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She’d held herself rigid as he’d placed his hands on her wet shoulders, heart thumping against her ribcage, back stiffening in rejection as his lips impinged in no more than a brotherly gesture on her burning cheek.
‘You claim to love Luca, but I think we both know differently, don’t we?’ he’d challenged with a menacing softness, his warm breath fanning her hair, his scent and sound and touch an assault on her screaming senses before he’d picked up the briefcase he’d set down on the tiles and stridden away.
Staring broodingly after his broad back, she had wondered if he’d sensed the way that simple gesture had made her blood race through her, and if he’d guessed at her mind’s screaming rejection of the sensations that had ravaged her even from that briefest contact with him.
He probably thought he was irresistible to her! she remembered thinking hotly, because his ego was enormous enough and because, just like his parents, he believed that her interest in Luca lay only in what she could gain financially.
The incident, though, had unsettled her. Even remembering it now caused an icy little shiver to course down her spine. It was the cold realisation that it was entirely possible to love one man while still being shockingly aware of another—even if you didn’t like him, she thought, grappling with the gear stick as an impatient hooting from the car behind jolted her into realising that the lights had changed. And she certainly hadn’t liked Romano Vincenzo! The feelings he’d aroused in her had been irrational, born only out of a kind of warped fascination coupled with dislike, and nothing like the warm, tender feelings she’d shared with Luca.
On the move again, she recalled how elated she had been when she’d become pregnant almost immediately, and how her joy had been tempered by the sudden worrying turn of her father’s health. With no one to look after him, she’d made frequent visits back to England, the long periods she’d spent caring for him instead of being in Italy with her husband adding yet another detrimental mark against her in her in-laws’ eyes.
As she brought her car into the familiar tree-lined square, the memory of that time and everything that followed pressed down on her like a dark, suffocating cloud.
When she had gone into labour, unexpectedly here in England, given birth to a healthy baby boy, her life should have been complete. But it hadn’t worked out that way, she reflected achingly. Luca had had that accident rushing to the airport to be with her, and his parents, already despising her more than she could have believed possible, had no qualms about blaming her for his death. After all, if she’d been there where she belonged instead of abandoning her husband and her responsibilities, their son would still be alive, his mother had sobbed accusingly to her over the phone.
It was something Libby had been all too conscious of, but having it spelt out by someone else—someone who loved him just as much as she did—was almost too much to bear.
It was several weeks later when she’d gone back to Italy to collect a few of her and Luca’s things that they had dropped their bombshell.
They wanted to adopt Giorgio. Bring him up as their own. Couldn’t she see that the boy would have a far more privileged and stable upbringing with them than he would with a sick grandfather and a single mother? How could she allow their grandchild to be deprived of all they could offer him? How could she be that selfish? they had asked her when, horrified, she’d refused at first even to give any headroom to such an unthinkable idea. She’d wanted to look after her baby herself—and care for her father. She’d known there would be difficult times ahead, but she’d manage, she’d determined. Wouldn’t she? After all, other girls did. It had continued to be impressed upon her, though, how selfish she was being. That she didn’t have her child’s interests at heart. Even her father had tentatively suggested that perhaps she ought to consider the Vincenzos’ offer very carefully. She was young—had her whole life in front of her. Had she considered the enormity of what she was taking on?
Tortured and afraid, she had clung desperately to Luca’s child. She could never give him up! She couldn’t! Though the pressure to do so had been almost overwhelming, she might not have given in. Not if Marius Vincenzo, determined to wear down her resistance, hadn’t come up with that cruel ultimatum…
Blindly, she left her car in the reserved parking bay outside the rank of exclusive Georgian apartments and, dodging the rain, raced up the steps, shutting her mind to the bitter choice the man had given her. She couldn’t relive it—couldn’t think about it now.
She only knew as she rode the lift up to the first floor—let herself into the welcoming haven of her own apartment—that when she had been forced to sign that piece of paper, handing over her son to Luca’s family, she had been too young and too worried about her father to see beyond her naïve hopes in believing that one day she would get her baby back.
