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‘Yes,’ Jemima muttered, dry-mouthed, nerves rattling through her like express trains as yet another fear presented itself to her.
All bets were off if he intended to have her tested for DNA. Did twins have the same DNA? She had no idea and worried that she would be exposed as an imposter. She lowered her feathery lashes. Well, she would just have to wait and see what happened. She was not in a position to do anything else. Arguing against the need for such testing would only muddy the waters. It wouldn’t achieve anything. It would only increase the animosity and uncertainty about her nephew’s future.
‘So, you will agree to this?’ Luciano said softly.
Involuntarily, Jemima glanced at him and connected with liquid dark eyes surrounded by black velvet lashes as lush as his son’s. Her heart went bang-bang-bang inside her and she felt incredibly dizzy, as if she stood on the edge of an abyss gazing down at a perilous drop. Something tugged and tightened low in her pelvis and she was unexpectedly alarmingly aware of her body as if her prickling skin had suddenly become too tender to bear the weight of her clothes. ‘Yes...’
‘In fact you will agree to all my demands,’ Luciano told her without skipping a beat while he silently marvelled at the translucent perfection of her pale blue eyes. ‘Because you are not stupid and it would be very stupid to refuse me anything that I want.’
Brows pleating, Charles Bennett turned to study his client in astonishment and then his attention skimmed back to the young blonde woman staring back at Luciano as if he had cast a magic spell over her.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_e1c15255-286e-5466-b7d0-e17c2ab78355)
‘AND WHY WOULD you think that?’ Jemima fired back in sudden bewilderment, shaking her head as though to clear it.
‘Because I hold pole position,’ Luciano informed her with chilling assurance. ‘I have security-camera footage of you stealing credit cards and using one of them in an act of fraud. If I should choose to pass that evidence to the police, I—’
‘You’re threatening me!’ Jemima interrupted in shock.
Stolen credit cards? Was he serious? Was it possible that Julie had sunk that low while she was working in London? Jemima did recall wondering how her sister was contriving to stay at a fancy hotel. She had asked and Julie had winced as though such a financial enquiry were incredibly rude and had sulkily refused to explain.
‘My client is not threatening you,’ Charles Bennett interposed flatly. ‘He is simply telling you that he has footage of the theft.’
But Jemima had turned pale as death and did not dare look in Luciano’s direction again. Proof of theft? My goodness, he could have her arrested right here and now! Forcibly parted from Nicky! Her lashes fluttered rapidly as she struggled to think.
‘So you will agree to the DNA testing?’ Luciano queried once more.
‘Yes,’ she agreed shakily.
‘We will endeavour to be civilised about this matter.’
In receipt of that unpersuasive statement, Jemima’s palm tingled. Never in her life had she wanted so badly to slap someone for lying. But that richly confident, patronising assurance from Luciano Vitale sent violent vibes of antagonism coursing through her and, daringly, she turned her head to look at him again. It was a grave mistake. As she fell into the hypnotic darkness of his gaze shock gripped her, tensing every muscle with sudden bone-deep fear for in Luciano she sensed a propensity for violence that made a mockery of her own softer nature. He was a man of extremes, of dangerous emotions and dangerous drives, and for a split second it was all there in his extraordinarily compelling eyes like a high-voltage electrical pulse zapping her with a stinging warning to back off or take the consequences. Seemingly he hid the disturbing reality of his true nature behind a chillingly polite mask.
‘Yes, we must try to be civilised,’ she heard herself say obediently while she shrank from the terrifying surge of ESP that had enveloped her in an adrenaline-charged panic mere seconds earlier.
‘I can be reasonable,’ Luciano declared, smooth as polished glass. ‘But I will do nothing that could put me on the wrong side of British law. Be clear on that score.’
‘Of course,’ she conceded, wondering why she didn’t feel reassured by that moral statement.
He wanted to stay on the right side of the law. She quite understood that. Only, where did that leave her? Julie had committed her crimes in Jemima’s name and the only way for Jemima to clear her name was to own up to her sister’s identity theft. Unfortunately doing that would also mean that she lost the right to care for Nicky. How could she bear that loss? How could she risk it? All she could do in the short-term, she thought in a panic, was fake being Julie until she was confronted by the police. At that point she would have to come clean because she would have no other choice.
