Claiming His Scandalous Love-Child

She turned to him—and reeled. The blaze in his eyes was open now, filling his dark, dark eyes, turning them to liquid fire. Desire was blatant in them. He did not speak, nor did she, as his other hand lifted to her. The tips of his fingers grazed the delicate outline of her jaw with a feathering lightness that sent those shimmers reverberating through her again. With infinite slowness, infinite gentleness, the tip of his finger shaped her mouth, and at her back she felt his hand press into the hollow of her spine, starting to draw her to him.

She should speak—halt him—should say to him what she must say...what she had been waiting to say, what she had waited so long to say but had dared not until she had known for absolute certain that to speak was right...

But his mouth was lowering to hers, her name was soft on his lips, and then his mouth was on hers, and her eyes were fluttering shut so she could take absolute focus on the bliss of the sensation of his mouth brushing hers—like water on a parched desert. Unconsciously her hand lifted to him, to glide around the strong column of his neck. She let her fingers splay into the silkiness of his hair, to mould the shape of his head to her palm as her other hand flattened against his muscled flank.

His mouth was opening hers, deepening their kiss, and she gave a little moan of pleasure in her throat. It seemed to shake him, so that he jerked her towards him, his hold on her strengthening.

‘Por Dio, but I’ve missed you so much!’

His voice was thick as his mouth drew away fom hers momentarily, and she could hear the naked desire in his voice, bringing back a hundred memories—a thousand—of all their nights of passion. She felt faint, her blood rushing in her veins, sending heat to her core, and she could feel her breasts swelling, their peaks cresting. How long since she had felt like this in Vito’s heady embrace? Too long—oh, too, too long.

Her breathing quickened, and with a hunger that his touch had released in her she pulled his mouth down to hers again wordlessly, knowing only that she wanted him, craved him, needed him now—right now.

He answered her need, crushing her mouth with his, sending a million nerve fibres into overdrive, catching at her lips with his, with skilled expertise, with mastery and possession. And she was his—oh, she was his—and he was hers, hers, hers.

For ever now—for ever he is mine!

The words soared in her mind, exultant. The world had gone—disappeared—the air and the sun had gone too. There was only Vito and herself. Only her body, quickening to his, aching for his possession as he had possessed it so many times before. She felt the muscles in her legs strain as she yearned towards him, wanting with a primal urgency to feel her swollen breasts crushed against him, to press her body against his.

Her need for him was answered, and he groaned, devouring her mouth yet more deeply. His hand left her face, stroked sensually down the column of her neck, palmed the rich swell of her breast, and she moaned with pleasure. His thumb caught at its crested peak and she moaned again, straining towards him. Then his hand was gliding still lower, down over her flank, cupping her hip.

Her thighs loosened and the heat in her core was melting her now, as she felt the rush of her own arousal. And then his hand was shaping that vee, pressing into it through the flimsy material of her sun dress with exquisite sensation as her hunger for him climbed and climbed. His long fingers sp

layed upwards, curving around the swell of her abdomen.

And then he froze.

Time stopped. Halted.

In a fraction of a second—less—he had pulled away from her, was staring at her with disbelief in his face. The material of her sundress was pulled taut against the curve of her body, outlining with absolute delineation those revealing contours.

Words in Italian broke from him. Disjointed. Shocked. Disbelieving.

As if pulled out of the drowning tide of physical desire, Eloise realised what he was seeing. What all the carefully chosen outfits she’d worn in his company had been designed to conceal. What now could be concealed no longer.

He jack-knifed to his feet, still staring down at her, horror-struck.

It was that horror-struck expression that penetrated her thoughts like some huge, heavy battering ram, shattering the crystalline delusions of her hopes. And then, even as it did so, his expression changed. Closed.

He took a step back.

‘Is it mine?’

The cruelty of the words was like a knife. Slashing through what she had thought was between them. Had hoped, longed so much was between them.

But her fears had been right all along. That was the hideous, unbearable truth of it. The fears that had driven her from that moment in New York when she had discovered that her flight from Rome had not been the end of her affair with Vito. Could never be the end—because the consequences of it would be with her all her life.

All her child’s life.

The child whose father was now staring at her with a look of horror on his face. Telling her what she had dreaded to know.

Rejection. Rejection just as my father rejected me.

The pain of it made her faint, but she must give an answer.

‘I think you had better leave, Vito.’ Her voice came from very far away.

‘Do you carry my child?’