A persistent ringing of the doorbell had Libby reluctantly answering it. Since abandoning all thoughts of going out, she’d bathed and changed and she certainly didn’t feel like seeing anyone tonight.
‘Surprise!’ Fran and about a dozen others carolled from the front doorway, before breezing in brandishing bottles of champagne.
‘As it was obvious you weren’t coming to the party, we decided to bring the party to you,’ a young woman Libby didn’t even recognise announced, her voice raised above the animated conversation and laughter.
‘I can’t. Really, I can’t face this now,’ Libby protested over the sound of corks already being popped, glasses being hauled out of her china cabinet. Someone had switched on her CD player, and a sea of bodies began gyrating to a deafening rhythm.
She wanted to scream at them to get out. After meeting Romano today there had been no question of attending the end of the assignment party. She had had a lot of decisions to make, appointments to cancel. On top of which her thoughts were in turmoil and her head was thumping.
‘Are you all right?’ Fran shouted to make herself heard above the noise.
‘No, I’m not!’ Libby yelled back. ‘I just want to be alone!’
‘You always do!’ Fran’s more mature features were contorted in friendly chastisement. ‘We thought it would do you good not to let you get away with not turning up for yet another party. We thought…Hey! Are you OK?’ The make-up artist looked genuinely concerned, but trying to compete with the din in her flat was hurting Libby’s throat.
With a hopeless shrug she swept away from them all, towards the sanctuary of her bedroom.
‘Everybody! Everybody! Blaze doesn’t need this!’ From behind the closed door, she heard Fran’s futile attempts to make her protests heard. ‘I really think we ought to go!’
Someone turned up the music. After a few moments the sound burst intrusively into the bedroom as the door opened and then closed again, admitting a penitent-looking Fran.
‘I’m sorry, Blaze. I didn’t realise,’ the woman expressed, as Libby flopped limply down onto the bed. ‘We really were only thinking of you. I tried…. What’s this?’ Fran’s sudden diversion drew Libby’s eyes to the single bed and the little white album lying on the coverlet that she hadn’t had chance to put away. ‘What is this?’ The woman was picking it up, surveying the embossed gold lettering on the leather-bound cover and, despairingly, Libby saw her taking in the first two pages of photographs, then the subsequent blank white pages that told their own story. ‘Am I imagining this…’ the woman’s puzzled gaze lifted from the few appealing baby photos to clash with Libby’s ‘…or does he look like…?’ Fran’s voice tailed off, her mouth an open circle of disbelief. ‘Yours?’ she whispered, dumbfounded.
Leaping up, Libby grabbed the incriminating album and snapped it shut. ‘He belonged to someone else,’ she said quickly, her voice noncommittal. Well, it was true, wasn’t it? she thought achingly. And if it got out that she had married into the Vincenzo family—one of the richest families in Italy—was the mother of Luca Vincenzo’s son, then because of her celebrity status Giorgio would be hounded by the Press, and his little life would cease to be his own.
Fran gave her a sidelong glance. ‘Belonged?’ she echoed gingerly and, when Libby said nothing, ‘I’m sorry,’ the woman sighed, guessing that something had gone terribly wrong in her young friend’s life, but clearly didn’t want to probe too deeply. ‘You never said.’
Libby shrugged. ‘It’s in the past.’ Only it wasn’t. It never would be, she thought, speared with wanting. Giorgio was hers—part of the here and now—and all she wanted was for this rowdy uninvited crowd to leave so that she could ring the boy’s uncle and tell him that she was ready to go with him. That she would throw in her job, her flat, and every commitment she’d made and leave now—this minute—with nothing but the clothes she stood up in just as long as she could see her baby again.
Hastily she stuffed the album into a drawer. ‘Promise me you won’t say anything to the others?’
‘Of course not,’ Fran uttered in compliance, and Libby didn’t doubt that the woman would be as true as her word. ‘Was there some connection with that gorgeous hunk who turned up on the shoot today? Did you have an affair with him or something?’