Luciano studied his quarry, his gaze instinctively lingering on her ripe mouth and the porcelain smoothness of the upper slopes of her full breasts. He was a man and he supposed it was natural for him to notice her body, but the pulse of response at his groin and the sudden tightening there infuriated him. He turned away dismissively, broad shoulders rigid below his exquisitely tailored charcoal-grey suit jacket.
‘The technician will call to take the sample this afternoon,’ he delivered.
‘You’re not wasting any time,’ Jemima remarked gingerly.
Luciano swung back, eyes narrowed and cutting as black razors. ‘You have already wasted a great deal of my time,’ he told her with brutal bluntness.
Jemima clenched her teeth together and glanced at his companion, whose discomfiture was unhidden. There was civilised and civilised, she guessed, and Luciano Vitale had no intention of treating someone like her with kid gloves. It was clear that he saw her as inferior in every way. She would have to toughen up, she told herself urgently, toughen up to handle someone who disliked and distrusted her without showing weakness. Weakness, she sensed, he would use against her.
Shell-shocked as Jemima was by Luciano’s visit, once he had left she followed her usual routine with Nicky. She had looked forward to spending the long summer holidays with the little boy before she had to make childcare arrangements to enable her to return to work at the start of the new term. Now she was wondering if she would lose custody of him before then. She was down on the floor playing with Nicky when the doorbell went again.
It was the technician from the DNA-testing facility. The woman extended a consent form on a board for her to sign and then asked her to hold Nicky. The swab was done in seconds and Jemima waited for the technician to use the same procedure on her but instead she packaged the swab and departed, her job evidently complete. Heaving a sigh of relief that she herself had not been asked to give a sample, Jemima was in no mood for further company and she suppressed a weary groan when yet another caller turned up at the door.
Her face stiffened when she recognised her ex-boyfriend. Yes, she was still friends with Steven because her parents liked him and she had had to deal with the awkwardness of continuing meetings whether she liked it or not. Steven was a big mover and shaker in the church she attended and ran a young evangelical group to great acclaim.
‘May I come in?’ Steven pressed when the polite small talk about her parents’ little holiday had dried up and she was rather hoping he would take the hint and leave.
‘Nicky’s still up,’ Jemima warned him.
‘How’s the little chap doing?’ Steven enquired with his widest, fakest smile.
‘Well, his father may have turned up,’ Jemima heard herself say without meaning to. That she had admitted that much to Steven was evidence of how much emotional turmoil she was in because once she had realised how much he disapproved of her taking responsibility for Julie’s son she had stopped confiding in the tall blond man.
Steven took a seat with the casual informality of a regular visitor. A handsome dentist with a lucrative line in private patients, her ex was well liked by all. Jemima, however, was rather less keen. She had believed she loved Steven for years and had fully expected to marry him before Julie came into their lives.
‘Yes, he’s good-looking and he could give me some fun but he’s your boyfriend. I’m not poaching him,’ Julie had told her squarely.
But Jemima hadn’t wanted to keep Steven by default and once she’d realised how infatuated he was with her twin she had set him free. Of course, as a couple, Steven and Julie hadn’t suited, as Jemima had suspected at the outset. Her sister and her ex had enjoyed a short-lived fling, nothing more, and Jemima genuinely did not hold Steven’s defection against him. How could she possibly blame him for having found her colourful, lively sister more attractive? No, what annoyed Jemima about Steven was that he was smugly convinced that he could talk his way back into Jemima’s affections now that Julie was gone. Steven had no sensitivity whatsoever.
‘His father?’ Steven echoed on a rising note of interest. ‘Tell me more.’
Jemima told him about her visitors but withheld the information about the stolen credit cards and the underlying threat, reluctant to give Steven another opportunity to trash her sister’s memory.
‘That’s the best news I’ve heard in weeks!’ Steven exclaimed, his bright blue eyes lingering intently on her flushed face. ‘I admire your affection for Nicky but keeping him isn’t practical in your circumstances.’
‘Sometimes feelings aren’t practical,’ Jemima countered quietly.
Steven gave her an earnest appraisal. ‘You know how I feel about you, Jem. How long is it going to take for you to forgive me? I was foolish. I made a mistake. But I learned from it.’
