Elizabeth Power – Blackmailed For Her Baby (страница 1)
BOUGHT FOR HER BABY
Taken for her body…and her baby!
These men always get what they want—
and the women who produce their heirs will be their brides!
Look out for all of our exciting books this month:
The Marciano Love-Child
Melanie Milburne
Desert King, Pregnant Mistress
Susan Stephens
The Italian’s Pregnancy Proposal
Maggie Cox
Blackmailed for Her Baby
Elizabeth Power
Only from Harlequin Presents EXTRA!
ELIZABETH POWER was born in Bristol, U.K., where she still lives with her husband in a three-hundred-year-old cottage. A keen reader, as a teenager she had already made up her mind to be a novelist. But it wasn’t until a few weeks before her thirtieth birthday, when Elizabeth realized she had been telling herself she would “start writing tomorrow” for at least twelve of her first thirty years that she took up writing seriously. A short while later, the letter that was to change her life arrived from Harlequin. Rude Awakening was to be published in 1986. After a prolonged absence, Elizabeth is pleased to be back at her keyboard again, with new romances already in the pipeline.
Emotional intensity is paramount in Elizabeth’s books. She says, “times, places and trends change, but emotion is timeless.” A powerful storyline with maximum emotion, set in a location in which you can really live and breathe while the story unfolds, is what she strives for. Good food and wine come high on her list of priorities, and what better way to sample these delights than by having to take another trip to some new, exotic resort? To find a location for the next book, of course!
Blackmailed for Her Baby
Bought for Her Baby
Elizabeth Power
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
‘ONE more take, Blaze! That’s it! Toss back that glorious mane of yours and smile. Smile up at the child. She’s your daughter, remember. Higher! Lift her higher! Perfect! That’s beautiful, darling! Bea-u-ti-ful!’
The gushing praise from the cameraman was as synthetic, Libby thought, as the relationship between herself and the giggling baby suspended high above her head. Like the nickname someone had given her at the outset of her career that had helped propel her up the ladder to supermodel status following a chance discovery at a small fashion show she had paraded in for a local charity.
What did it matter to the Press and the public that she was weary of pretending? That behind the shining trademark of her heavy red hair, the clothes and make-up and the pure artifice in standing in a summer meadow, promoting an exclusive range of skincare, which purported to make her skin as soft as that of any baby’s, she was still just Libby Vincent. Or rather Vincenzo, she thought with a pained mental grimace. An average girl from an average background, who couldn’t run away from who she really was no matter how hard she tried, or from the far from average burden of guilt she carried everywhere.
‘OK! That’s it! Beautiful, darling. Perfect!’
With an indiscernible sigh, she brought her arms down and the child with them, mercifully relieved that the shoot was over. She didn’t think she could have endured another second.
The snowy fabric of her peasant skirt brushed her slender calves as she trudged back through the long grass. The baby she was reluctantly cradling crooned up at her, revealing two small white teeth, its little button nose wrinkling as it grasped her camisole with one tiny pink hand.
Libby dragged air through her lungs, a longing of such intensity sweeping over her that for an endless moment she couldn’t seem to breathe as she fought the urge to clasp the infant fiercely to her.
Keeping a tight rein on her galloping emotions, her flawless features rigid as stone, somehow she made it back to the mobile make-up unit, where the rest of the team were waiting.
‘Here.’ The emotion clogging her throat made her sound decidedly curt as she thrust the child towards its mother, while the baby, obviously sensing the tension in Libby, began to bawl, her eager little arms outstretched as the other woman took her, leaving Libby to spin determinedly away.
‘Isn’t she a cutie?’ Fran, a mature brunette with two growing boys of her own, couldn’t help drooling as Libby approached, seeking only the seclusion of the huge green trailer behind them.
Beneath the make-up that Fran had applied so expertly earlier, Libby’s face felt like a tight, tense mask. ‘If you say so.’