‘No!’ Fran knew that there was no man in her life, and that she didn’t date, so an eye-catching specimen like Romano showing up would naturally arouse her curiosity.
‘He seemed pretty possessive. The way he slung that door closed in my face. Only a lover behaves like that.’
‘No!’ Libby denied with a vehemence that had one of Fran’s dark brows lifting in patent scepticism. Why would she think that? Libby thought angrily, guessing that while her friend knew when to let the subject of a lost child drop, the possibility of such a ruthlessly attractive male as Romano Vincenzo as a candidate for Libby’s bed was too much even for the discreet Fran to ignore.
The music was still pounding away in the sitting room. Animated shouts with the rhythmic thud of feet reverberated through the apartment. Suddenly a loud banging was cutting insistently through the pandemonium.
‘Your neighbours?’ Fran suggested with a grimace.
‘Oh, good grief!’ If it was, then they had every right to complain. ‘Help me get rid of this lot, will you?’ Libby appealed despairingly to her friend.
‘I will,’ Fran promised, giving her an affectionate squeeze. ‘After all, it was my fault you got stuck with…’ Her words were drowned beneath a wall of sound as the bedroom door opened and the blond technician who had been on the shoot peered round it.
‘Having a tête-à-tête?’ His words were a little slurred, Libby noted, guessing that he had already been drinking heavily before he’d arrived and was clearly the worse for too much champagne. ‘I thought for a moment the lovely Blaze had got herself a man in here, but I should have known better, shouldn’t I?’
‘Leave it, Cullum,’ Fran advised, wiser now to what made Libby such a loner.
Steve Cullum, though, Libby noticed, looked aggressive enough to swing a punch at someone, and hurriedly she made to defuse the situation.
‘Let’s go back and join the others,’ she suggested to him in a placatory tone, pushing him gently back into the other room so that she could go and answer the persistent thudding on her front door.
‘Only if you’ll dance with me.’
‘All right. All right,’ she promised recklessly. ‘After I’ve answered the door to whoever’s out there first.’ Humour him. Don’t be offensive, she warned herself, knowing from experience that it was the only way to handle drunks. ‘Someone turn the music down!’ she shouted, making a move towards the hall.
‘Turn it up!’ The technician was grabbing her arm, shouting at the top of his voice, ‘Turn it up! Blaze wants to dance! Blaze wants to dance with me!’
Libby tried to resist as he spun her round in the middle of the floor and, with his arms crossing her chest, pulled her back against him, forcing her body to sway with his to the raucous music.
His aftershave lotion was cloying, and his alcohol-stained breath was revoltingly warm against her throat. Somewhere in her repulsed brain it registered that the banging on the front door had stopped. That the neighbour had given up all hope of being heard and gone—probably to call the police!
‘Come on, baby, dance. You know how to move.’ The scoop-necked sweater she had changed into when she’d showered had slipped off one shoulder and the man’s mouth was suddenly moving, hot and moist, across her bare flesh. Trapped in his arms, she jerked her head aside, but he only laughed and tightened his hold on her.
In a minute, she decided, she was going to elbow him—hard!
The only thing that stopped her was the shocking silence as the music was cut dead, along with every other sound in the room.
All eyes were turned towards the CD player and the man in the impeccable dark raincoat and executive suit who was straightening up beside it. And it wasn’t just the formality of his clothes but that hard air of command that set him apart from everyone else in the room.
Romano Vincenzo!
Stunned, Libby could only gaze speechlessly at his strong, tanned face and those glittering black eyes, which, focusing only on her now, flared, like those proud nostrils, with unequivocal anger.
‘I think you’d better ask your friends to leave.’ His recommendation fizzed with seething displeasure.
Barely able to grasp that it must have been him who had been thundering on the door—that someone had let him in—Libby could only despair at the compromising position in which he had walked in and found her, locked as she still was in the technician’s arms. Things couldn’t look worse, she thought, knowing that it wasn’t the first time that he had caught her in a situation like this.
