Elizabeth Power – Blackmailed For Her Baby (страница 2)

Some racing emotion darkened the long green eyes gazing up at him from beneath their rich mahogany lashes as they had done from the covers of countless glossy magazines over the years.

‘Not that I know of.’

He saw her eyes close, the pressing of those long, feathery lashes against the alabaster skin a response he understood and accepted, though not without a measure of surprise.

‘How long have you been here?’ Weak-kneed with relief—from this unexpected encounter with Luca’s brother—Libby tried to get a grip on her errant thoughts.

‘Long enough.’

His deeply-accented voice was as rich as she remembered it, his face as hard-boned and as classically structured, from his high intellectual forehead, straight nose and that forceful, darkly shadowed jaw to those penetrating black eyes that had always seemed to probe right down into the depths of her soul.

Her nostrils flaring, guardedly she demanded, ‘Why didn’t you make yourself known?’

His wide masculine mouth compressed, a mouth that could curl with disdain or make a woman’s bones melt in the blaze of one smile. ‘And miss watching the nation’s loveliest model playing at doting motherhood?’

His double-edged compliment hit home hard and she swept determinedly past him, the brush of his jacket as their shoulders collided sending a tingling friction across her bare skin.

She gave a nonchalant little shrug, her feelings held on a throttle-tight leash. ‘It isn’t a role I’d normally have chosen.’ In fact she had tried to refuse the job, but it was her agent who had warned her of the inadvisability of turning down such opportunities and who had won in the end.

Something flickered in Romano’s eyes beneath his midnight-black lashes.

‘Is that why you handed the kid over like she was a sack of potatoes?’

‘Did I?’ It was hard trying to pretend he wasn’t unsettling her when even to her own ears her voice was shaking. ‘I thought I was being careful.’

The firm mouth tugged downwards. ‘As careful as you were when you handed over Giorgio?’

‘Giorgi?’ The name escaped her like a helpless little plea. He’d said there was nothing wrong, but something had to be because in all these years he had never chosen to patronise her with so much as a social call. ‘He’s all right, isn’t he?’

It was only a heartbeat before he answered, and yet it seemed an eternity.

‘That hasn’t worried you for the past six years. So why should it suddenly concern you now?’

She couldn’t tell him how much she had grieved for the baby son she had been forced to hand over so cruelly; how much she ached to see him, know him, her concern for his welfare and her need to be with him an excruciating pain that tore at her constantly no matter how many days, weeks, months or years dragged by.

‘You wouldn’t be here if it didn’t concern Giorgio,’ Libby breathed, feeling like a slave begging for mercy from a powerful master who held the key, not just to her happiness, but also to her very existence on this earth. ‘Are you going to tell me what it is?’ Her eyes were dark pools against the pale oval of her face. ‘Or are you taking some sort of warped satisfaction out of seeing me suffer?’

‘Suffer?’ A thick eyebrow arched darkly against his tanned forehead. ‘You? I don’t think so, Libby. A moment ago you had nothing on your mind but partying until dawn.’

Libby felt something snap inside of her and the next moment, to her own horror, she was flying at him, fingers clamping like angry claws onto the expensive cloth of his jacket, her teeth clenched in an agony of frustration.

‘Are you going to tell me? Or am I going to have to rip it out of you?’ she sobbed, suddenly all too conscious of his physicality and the sheer power of him, the knowledge that he could subdue her with just one gram of his latent strength should he choose to do so.

Fortunately he didn’t. Instead he caught her angry hands and held them against his chest, bringing her startlingly alive to the hard warmth of him beneath the impeccable cut of his clothes.

Some hot emotion burned in the incredibly dark gaze resting on her lips, strangely at odds with the deepening furrow between his eyes. ‘Easy. Take it easy,’ he advised hoarsely.

