PROLOGUE
ROCCO threw down the hard hat he had been wearing whilst he showed the ‘suits’ and potential investors round the new complex—a luxury spa and holiday resort here on Sicily—pushing an impatient hand into the thick darkness of his hair as he held the mobile to his ear and said laconically, ‘You wanted me, Don Falcon?’
If his elder brother was irritated by Rocco’s mocking use of his title he didn’t say so, announcing coolly instead, ‘We’ve found her. Here is her address in London. You know what you have to do.’
Falcon had ended the call before Rocco could say anything, leaving him to retrieve his hard hat and stride towards the Porta cabin that was currently serving as his on-site office.
CHAPTER ONE
A LOUD bang from a noisy exhaust somewhere in the street had Julie glancing over her shoulder and then checking automatically to see that her shabby shoulder bag was tucked in against her body. This was a down-at-heel and often unsafe neighbourhood. Only the other day she had been warned by the woman in charge of the nursery never to leave any personal documents in her flat as there had been a spate of robberies, with passports especially being targeted. As a result, she was now carrying their passports with her in her handbag.
‘Ms Simmonds?’
Julie gasped with shock. She had been so busy looking over her shoulder that she hadn’t seen the man who was now standing in front of her, blocking her way to the entrance of the converted house where she rented a small flat.
One look at him, though, told her that this was no thief. Not with that expensive car parked right next to them, which she hadn’t noticed before and which she suspected must be his.
Warily she nodded her head.
‘And this is your child?’
Now she could feel herself tensing, hesitating, as she held on tightly to her orphaned baby nephew whilst she fought off her feeling of apprehension. Josh was her child after all—now. The icy March rain that had started when she had left the local eight-until-ten shop where she worked part-time to walk to the nursery to collect Josh had soaked through her thin coat, turning the fine silver-blonde silkiness of her hair into lank rats’ tails whilst the cold had left her skin blue-white and bloodless, and now she was trapped here on the street with a man who was asking her questions she did not want to answer. The weight of Josh, plus his nappy bag and her handbag, were already making her thin arms ache.
‘If you’re a debt collector…’ she began. Her voice might be thin with disdain and exhaustion, but it was fear that was making her heart thud so painfully. Josh was hers. There was no reason for her to feel that this man—this stranger—somehow threatened her right to call Josh her child, even if she wasn’t actually Josh’s birth mother. That was what living a hand-to-mouth existence and constantly fearing the arrival of another demand for money did for you: it made you feel guilty and on edge even when you had no cause to do so.
If it was money that this man was after then he was wasting his time. Julie’s chin unconsciously lifted with the pride she knew he would believe she no longer had the right to have. There was no point in anyone sending in any more bailiffs as there was nothing left to take. Even Josh’s buggy had been claimed against her dead sister’s debts. There was no point feeling sorry for herself or wishing that her parents had thought to make a proper will. Ultimately, as their now only surviving child, she should inherit something—enough, she hoped, to clear all Judy’s debts and buy a small house for herself and Josh. But according to her solicitor a final settlement of everything could be some time away, given the complications of the situation.
The fact was that her parents, her sister, James—her sister’s fiancé—and his parents had all died, along with twenty other people in the same fatal train crash. It had been such a terrible shock, and had left Julie with the task of supporting herself and her late sister’s child whilst being hounded to pay Judy’s debts. And, of course, cope with James’s death.
The funerals had been in their way even worse than the news of the deaths itself. She, of course, as the only adult living member of her own family, had had to make the arrangements for the burial of her parents and her sister. She had thought that maybe Judy should be buried with James, but Annette, James’s elder sister and only relative, had refused to entertain the idea, insisting that James was buried with their parents.
With the funeral two days after her family’s, Julie had been able to attend—and she had found that Annette was exactly as James had once described his elder sister to her. Polished and expensively dressed—her husband was a banker—and very cold.
‘Keep that child away from me,’ she had said sharply, stepping back from Julie. ‘My coat cost a fortune, it’s pure cashmere.’
James had told Julie that Roger, Annette’s husband, desperately wanted a family but that Annette flatly refused to entertain the idea. They had a smart townhouse in Chelsea, where Annette entertained Roger’s colleagues and clients. She was very much the corporate wife, and according to James was very ambitious for her husband. James. Julie blinked away exhausted tears. Her one and only love. Her one and only lover. It only things had been different. If only she had been the one to conceive his child. If only…
Losing him still h
urt so very much. Only with his death had she admitted that somewhere deep inside herself she had been cherishing the foolish hope that one day he would come back to her.
