’

  Against her better judgement Julie found that she was allowing herself to be coaxed and bullied into hurrying back into the house, Josh clasped tightly in her arms.

  Maria had shown Rocco’s father into the grandest of all the formal salons, twenty metres long and fifteen metres wide, with heavy rococo décor and gilded furniture. Its rich blue embroidered silk drapes threw shadows that reached out to create dim pools of darkness, making it almost impossible to see anything clearly.

  It was a shock to see Rocco’s good looks stamped so clearly on the face of the man seated in a wheelchair behind which was standing a harassed-looking middle-aged man, whom Julie assumed must be his attendant. The Prince’s mouth was etched with pride, and his eyes were colder than polished black marble.

  He was, Julie recognised, everything that Rocco had warned her he would be, and her heart ached for the three small boys left to this man’s pitiless care by the death of the mother who had loved them.

  ‘So!’ His angry gaze raked Julie from top to toe. ‘There is no need for me to ask why you married my son. There can only be one reason.’

  Rocco, alerted to his father’s arrival at the villa by a phone call from Maria, arrived just as his father and Julie were confronting one another. Both of them were oblivious to his presence, the hostility between them so powerful it was almost like a force field.

  ‘Actually, there are two reasons,’ Julie corrected the Prince determinedly. ‘One is my love for my nephew, and the other is my love for Rocco himself.’

  Pride and truth rang in the clear enunciation of her words, causing Rocco to remain where he was instead of alerting them to his presence.

  ‘You love my son?’ Rocco’s father gave a contemptuous shrug. ‘Of course you do. After all, he is a rich man.’

  ‘I love Rocco for what he is himself, not for his wealth. I would love him just as much if he was poor. In fact I wish he was,’ Julie told the Prince passionately.

  Rocco’s father gave her another cold look.

  ‘Such words are the words of the ignorant and the foolish. How naïve you are. I suppose you believe that Rocco returns your feelings, do you? Your kind always do.’

  Rocco had heard enough. He wasn’t about to let his father verbally abuse and hurt Julie. He started to move forward, but once again the sound of Julie’s emotionally charged voice stopped him.

  ‘No. I don’t,’ Julie answered her inquisitor. ‘I know that Rocco married me for reasons of duty and of…of chivalry. Because he wants to protect Josh from being stolen from me to suffer as he himself did as a child.’

  She could be accused of being cruel, Julie knew, but hadn’t this man been cruel to his three eldest sons? Hadn’t he denied them the love they had had every right to expect from him? Shouldn’t she, out of her love for Rocco, redress the balance if only a little, and show him what an honourable and wonderful man his third son was—even if his father didn’t have the wisdom to see it for himself?

  ‘I don’t love Rocco because he is your son, or because he has wealth and position. I love him because despite everything he has had to endure the love his mother bore him has touched his heart and made him something that money can never buy.’

  ‘And what might that be?’

  ‘Rocco may have his pride—the pride of his ancestors—but he also has magnanimity of spirit. He has compassion and wisdom; he understands the true meaning of love. He is a man who as a child never knew the true love of a father, and yet he has grown beyond that, instead of allowing it to cripple him emotionally, to take into his protection a child who has no claim whatsoever on him.

  ‘You may be a Prince, but Rocco bears a higher and far more worthy title—and that is the title of a good and honest man, the best of men. The kind of man other men will always look up to because of what he is, not who he is, the kind of man who deserves to have a loving father who values him as he should be valued. I will never burden Rocco with my love. He already has enough to bear. But neither will I allow you to think that he needs anything to win a woman’s love other than himself. I would be proud to follow him in rags to the end of the earth if he asked that of me.’

  She almost threw her last words at Rocco’s father, turning on her heel as she did so, unable to endure another second in his company. She was not going to allow Rocco’s father to deni¬ grate the man she loved, no matter how afraid he made her feel, Julie told herself fiercely—and then gasped with shock when she saw Rocco standing in front of her.

  ‘Julie.’

  He was angry with her. He had to be. Shaking her head, Julie evaded him, holding Josh tightly as she fled.

  Rocco let her go. What he needed to say to her was best said in private—and besides, there were things he had to say to his father, issues that must now be dealt with.

  Approach
ing the wheelchair, he stood looking down at the man seated in it. Falcon had taught him by example to give their father respect, as a matter of duty and as a gift of love and honour to their dead mother, but it was not a respect that came freely and lovingly from his heart, Rocco acknowledged.

  ‘How could you, a Leopardi, marry this—this nobody?’ the Prince demanded furiously. ‘You are my son. You have a duty to me and to your name. Now you have shamed me and that name by marrying this nothing, who should have been sent back where she came from once you knew that her child was not Antonio’s. It is no wonder that you married in secret to hide your shame.’

  There was so much Rocco wanted to say to his father. But he could see where the swollen vein in his temple had started to throb and pulse under the force of his anger, and he could see, too, the anxious concern of the medical attendant Dr Vittorio had placed in charge of the Prince’s day-to-day care.

  How pitiful he was, this man who had dominated his childhood and who had filled Rocco with both the longing for approval and attention and the bitter realisation that he would never receive them.

  Now, as a result of his treatment of them as children, at a time when a good father should at this stage of his life have commanded their love and care, his father could only command the cold emptiness of duty. Rocco thought of the way in which Josh was already recognising him, smiling up at him and holding out his arms to him. He made himself a promise that the baby’s trust would never be abused, and that the small shoot of love was something he would protect and nurture for as long as Josh needed those things from him.

  ‘What you mistake for secrecy, Father, was in fact speed. And the reason I married Julie with speed was because I was afraid she might realise how unworthy of her I am and that I would lose her.’

  As he spoke Rocco recognised that there was a great deal of truth in what he was saying.

  ‘Far from being ashamed of my wife, I am very proud of her, and there is nothing I would have liked more than to have my brothers witness our marriage.’