‘If you had really loved me, you wouldn’t have wanted Julie—’
‘It’s different for men. We are more base creatures,’ Steven told her sanctimoniously.
Jemima gritted her teeth and resisted the urge to roll her eyes. It amazed her that she had failed to appreciate how sexist and judgemental Steven could be. ‘I’ve moved on now. I’m fond of you but I’m afraid that’s all.’
‘Tell me about Nicky’s father,’ Steven urged irritably.
‘I only know his name, nothing else...’
Steven started looking up Luciano Vitale on his tablet and fired a welter of facts at her.
Luciano was an only child, the son of an infamous Mafia don. Jemima did roll her eyes at that information. He was filthy rich, which wasn’t a surprise, but much that followed did take her aback. In his early twenties Luciano had married a famous Italian movie star and had a daughter with her before tragically losing both wife and child in a helicopter crash three years earlier. Jemima was shocked, very shocked by that particular piece of news.
‘So there you have it...that’s why he wants a kid...his daughter died!’ Steven pointed out with satisfaction. ‘How can you doubt that the man will make a good parent?’
‘He’s still single. How much actual parenting is he planning to do?’ Jemima traded stubbornly. ‘And maybe Nicky’s supposed to be a replacement but he’s not a girl, he’s a boy and a child in his own right—’
Steven pontificated at length about the immorality of the surrogacy agreement and how it went against all natural laws. Jemima said nothing because she was too busy looking at photographic images of the exquisite blonde, Gigi Nocella, Luciano’s late wife and the mother of his firstborn. Luciano had matched Gigi, she reflected abstractedly, two beautiful people combined to make a perfect couple. He had already lost a child, she thought helplessly, and she was filled with guilt at her own reluctance to hand over Nicky. Who was she to interfere? Who was she to think she knew everything when she was already painfully aware that her sister had made so many bad choices in life?
‘Vitale needs to know what Julie did to you and your family,’ Steven said harshly. ‘After all, if he’d kept better tabs on her, Julie would never have come here and caused so much grief.’
‘That’s very much a matter of opinion, Steven,’ Jemima said stiffly and, deciding that she had been sufficiently hospitable, she stood up in the hope of hastening his departure.
‘You’re not thinking this through, Jem,’ he told her in exasperation. ‘Nicky’s not your child and you shouldn’t be behaving as if he is. If you pass him on to his father...’
‘Like a parcel?’
‘He belongs with his father,’ Steven argued vehemently. ‘Don’t think that I don’t appreciate that that child is preventing us from getting back together again!’
‘Only in your imagination—’
‘You know how I feel about you keeping Nicky. Why are you trying to do more for the kid than his own mother was prepared to do? Let’s be honest, Julie was a lousy mother and not the nicest—’
‘Stop right there!’ Hot-cheeked, Jemima wrenched open the front door with vigour. ‘I’ll tell Mum and Dad that you called in when I phone them later.’
She closed the door again with the suggestion of a slam and groaned out loud in frustration. But grateful as she was to see Steven leave, he had left her with food for thought. She played with Nicky in the bath and stared down at his damp curly head with tears swimming in her eyes. He wasn’t her child and all the wishing in the world couldn’t change that...or bring Julie back. Luciano Vitale had lost a much-loved daughter. She must have been loved, for that could be the only reason her father had gone to such lengths to have another child. Jemima wrapped Nicky’s wet, squirming figure into a towel and hugged him close.
Luciano had searched for eight months to find his child. He wanted Nicky. She had to stop being so selfish. She had to take a step back. Was she prejudiced against Luciano because he had chosen a surrogacy arrangement to father a second child? She was conservative and conventional and she supposed she was a little bit disposed to prejudice in that line. The admission shamed her. How could she have accepted Julie and Nicky but retained her bias against Nicky’s father? Of course, what if Luciano Vitale wasn’t Nicky’s father?
Two days later, however, she received the results of the DNA testing, which declared that her nephew was Luciano’s flesh and blood, and she had barely settled the document down when the landline rang.
‘Luciano Vitale...’ Her caller imparted his identity with a warning edge of harshness. ‘I would like to meet my son this evening.’