‘Romano!’
It was all she could utter as Steve Cullum lifted his head to demand in a slurred voice, ‘Are you suggesting I quit this party and walk out of here—just because you said so?’
Beneath his rain-splashed coat, Romano’s shoulders squared. The last thing he wanted was trouble. But the sight of Libby, the girl who had plagued his thoughts and got under his skin as he had allowed no other woman to do—filling him with self-disgust when she was married to his brother—and who still aroused the same complexity of emotions in him—not only living it up after all he had told her today without a care for her child, which just went to prove just how heartless she was, but also crushed against that lecherous drunk, which she was obviously consenting to, only fuelled his anger, filling his veins with cold, jealous fury.
‘That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.’ Anger blanched the skin around his taut upper lip. ‘Unless you’d rather be thrown.’
Feeling the technician’s body tightening up behind her, Libby sucked in a breath. The last thing she wanted to witness was a brawl. But one step forward from the man who was taller, broader and light-years ahead in the fitness stakes than the inebriated Steve Cullum had the technician instantly backing off.
‘OK, mate. OK. Keep your shirt on.’ Hands held up in acquiescence to the other man’s dominant will, he moved grudgingly away, while the others, bottles in hand, their eyes fixed on Romano, also started filing out, muttering their goodnights to Libby as they yielded to an authority they recognised as one not to be tested.
‘Still denying it?’ Fran grimaced as she moved past Libby.
Denying what? Libby asked herself, quietly fuming. That Romano Vincenzo was her lover? Because he was certainly acting like one, she thought angrily, her aching head throbbing even more from the thought of being alone with him; from imagining the scene she didn’t want, but which she knew would inevitably follow.
‘Are you going to be all right?’ the lingering Fran whispered protectively to her.
Libby darted a glance towards Luca’s brother. His sheer physical presence and that dark charisma sent something like untapped electricity crackling across her nerve-endings.
‘Of course,’ she croaked, not at all sure she would be before Fran, too, went the same way as the others and the front door banged loudly behind them all.
An interminable silence filled the flat as Libby faced hard, unrelenting features across the carpeted space of her sitting room.
‘What the devil did you think you were doing?’ Her voice shook with her own hot emotion. ‘What gave you the right to come in here and speak to my guests so rudely?’ Hardly guests! she thought with a mental grimace, immensely relieved that he had driven them away, even if she didn’t approve of the way he had done it.
‘Forgive me if I broke up such a wildly enjoyable party.’ The deep tones were anything but contrite. ‘I would have thought even you would have had the decency to skip the good time when you’ve just been informed of how much your child needs you. Obviously it means far less to you than entertaining your precious friends!’
‘They aren’t my friends!’
His head cocked to one side. ‘No?’
‘Well, only one of them is and—’
‘Evidently!’
Libby stifled a small, despairing sigh. It was clear he meant the man who had been forcing his attentions upon her.
‘Steve Cullum was drunk,’ she emphasised, as though that would somehow vindicate her. ‘And they came here uninvited!’
‘But it didn’t take you long to get into the swing of things!’
Which is what it would have looked like, Libby realised, especially if he had heard Steve shouting to everyone that she wanted to dance, which he probably had!
‘I was going to ring you,’ she said.
‘When? Tonight?’ His eyes were steel-hard, his voice sounding blatantly unconvinced. ‘Or tomorrow—after the hangover?’
Well, of course, he would think that, Libby despaired.
He looked like an avenging angel, from the flawless sheen on his coat to the striking force in his unrelenting features. There were raindrops glistening on his black hair, she noticed now, watching, mesmerized, as one fell from the thick strands to meet the startling contrast of his immaculately white collar.
She opened her mouth to speak, to assure him that not a drop of alcohol had passed her lips, but he cut across her protest, saying smoothly, ‘You forget. I know you, Libby.’ There was a cruel reminder in his softly spoken words. ‘Perhaps even better than Luca did.’