If he was truthful with himself, Romano thought, he was shocked by the strength of her reaction to what had, after all, been his unprovoked taunts. But what human being wouldn’t feel justified in making them? he vindicated himself with his jaw clenching. Knowing exactly what made this single-minded little opportunist tick? But perhaps that was the reason for her wild and totally unexpected outburst. Guilt, it occurred to him suddenly. She’d be less than human if what she had done hadn’t left her with some measure of remorse, so perhaps she had suffered. Because she was human, and very much a woman, two aspects he was vitally aware of now as he became conscious of the slender bones of her wrists beneath the hard pressure of his fingers, felt the life that was pulsing through her like the fluttering of a frantic sparrow so that he had to harden his swerving convictions and try to focus on her as the heartless little gold-digger she had proved herself to be, because he could deal with that.

‘So there’s a flame beneath the fire,’ he recognised mockingly, obviously wise to that unkind headline about her. ‘But then we always suspected I’d be the one to bring it out in you, didn’t we, cara?’

‘Wh-what are you talking about?’ Libby stammered. He couldn’t have the slightest notion of the way he had used to affect her—still affected her!—could he? she wondered hectically. Couldn’t have guessed how he had plagued her troubled dreams even when she was happily married to his brother. But that was only because she had been so young, so overawed and intimated by him, she exonerated herself. Because she had loved Luca! She still loved Luca!

And Giorgio…

Her green eyes clouded over now as fear and grief, despair and a repression of feelings that she wasn’t equipped to deal with coalesced with her maternal longing so that she swayed unsteadily under the weight of them.

‘I think you’d better sit down.’

Catching his husky recommendation, shockingly aware of one iron-strong arm across her back, Libby did as she was told, dropping down onto the chair angled away from the mirror and Fran’s pots of creams, mascara wands and lipstick phials.

Rocking back on his heels, Romano dragged in a deep breath. She wasn’t going to like hearing what he had to say.

Wedging her hands between her knees to stop them trembling, Libby stared up at him as though he had just descended from a cloud.

‘Would you mind repeating that?’ she whispered.

His features were passive, his eyes hard and assessing. ‘I think you heard me, Libby.’

Yes, she had, she realised, stunned, disbelieving. She hadn’t yet come to terms with the fact that Romano Vincenzo was actually here—on the shoot—let alone got her brain round the demands he was suddenly making. In a minute, she thought, she would wake up and find that this was all some crazy dream, yet contrarily she knew he was anything but a figment of her imagination.

Here in this superficial world she inhabited, where everyone called her ‘Blaze’ and no one cared a jot for her beyond how well she could pretend to love the product they wanted to sell, he was the only representation of anything real; of her past, of which he was a vital part; of Luca and the girl she had once been. Only he knew who she really was. Or thought he did, she corrected bitterly.

‘You want me to go to Italy with you?’

To see Giorgio…

She had never once expected that any member of the Vincenzo family would allow her to do that, let alone insist upon it.

She was trembling so much that she had to do something—anything—so she got up, moving like an automaton over to the couch where she had left her own clothes. Mindlessly, she started to peel off the skirt she had worn for the commercial with fingers that shook.

Watching his brother’s widow, Romano couldn’t believe how calmly she could carry on functioning as though he had said nothing, his eyes dark, judgemental slits in the hard lean, structure of his face.

Coldly he regarded the way the virginal fabric slithered down her long, golden legs, pooled alluringly around her ankles, the way she stepped nimbly out of it in nothing but her lacy white camisole and briefs.

‘Had it been left to me I would never have entertained the thought of coming here,’ he stated with grim assurance. ‘I did so only because of a five-year-old who can’t understand why it is that he doesn’t have a mother. Who’s trying to make sense of what it is he’s done wrong.’

Libby choked back a small stifled cry as Romano continued, deaf and blind to how he was hurting her.

‘A kid who’s so distressed at being goaded by his peers he doesn’t want to go to school any more. Won’t sleep. Won’t eat properly. Won’t even play with his friends.’ A five-year-old going on six who couldn’t be placated with a new pony or a trip to Disneyland. Who foolishly believed his Zio Romano could make anything happen—including bringing home the mother who didn’t want him!