Jemima reminded herself that there was no room for her personal feelings in her dealings with Luciano and she breathed in deep. ‘Yes, Mr Vitale. What time suits you?’
They negotiated politely for an earlier time than he first suggested because Jemima knew that the later he arrived, the more tired and cross Nicky would be. And she wanted the first meeting between father and son to go well because it would be downright mean and malicious to hope otherwise. The small living room was spick and span by the time she had finished cleaning, but Nicky was teething again and cried pathetically when she tried to put him down for his afternoon nap. Ellie had been texting her constantly with queries since she had told her friend about Luciano and was reacting to his proposed visit with as much excitement as a famous rock star might have invoked.
‘Are you sure I can’t come round and sort of hover on the doorstep?’ Ellie pleaded on the phone. ‘I’m gasping to see the guy in the flesh. He looks hotter than the fires of hell!’
‘It’s not the right moment, Ellie. He has a right to his privacy.’
‘Not looking like a walking, talking female temptation, he hasn’t!’
‘He may look good in photos but he’s not the warm, approachable type,’ Jemima reminded her friend.
‘Well, why would he be? He thinks you’re Julie and Julie ripped him off! When are you planning to tell him the truth?’
‘When I find the right moment. Not tonight because in the mood he’s probably going to be in he’s likely to just scoop up Nicky and walk straight out of here with him,’ Jemima admitted with a grimace.
‘Whether Luciano Vitale knows it or not, he owes you,’ Ellie said loyally. ‘Julie couldn’t cope with Nicky and you’ve been caring for him since he was only a week old. Your parents will miss him terribly, though, when he goes.’
When he goes, Jemima repeated inwardly, her heart sinking as she was finally forced to face that certainty. Nicky was about to be taken away from her and there was not one blasted thing she could do about it. She was not Nicky’s closest relative, Luciano was.
Jemima was very tense while she waited for her visitor. Nicky looked adorable in a little blue playsuit but he was teething and in a touchy temperamental mood in which he could travel from smiles to tears in the space of seconds.
Jemima heard the cars arrive and rushed to the window. The equivalent of a cavalcade had drawn up outside on the street, a collection of vehicles composed of a black limousine and several Mercedes cars, all with tinted windows. As she watched several men emerged from the accompanying cars and fanned out across the street while clearly taking direction from ear devices. All the men wore formal suits and sunglasses and emanated an aggressive take-charge vibe. Finally the rear door of the limo was opened and Luciano slid out, instantly casting everyone around him in the shade. He wore well-washed jeans and a long-sleeved black sweater...and still, he took her breath away.
The well-cut denim outlined long, powerful thighs and lean hips, while the dark sweater somehow enhanced his blue-black hair and olive skin. Her mouth ran dry while she stared and smoothed damp palms down over her own, more ordinary jeans, wishing she had the same sleek, fashionable edge he exuded with infuriating ease. As she began to back away from the window a movement behind him attracted her attention and she stared as a slim blonde woman climbed out of the car. Instantly, Luciano turned to speak to the woman and a moment later she got back into the car, evidently having thought better of accompanying him. Who was she? His girlfriend?
It’s none of your business who she is, a voice reproved in Jemima’s mind and she moved through to the doorway and breathed in deep, struggling to bolster herself for what was to come. She opened the door briskly. ‘Mr Vitale...’
‘Jemima,’ he said drily, stepping inside, his sculpted lips unsmiling, an aloof coolness stamped across his lean bronzed face like a wall.
‘Nicky’s in here...’ Jemima pressed the living-room door wider to show off Nicky where he sat on the floor surrounded by his favourite toys.
‘His name is Niccol?,’ Luciano corrected without hesitation. ‘I don’t like diminutives. I would also like to meet my son alone...’
Jemima glanced up at him in surprise and dismay but he wasn’t looking at her. His attention was all for Nicky, no, Niccol?, and Luciano’s lustrous tiger eyes were gleaming as he literally savoured his first view of his son with an intensity she could feel. Jemima stared, couldn’t help doing it, noting with relief that the forbidding lines of Luciano’s lean dark face were softening, the hard compression of his beautifully sculpted hard mouth easing.