Rocco watched the shadows come and go in the woman’s unusually expressive dark grey eyes. The only part of her that looked anything like alive. He had never seen such a washed-out-looking female.
‘A debt collector?’ He gave her a haughty look, before adding dryly, ‘You could call me that,’ he agreed, answering Julie’s bitter question. ‘Although what I’m here for is more properly a matter of repossession.’
Repossession? There wasn’t anything left in the flat to repossess. The bailiffs had taken it all. She tried to look braver than she felt as she looked at the man.
The harsh street lighting gave his features a Byzantine quality of polished arrogance allied to cruelty, gilding the olive skin drawn tight over the high cheekbones. It was the face of a man without mercy or compassion—the face of a man whose heritage was rooted in the alien and the dangerous, Julie recognised.
It was hard for Rocco to see what could possibly have attracted his young half-brother to this pale plain English girl. She was thin to the point of malnourishment, whey-faced, and so far as he could see without charm or personality—but perhaps he was being unfair. Given enough champagne and the illegal party drugs his late half-brother had favoured, maybe she had sparkled in the tawdry manner in which Antonio had liked his women to sparkle.
Distaste filled him—for his late half-brother’s way of life, for the morals of the woman standing in front of him, but most of all for the duty that had been imposed upon him by his own birth and his elder brother’s conscience.
He had been against this whole thing right from the start. A child’s place was with its mother. But Alessandro had pointed out that the child would be with its mother, at all times, and would continue to remain with her since Rocco’s task was to bring them both back to Sicily with him. In fact, now that he had seen the circumstances in which the pair of them seemed to be living, Rocco acknowledged that his intervention in their lives could only be of benefit—to them both.
She was so cold, and she must get Josh inside—but he was still standing in front her. Josh still wasn’t over the nasty cough he had caught at the beginning of the winter.
Poor baby, he had had so many problems since her sister had given birth to him three weeks early, in January. First there had been the fact that Judy had never wanted him in the first place. Then there had been his inability to feed properly, followed by the discovery that he was slightly tongue-tied… That had led to a very minor medical procedure, after which—perhaps because Judy had not been careful enough—he had contracted an infection, which in turn had led to further feeding problems. And then with one blow fate had robbed him of his parents and both sets of grandparents.
But somehow Julie would make it up to him. She would love him and look after him. He was, after all, all she had left of James and her family, even if he hadn’t already been precious to her in his own right.
When they had come to tell her about the train accident which had killed so many people, including her own and Josh’s family, she had made a silent vow to the man she loved so much to love and protect the child he had believed was his.
James had been so proud and excited when he had discovered that Judy was pregnant…
Rocco was getting impatient. He was a Leopardi after all. The Leopardis had ruled their lands and dispensed their own form of law in Sicily from the time of the Crusades onwards. Rocco had grown up in an environment where to be a Leopardi meant that one’s word was law.
‘I don’t know what it is you wish to repossess,’ Julie began tiredly, ‘but my…my baby is cold, and I really need to get him inside.’ She didn’t really want to have to open her handbag in front of this stranger, but she needed to get her keys so that she could let herself into the flat. It wasn’t easy, trying to surreptitiously open her handbag and at the same time hold Josh safe, and when she saw the way the man was looking at her, with a mix of male irritation and impatience, she knew that her attempt at discretion had been a waste of time.
‘Let me hold the child for you.’ The cool assurance in the male voice combined with the unexpected offer caused Julie’s eyes to widen in astonishment. He sounded as though he was perfectly at home holding young babies.
‘You’ve got children of your own?’ Julie’s face burned as she realised how personal and inappropriate her question was.
His terse ‘No’ compounded those feelings, which hardly inspired her to hand over Josh. But then her ineffectual scrabbling one-handedly in the bag suddenly caused it to tilt upwards, disgorging some of its contents onto the wet street, including her purse, an assortment of bills that belonged to Judy, her keys and their passports—Josh’s a sad reminder of the honeymoon her sister had been so excited about, their first holiday as a family. Rocco frowned as he looked down at the wet pavement and saw the passports amongst the other detritus that had spilled from the woman’s handbag.
Ignoring Julie’s gasp of protest, he bent down to retrieve her possessions, picking up the now wet bills and the two passports before casually flicking them open. Both passports were in his hand—a providential accident or a potent sign that this task might after all be simpler and easier than he had thought? What kind of woman carried passports around with her? he wondered, and then grimaced as he found the answer to his own question.