‘That’s what you think,’ she argued bitterly, and from the way his mouth pulled down one side knew exactly what he was remembering. Hadn’t he stumbled upon her here in England, five months pregnant, supposedly caring for her father, but instead living it up with friends in his father’s country club? He hadn’t listened to her excuses then, so she didn’t see any reason why he would listen to them now. ‘What did you want anyway?’ she asked wearily, turning her back on him.
He watched her clearing up glasses, stoop to pick up a cushion, toss it onto a chair.
He’d come back to apologise, he reflected with self-chastening mockery. To apologise for the way he had spoken to her today. It had been unwarranted, he’d decided afterwards, especially offering to pay her to accompany him back to Italy. Knowing the manager of the hotel where she was supposed to be tonight, he had tried to ring her there, and been relieved to learn that she hadn’t attended the party after all. She had gone up a few notches in his estimation then and, as he’d made his way to her apartment, he’d been doubly ashamed of his behaviour, but his desire to make amends, he realised grimly now, had been far too premature!
The wide scoop-neck of her top had been pulled down on one side—probably by that inebriated lout who had been manhandling her, he thought—while her hair lay like a twist of fire against the pale silken slope of her shoulder. He felt a kick in his gut from watching the sway of her marginally curved hips as she went through into the kitchen, his eyes resting on her small, tight denim-clad bottom, his teeth clamping together from the host of temptations that he knew had once ensnared his brother.
‘We parted on a rather unfortunate note,’ he answered her from the kitchen doorway. ‘It was my intention to rectify that.’ After all, he could hardly persuade her to go back with him with threats and insults, he’d assured himself earlier, but that was before he had come up here, seen first-hand what little feeling this girl really had. ‘In the circumstances,’ he breathed, his anger with her spilling over from mere disillusionment into something hot and irrationally possessive, ‘it seems all I have to apologise for is spoiling your fun!’
That it had even occurred to him to apologise for anything was unimaginable to Libby. The great Romano Vincenzo contrite? Even the thought of it was laughable.
A bitter little smile touched her mouth as, finding his proximity in the doorway of her small kitchen too unsettling, she couldn’t think of anything to say.
She wanted to move away from him back into the larger room, but one darkly clad sleeve was stretched across the doorway, effectively blocking her way out.
Libby swallowed. ‘C-could you let me pass, please?’
His eyes, probing into the wary depths of hers were far, far too disturbing. ‘Of course.’ She caught a waft of his cologne as he dropped his arm and she inhaled sharply, every nerve cell honing to his scent, his warmth, the closeness of his strong, hard body. But he didn’t move and without looking at him she made to brush past him, stifling a small startled cry as his arm came up unexpectedly again, trapping her there against the doorjamb.
‘Let me go!’
He laughed softly at her proud, indignant features. ‘I wasn’t aware that I was holding you.’ His other hand came to rest disconcertingly just above her other shoulder.
Breath locking in her lungs, Libby darted a cautious glance up at him. Her heart was pumping as fast as if she had been running hard. ‘You’ve got nothing to gain from this.’
She didn’t know why she said it, every nerve tingling with apprehension and something far more complex as he turned her towards him, surveying her with a twist of cruel mockery on his lips.
‘On the contrary,’ he murmured, gazing down into her flushed and guarded features, ‘I think I’ve got a great deal to gain.’
His thumb moved caressingly over the bared, heated flesh of her shoulder, his touch so light—just a whisper of sensation—that she might have been imagining it if it hadn’t been for the way her breasts ached from her sick reaction to it, or for the shaming impulses that seemed to be causing implosions throughout her body, weakening her bones from a dark and shattering desire.
She wondered what it would be like to be pressed against his hard warmth, feel that devastating mouth—all that she could focus on now—clamped over hers; the startling realisation that he was drawing her towards him causing her mouth to part on a small gasp, her head to drop back in involuntary invitation to him so that his face went out of focus as he dipped his head and her wild and reckless craving became reality.
Sensation piled upon sensation as his mouth came down hard over hers, hostility meeting desire in one sizzling cauldron of hot, ungovernable expression.
