Her one and only love. Her one and only lover. It only things had been different. If only she had been the one to conceive his child. If only…
Losing him still hurt so very much. Only with his death had she admitted that somewhere deep inside herself she had been cherishing the foolish hope that one day he would come back to her.
Rocco watched the shadows come and go in the woman’s unusually expressive dark grey eyes. The only part of her that looked anything like alive. He had never seen such a washed-out-looking female.
‘A debt collector?’ He gave her a haughty look, before adding dryly, ‘You could call me that,’ he agreed, answering Julie’s bitter question. ‘Although what I’m here for is more properly a matter of repossession.’
Repossession? There wasn’t anything left in the flat to repossess. The bailiffs had taken it all. She tried to look braver than she felt as she looked at the man.
The harsh street lighting gave his features a Byzantine quality of polished arrogance allied to cruelty, gilding the olive skin drawn tight over the high cheekbones. It was the face of a man without mercy or compassion—the face of a man whose heritage was rooted in the alien and the dangerous, Julie recognised.
It was hard for Rocco to see what could possibly have attracted his young half-brother to this pale plain English girl. She was thin to the point of malnourishment, whey-faced, and so far as he could see without charm or personality—but perhaps he was being unfair. Given enough champagne and the illegal party drugs his late half-brother had favoured, maybe she had sparkled in the tawdry manner in which Antonio had liked his women to sparkle.
Distaste filled him—for his late half-brother’s way of life, for the morals of the woman standing in front of him, but most of all for the duty that had been imposed upon him by his own birth and his elder brother’s conscience.
He had been against this whole thing right from the start. A child’s place was with its mother. But Alessandro had pointed out that the child would be with its mother, at all times, and would continue to remain with her since Rocco’s task was to bring them both back to Sicily with him. In fact, now that he had seen the circumstances in which the pair of them seemed to be living, Rocco acknowledged that his intervention in their lives could only be of benefit—to them both.
She was so cold, and she must get Josh inside—but he was still standing in front her. Josh still wasn’t over the nasty cough he had caught at the beginning of the winter.
Poor baby, he had had so many problems since her sister had given birth to him three weeks early, in January. First there had been the fact that Judy had never wanted him in the first place. Then there had been his inability to feed properly, followed by the discovery that he was slightly tongue-tied… That had led to a very minor medical procedure, after which—perhaps because Judy had not been careful enough—he had contracted an infection, which in turn had led to further feeding problems. And then with one blow fate had robbed him of his parents and both sets of grandparents.
But somehow Julie would make it up to him. She would love him and look after him. He was, after all, all she had left of James and her family, even if he hadn’t already been precious to her in his own right.
When they had come to tell her about the train accident which had killed so many people, including her own and Josh’s family, she had made a silent vow to the man she loved so much to love and protect the child he had believed was his.
James had been so proud and excited when he had discovered that Judy was pregnant…
Rocco was getting impatient. He was a Leopardi after all. The Leopardis had ruled their lands and dispensed their own form of law in Sicily from the time of the Crusades onwards. Rocco had grown up in an environment where to be a Leopardi meant that one’s word was law.
‘I don’t know what it is you wish to repossess,’ Julie began tiredly, ‘but my…my baby is cold, and I really need to get him inside.’ She didn’t really want to have to open her handbag in front of this stranger, but she needed to get her keys so that she could let herself into the flat. It wasn’t easy, trying to surreptitiously open her handbag and at the same time hold Josh safe, and when she saw the way the man was looking at her, with a mix of male irritation and impatience, she knew that her attempt at discretion had been a waste of time.
‘Let me hold the child for you.’ The cool assurance in the male voice combined with the unexpected offer caused Julie’s eyes to widen in astonishment. He sounded as though he was perfectly at home holding young babies.
‘You’ve got children of your own?’ Julie’s face burned as she realised how personal and inappropriate her question was.
His terse ‘No’ compounded those feelings, which hardly inspired her to hand over Josh. But then her ineffectual scrabbling one-handedly in the bag suddenly caused it to tilt upwards, disgorging some of its contents onto the wet street, including her purse, an assortment of bills that belonged to Judy, her keys and their passports—Josh’s a sad reminder of the honeymoon her sister had been so excited about, their first holiday as a family. Rocco frowned as he looked down at the wet pavement and saw the passports amongst the other detritus that had spilled from the woman’s handbag.
Ignoring Julie’s gasp of protest, he bent down to retrieve her possessions, picking up the now wet bills and the two passports before casually flicking them open. Both passports were in his hand—a providential accident or a potent sign that this task might after all be simpler and easier than he had thought? What kind of woman carried passports around with her? he wondered, and then grimaced as he found the answer to his own question.
Obviously the kind who expected that the opportunity to leave the country might occur at any time and wanted to be prepared for it. He imagined it was the kind of thing that would be quite common where high-class hookers were concerned.
But this pathetic and unappealing-looking woman couldn’t have looked less like anything high-class. Rocco reached for her purse, frowning as he felt its emptiness, and then picked up her keys.
He was handing everything back to her, including her keys. Julie exhaled shakily in relief. She wasn’t sure just what she had been fearing, but now she admitted she did feel a bit more relaxed—or at least she did until he said autocractically, ‘The baby needs to be out of this rain and wind.’ He put his hand on her arm, nodding in the direction of his car as he told her, ‘My car’s over there.’
Had she moved of her own volition, or was it a combination of the wind and his hand on her arm that had somehow brought her so close to his car that she was standing with it on one side of her and him on the other, hemming her in? Julie shivered.
What were his intentions? What did he really want? Not her. Not a man like this one, whose every movement and expression suggested a certain contempt for everything and anything that was not of the very best—including the speed with which his hand had dropped from her arm. All she needed to do was simply ask him to move. She could even push past him. Her hand was beginning to feel numb from clinging on to her possessions, and Josh was an increasingly heavy weight on her arm, despite his slightness. Carefully she tried to adjust Josh’s position to ease her arm.
‘Let me take him.’ He was reaching for Josh, Julie recognised immediately, all maternal anxiety, his hands long- fingered, lean and tanned against the baby’s shabby suit.
‘What is it you want?’ she demanded. ‘Who sent you here?’
‘No one sends me anywhere,’ he told her coldly. ‘And it isn’t who I am from you should be asking, but where.’
‘Where? I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’
‘No? Try this, then. I’m from the country and the family to whom the boy belongs.’
Julie’s eyes were as grey and drained of warm blue as London’s March sky, and they registered shock and then fear as the meaning of his words slammed into her heart, causing it to thud so heavily that she could hear its beat in her own ears.
‘You’re