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‘No!’ The mobile slipped through her fingers to fall on the floor whilst Julie sat down on the stairs and covered her face with her hands.
Rocco scooped up the mobile, checking that Josh was still safely asleep in his buggy. When Julie failed to respond he autocratically listened to the message himself, and strode towards her.
Somehow she had managed to get herself under control and stand up, even though she felt sick with shock and despair. What was she going to do?
‘I don’t understand,’ she told Rocco. ‘Annette doesn’t even like children. She’s always refused to have a family, even though her husband desperately wants one. She wouldn’t even look at Josh, never mind hold him. She told me to keep him away from her in case he dirtied her expensive coat. I can’t let her take him. She won’t love him properly. I know she won’t.’
Her shocked distress aroused all Rocco’s protective instincts. He had grown up without his own mother and he knew the pain that caused. Josh had already bonded with Julie, and the truth was that he had grown attached to the child himself. Why should Josh be handed over to strangers just because they were a couple, when he could provide him not only with financial security but also with a father?
‘There is a solution,’ he told Julie, his mind made up.
‘What?’
‘Marriage.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘MARRIAGE,’ Julie repeated uncomprehendingly.
‘Yes,’ Rocco confirmed, telling her coolly, ‘If you and I were to marry, then there would be no question of anyone trying to take Josh from you.’
‘What? That’s…that’s not possible.’
Rocco frowned, his resolution, like his pride, hardened by her rejection and denial.
‘Why not?’
You don’t love me. How easily those words might have slipped from her lips—and how illuminatingly, shining an unwanted and far too bright light into the most private recesses of her own heart.
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Julie told him weakly.
‘On the contrary—it makes perfect sense.’ Rocco overruled her. ‘I know what the lack of parental love an
d the loss of a mother can do to a child, and since it is within my power to ensure that that does not happen to Josh, then—’
‘But to marry me? Josh is not your responsibility after all.’
‘I cannot agree with that. Whilst you and Josh are living beneath my roof you are both as much my responsibility as my father’s people are his. That is what it means to be a Leopardi. I cannot abdicate that responsibility any more than I can deny my name and my blood. It is my duty to honour my responsibility to my blood and to you.’
‘That’s…that’s feudal—’ Julie began, only to have Rocco stop her.
‘You believe, do you not, that you have a responsibility towards Josh, and that you must put his needs first and above your own and do what is right for him?’ he said.
Julie nodded her head, her heart sinking as she realised where this conversation might be leading.
‘Then you must understand that I too have my own sense of responsibility.’
He meant what he was saying, Julie recognized, but she still shook her head and said, ‘But we are nothing to you…’
‘You are here beneath my roof. Therefore you are my responsibility,’ Rocco repeated, before continuing. ‘On the other hand, if I have misunderstood your feelings and you do not feel you have to put your nephew’s best interests first—’
‘Of course I do.’
‘Then you will agree that in marrying me you will be doing exactly that and providing him not just with the security of two parents but also with financial security.’
What could she say? It was impossible to deny the logic of Rocco’s argument.
Every word he said reinforced for Julie what she had already come to know about him—namely that he was a man whose sense of responsibility was incredibly deep.