‘You’d forgotten, Fran.’ It was the cynical voice of Steve Cullum, one of the technicians who had once asked Libby out and received the same polite brush-off for which she was renowned with the opposite sex. ‘Blaze doesn’t do maternal. Or any other sort of relationship for that matter.’
It was something the Press often speculated about. Her past. The lack of men in her life. Even, at times, her sexuality.
“Beneath the fire, is there only ice?” one tabloid newspaper had printed after she had refused to give them an interview, share with them her views on love, on marriage, on children.
And why should she? she thought bitterly now. These things were private. Which was why, unsurprisingly, they had never found out her real name, never been able to connect her with Luca.
Anguish speared her as she thought about the boy she had married; about the tragic waste of life when he’d been killed in that car accident less than a year later. She had loved Luca; had had plenty of thoughts and feelings then. But that was a long time ago, before her emotions had been numbed by events and actions that were too damning even to think about; when loving had come naturally and she’d believed that happiness was everyone’s birthright—even hers.
Inwardly she ridiculed herself for her gross naïvety. Because of course that was before she had met the prejudice and disapproval of the Vincenzo family. Before she’d felt his father’s tyranny; known the cutting censure of Luca’s darkly commanding older brother.
A prickly sensation lifted the hairs on the back of her neck as the disturbing features of Romano Vincenzo reared up before her eyes. A man who was lethally attractive and ruthlessly uncompromising. A man definitely not to be crossed. It hadn’t just been mutual dislike that she had shared with Romano Vincenzo. It had been something more. Something much stronger and intensely profound that she had never been able to put a name to, and which she certainly wasn’t going to waste any time wondering about six years on.
It was all in the past, and over the years she had become adept at hiding her emotions, which she did now, crushing her unwelcome reverie beneath a bright smile as Fran asked, ‘Are you coming to the party tonight, Blaze?’
‘You try and stop me!’ It was a first-rate performance she was giving and she knew it; knew also that it was one she would have to keep up until she could change, get back to the Porsche and slam out of there, away from the turmoil of her unwelcome thoughts; of memories—resurrected by a simple skin-cream commercial—which she couldn’t bear to face. ‘After a week of staying in every night, getting up at four am and coming here to be bitten by mosquitoes,’ she forced out laughingly over her shoulder, ‘I’m going to party till dawn!’
Well, what had he been expecting? Romano thought, standing there in the trailer, when Libby, not looking where she was going, almost collided with him. That she had changed?
He caught her small gasp, felt her warmth and closeness and the pure femininity of her washing over him on a sensual wave.
‘Buon giorno, Libby.’ His senses, normally so controlled, were leaping into overdrive, making his heart race, his voice take on a husky quality as he watched the colour drain from the smooth texture of her high, Slavic cheekbones, saw her lush red mouth open in a gesture of pure shock.
‘I’m sorry, Blaze…’ Fran’s voice followed her in, quickly contrite, breaking in on the whirling chaos of her thoughts. ‘I meant to tell you. I’m sorry, Mr Vincenzo…’ The woman’s tone had changed in deference to the tall, tanned Italian hunk looming there in the aperture of her mobile studio and whose dark designer suit couldn’t conceal the hard masculinity of the man beneath. ‘I hadn’t forgotten you were waiting…’
Romano’s sleek black hair gleamed like jet as he gave a curt nod before reaching around the stunned Libby and pulling the trailer’s sliding door closed with a rattling firmness that blocked out Fran and the rest of the world.
He hadn’t changed, some small functioning part of Libby silently acknowledged. A high-profile entrepreneur, with that overall impression of lithe fitness and impeccable style, he still dominated any room he happened to walk into, still held sway over others with that bred-in-the bone confidence and effortless authority.
‘Wh-what are you doing here?’ Struck by the ridiculous notion that her thoughts must have conjured him up, Libby found herself as she’d always been in this man’s company, a mixture of tongue-tied nervousness and challenging rebellion. And then, as shock receded and rational thought took over, she was urging in a voice strung with blind panic, ‘What’s wrong? What is it? Is something the matter?’