‘Thank you, Miss Barber,’ Luciano Vitale murmured, deftly planting himself inside the room and leaving her outside as he firmly closed the door in her face.
With a sigh, Jemima sat down on the phone bench just inside the front door. Of course he didn’t want an audience, she reasoned, striving to be fair and reasonable. Who was the woman waiting outside for Luciano? If she was his girlfriend, did he live with her? Was it possible that the girlfriend was unable to have children and that she and Luciano had entered the surrogacy agreement as a couple? And what did any of those facts matter to her? Well, they mattered, she conceded ruefully, because she cared a great deal about Nicky’s future but ultimately she had no say whatsoever in what came next.
As a whimper sounded from the living room Jemima tensed. Nicky was going through a stranger-danger phase. She could hear the quiet murmur of Luciano’s voice as he endeavoured to soothe the little boy. Sadly, a sudden outburst of inconsolable crying was his reward. Jemima made no move but her hands were clenched into fists and her knuckles showed white beneath her pale skin as she resisted the urge to intervene. The sound of Nicky becoming increasingly upset distressed her but she knew she had to learn to step back and accept that Luciano Vitale was Nicky’s father and his closest relative.
When Nicky’s sobs erupted into screams, the living-room door opened abruptly. ‘You’d better come in... He’s frightened,’ Luciano bit out in a harsh undertone.
Jemima required no second invitation. She scrambled up and surged past him. Nicky’s anxious eyes locked straight on to her and he held up his arms to be lifted. Jemima crouched down to scoop him up and he clung like a monkey, shaking and sobbing, burying his little head in her neck.
Luciano watched that revealing display in angry disbelief. Niccol? had two little hands fisted in his mother’s shirt, his fearful desperation patently obvious as he hid his face from the stranger who had tried to make friends with him. As Jemima quieted the trembling child Luciano registered two unwelcome facts. His son was much more attached to his mother than his father had expected and Jemima was very definitely the centre of his son’s sense of security. It was a complication he neither wanted nor needed. His attention dropped to the generous curve of Jemima’s derriere in jeans and he tensed, averting his gaze to the back of his son’s curly head as he felt himself harden. So, he liked women to look more like women than slender boys and she had splendid curves, but he abhorred that hormonal response that was so very inappropriate in Jemima Barber’s radius.
‘He’s teething, which always makes him a bit clingy,’ Jemima proffered in Nicky’s defence. ‘And this is the wrong end of the day for him because he’s tired and fractious—’
‘He’s terrified. Isn’t he used to meeting people?’ Luciano pressed critically.
‘He’s more used to women.’
‘But your parents must’ve been looking after him for you while you were in London,’ he pointed out, momentarily depriving her of breath as he reminded her of the lie she was living for his benefit. After all, nobody could be in two places at once and while Jemima had been teaching and covering Nicky’s childcare costs at a local nursery facility, Julie had been in London.
‘Dad’s retired but he’s still out and about a lot, so Nicky would’ve seen less of him,’ Jemima muttered in a brittle voice, crossing her fingers at a lie that made her feel guiltier than ever because Nicky adored his grandfather.
Nicky stuck his thumb in his mouth and sagged against Jemima with a final hoarse whimper. ‘Sorry about this...’ she added uncomfortably. ‘But in time he’ll get used to you.’
Luciano compressed his lips. He didn’t have time to waste.
‘Is that your girlfriend outside waiting in the car?’ Jemima asked abruptly, keen to know and to change the subject about Nicky’s lifestyle in recent months.
Luciano frowned, winged ebony brows pleating above hard dark eyes fringed by lashes as dense and noticeable as black lace. ‘No, the nanny I’m hiring.’
Jemima stopped breathing. ‘A nanny?’ she gasped in dismay.
‘I will need some support in caring for my son,’ Luciano countered drily, wondering what he was going to do about the problem his son’s mother had become.
Well, he certainly wouldn’t be marrying her as Charles Bennett had ludicrously suggested after the results of the DNA test had been revealed.
‘A paper marriage,’ Charles had outlined. ‘In one move you would legitimise your son’s birth, tidy up any future inheritance issues and gain a legal right to have custody of your son. As an ex-wife you could also give her a settlement without breaking the law. It would be perfect.’
