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Her wedding dress had been carefully packed away in its dress bag, and there was no sign anywhere in the room that today had been her wedding day unless it was in the new shine of her rings. There was certainly no husband—no Rocco here with her, to make the vows they had exchanged real in the only way a marriage could be made real.
Julie undressed and headed for the shower before changing her mind, tempted instead by the thought of a luxurious soak in the large deep bath.
Pinning up her hair, she started to run the bath. On impulse she closed the nursery door so that she wouldn’t disturb Josh and switched on the bathroom’s state-of-the-art music system, which was loaded with a wide selection of different kinds of music.
Tonight the haunting sound of female blues singers crooning about their lost love best suited her mood.
The bathroom was its own private oasis of blissful self- indulgence, and the music and the bittersweet scent of the bath oil she had chosen perfectly matched her mood of melancholy and longing. The blues music whispered its knowledge of what it meant to be a woman hungering for a man who did not hunger back for her.
The bath was deep enough for her to slide her body beneath the water and let it lap at her throat, caressing her like warm scented silk. Her flesh was so aware of the pleasure it had known with Rocco and was now denied that every small movement of the water was almost a physical touch. If she closed her eyes it would be so easy to remember, to imagine, to transfer her memories of Rocco’s possession from the past to the present, to pretend that she was in truth his bride, lying here waiting for him and for his caress…
Rocco heard the muted strains of music the minute he opened the door and walked into the bedroom. He had spent longer at the site than he had planned, and even though he’d known that Julie wouldn’t have waited up for him there had been somethi
ng about entering the darkened villa on this, his wedding night, that had touched a newly exposed nerve deep within his sense of self, where he felt most vulnerable. He had thought himself safe from the pain that came from emotional loss through the death of his mother, as though the intensity of that had seared and sealed away his vulnerability, but now he rec¬ ognised that he had been wrong. Rocco didn’t like being wrong—about anything—and he liked even less the driving need that had brought him here to this night-shadowed bedroom that smelled of the rose scent Julie had worn when they exchanged their vows.
The bedroom was empty, and when he opened the door to the nursery Josh, its only occupant, lay sleeping peacefully in his cot. Closing the nursery door as he exited, Rocco looked towards the bathroom. A blues singer was sobbing out her tale of angry, passionate grief, her song drowning out the sound of his entrance. Julie was lying in the bath, her eyes closed, damp tendrils of hair escaping from her topknot to cling to her face. She was lost, oblivious to his presence, her parted lips and accelerated breathing telling his senses that she had given herself over to some private, sensual daydream. But not of him! Her left hand rested on the side of the bath, devoid of the ring he had placed there earlier.
A feeling Rocco didn’t want to analyse ripped through him in a tidal wave, sucking away reason and replacing it with the powerful rip curl of emotions it had dredged up from deep within him.
Julie was his wife, and this was their wedding night. No way was he going to have her fantasising about some other man. Without stopping to analyse his own reactions, he strode over to the bath, reaching down to take hold of her hand.
Julie opened her eyes and struggled to sit up, shocked into a panicky reaction by the unexpectedness of Rocco’s touch. The violence of her movements sent the bathwater splashing over the side of the bath, soaking Rocco’s shirt and jeans.
‘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.
