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It would be a long time before she could forget the feel of those hard hands on her body, and even longer—if ever—before she could forget the feel of his mouth on hers. As an adult woman who earned her own living, she found the thought of wearing clothes bought for her by someone else made her body stiffen in angry rejection—but, whilst she might be able to afford the luxury of pride and self-denial for herself, she couldn’t do that to Josh.
When she found the carefully folded baby clothes she looked at them with a mixture of anger and pain. Designer label baby clothes. What a shocking waste of money. All Josh or indeed any baby needed, surely, was simply clothes that were warm and clean and fitted? Even so, it was hard to stop herself from drawing in a small breath of delight as she removed a complete matching set of baby boy’s clothes in soft blue, cream and beige. The little shirt had an identifiable designer check, the beige trousers were vaguely ‘cargo’ style, and the cardigan was blue and trimmed again with the same check—like the socks that completed the outfit. Even the babygro to go under everything had its own designer logo, and the disposable nappies were not only the right size, but were also ‘boy’ nappies—a luxury she had never been able to afford, and which she had told herself was little more than a cynical marketing ploy designed to add yet another expense to being a parent.
It was impossible to even think of touching such exquisite clothes whilst she was still wearing her formula-encrusted jumper—which, of course, would have to be washed and somehow dried in time for her to put it back on before she left the plane.
In the bathroom, Josh had started to cry. Quickly Julie pulled the jumper over her head. She needed a shower every bit as much as Josh needed a bath, so she might as well remove her skirt and her tights as well.
If there was one thing Josh did enjoy it was his bath, and with all the splashing around he did she’d be better off bathing him wearing only her bra and knickers.
It was amazing what wealth could do: nothing that Josh might need had been forgotten—right down to a baby bath and luxury products that smelled deliciously of vanilla.
Lifting Josh out of the bath, Julie wrapped him in a towel and carried him through into the bedroom, where she finally managed to coax him to take a bit more of his formula.
He was falling asleep as she put a clean nappy on him and then fastened him into a brand-new, deliciously soft sleep suit patterned with floppy-eared rabbits.
Kissing him tenderly, she put him in the sky cot, making sure that he was secure and safe before returning to the bathroom, where she washed out her jumper, cleaned up the baby bathtime mess, and then finally—blissfully—stepped into the shower.
In the main salon, Rocco finished writing the e-mail he was sending his elder brother and then tapped the ‘send’ button, mentally reviewing the events that had led to the search for Antonio’s child.
Rocco hadn’t planned to spend Christmas with his father and his brothers. He’d intended to fly to Colorado to stay with friends and ski, but then his eldest brother had telephoned him with the news that their father was terminally ill, so Rocco had flown home instead.
Home. Rocco lifted his arms to link his hands behind his head, exhaling as he did so. He was naturally strongly built, but the hard physical labour he had done during his teenage years, when he had preferred to work on a building site during his summer holidays rather than be financially tethered to his father, had honed and developed his muscles in a way that had left a legacy Rocco’s tailors deplored and his lovers adored. Happily, one of the benefits of being a billionaire was that he could afford to have his shirts hand-made and made to measure, to accommodate the powerful muscles of his chest and upper arms.
Falcon, aesthete that he was, tended to look down his long, proud nose at what he somewhat derisorily termed Rocco’s ‘prize fighter torso’. Alessandro, his second brother, was less critical.
‘Who says that Father is dying?’ Rocco had asked Falcon cynically. ‘Because if it is the old man himself…’
‘It isn’t. I’ve spoken to the specialist myself. He gives Father a year at the most. I see no point in any of us pretending that we’re grief stricken,’ Falcon had continued coolly. ‘At least here amongst ourselves we can be open and honest without being judged as uncaring.’
From the high windows of the ancient fortress that had been their childhood home it was possible—just—to see the summit of Mount Etna. Etna, like their father, breathed bellicosity, fire and danger—and like their father it was a symbol of power. The kind of power that could be cruel and destructive.
Their father’s power, though, was waning, if Falcon was to be believed, and his eldest brother had never given Rocco reason to do anything other than believe him.
It had been a solemn moment. Their father—the head of one of Sicily’s greatest, most powerful and rich aristocratic dynasties—was dying.
At thirty-four, a billionaire in his own right via his own endeavours, and the least loved and favoured of his father’s three living sons, Rocco acknowledged that he should have been the last person to be swayed by the deathbed plea of a man who had spent his entire adult life manipulating others to his own will, and who was responsible for the death of Rocco’s own mother. No more children, their father had been told after the births of Falcon and Alessandro, but he had ignored that warning, and his delicate wife had died within hours of giving birth to her third son.
Her death had left a bitterness and a canker at the heart of the family, dividing father and sons, and that bitterness had been driven deeper when their father had married his long-term mistress within a year of their mother’s death.
However, tradition was burned deep into the hearts of the Leopardi family, handed down from generation to generation from the time when the Saracens had been driven from the land by the Normans and the first Leopardi had taken as his wife the daughter of the Saracen lord who had owned the vast, rich tracts of land that had passed with her to her husband. Those traditions involved putting the family and what was best for it first, rather than any individual member. They had held fast and become so tightly woven into the Leopardi culture that they were bred into their blood and souls.
As Falcon had said after he had spoken with them, despite their lack of love for their dying father they could not simply turn their backs and walk away from the duty he had imposed on them all.
They had been summoned to their father’s bedchamber—a lofty, feudally styled room, hung with the banners of past battle glories—where their father had been lying almost in state in the vast double bed.
It had been in this bed that they had all been conceived, including Antonio, their late half-brother—who, if their father was to be believed, had confided to him before he died that he had fathered a child.
‘There is a child—born to an Englishwoman. And that child is a Leopardi.’
Their father’s long thin fingers had curled round the silver head of his cane and he’d rapped it hard on the floor.
‘It is Leopardi and Sicilian by its father’s blood. He or she belongs here at Castello Leopardi, with this family.’
‘And the mother of this child?’ Alessandro had asked.
‘Antonio did not have time to say her name.’
Rocco remembered thinking that Antonio probably hadn’t even been able to remember it.
