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.
The old Prince’s retort had been typical of his way of thinking and his way of life. ‘This woman, in carrying Antonio’s child and keeping it from us, his family, is guilty of theft. The child must be brought here. It is his birthright and ours. Antonio was my son.’
And his most beloved son. They had all known that.
‘This child belongs here. It was Antonio’s dying wish to me that this should be so.’
‘Having no doubt refused flatly to accept any responsibility whatsoever for it during his lifetime, knowing our dear late half- brother as we do,’ Alessandro had murmured dulcetly to Rocco, out of earshot of their father.
‘That is all very well, Father, but we do not know the identity of the mother of Antonio’s child,’ Falcon had reminded their father, ‘since Antonio neglected to tell you her name.’
Their father had refused to listen.
‘The child must be found.’
That had been the Prince’s living will and his dying demand, and in the end they had had no honourable option as Leopardis other than to concede defeat.
Two weeks later they had all been back in their father’s bedchamber, to hear the results of the investigations Falcon had put in hand.
‘We now know that out of the multitude of women Antonio appears to have disported himself with last summer, only one went on to have a child,’ Falcon informed them all. ‘This woman was a British holidaymaker, attending the Cannes Film Festival at the time. Not entirely surprising, since Antonio had a taste for a combination of blonde hair and loose morals. However, there is no guarantee that it is this child to which Antonio was referring. It is true that it was conceived at the right time, but the only way we can be sure that the child is Antonio’s is via a DNA test, and for that we shall need the mother’s co-operation. In my view the simplest thing would be to approach the mother and—’
‘The child belongs here.’ Their father had interrupted Falcon angrily. ‘But only the child. The mother is nothing—little more than a slut who tempted and tormented my poor son until in his craziness his life was stolen from him and he was stolen from me. My beloved and most precious child—your brother. Your youngest brother. Where were you when he needed protecting from this harlot, whoever she is? You, Falcon, were in Florence, presiding over copyists and their fake works of art. You, Alessandro, were buying yet more jets for your airline—and you, Rocco, were too busy overseeing the rebuilding of Rome in the middle of the desert, for tourists to go and gawp at. No doubt flown there by your brother’s airline and decorated by Falcon’s copyists.’
They had all been aware of his angry contempt. But then they had all been aware of their father’s contempt for them all their lives. They were, after all, the sons of the woman their father had been forced to marry against his will.
Oh, yes, their father had been passionate in his contempt for them—expending energy he did not have in his determination to inject every bit of passion and persuasion into his voice as he extracted from them their reluctant promise that they would find the Englishwoman who had carried their dead brother’s child and that they would bring that child back to Sicily to be raised as a Leopardi.
Antonio himself could not be restored to their father since he was dead—killed in a senseless, stupid accident, showing off in his new car. So typical of him and so unacceptable to their father, who had adored the son of his second wife—the woman who had been his mistress during his marriage to their own mother.
If Falcon was right—and given Antonio’s well-known and well-documented