Desire Has No Mercy (2 page)

'
Buon giorno, signorina
.' The cigar smoke drifted closer and Julia tensed as her nerves felt a silent and supple approach, the tread of a tiger, darkly tanned from his head to his heels… a pagan who enjoyed the Italian sun on the high terrace of his casino, so he had carelessly told her when he held her and contrasted her skin with his own. 'Milk and honey,' he had breathed. 'They mix well, don't they?'

'Go away!' Julia had wanted to sound cold and angry, but her voice betrayed the pain and fear of a girl in trouble. 'You have no right to be here, Signor Demario. You weren't invited.'

'But I was, Signorina Van Holden. Your sister sent me an invitation.'

'Verna did what?' Julia swung round and was quite unable to suppress a gasp when she saw him standing only a few inches away from her, with not a crease in the fine suiting that covered his lean hard body. A pain stabbed deep inside her and she felt an intense awareness of the link she must soon find the courage to have cut, so she'd be free of him. Free to try and live the gracious, ordered life he had so disturbed with his vengeful arrogance.

'To thank me,' he drawled, 'for returning the IOUs her fiancé wouldn't have liked receiving.'

Julia swayed against the stone parapet and at once he was beside her, the rim of a champagne glass at her lips. 'Don't feint—sip a little of this.'

Julia didn't dare to faint. A couple of guests at the wedding were in the medical profession and she had sworn to herself that no one was going to know that she, who prided herself on being poised and coolly detached from the romantic blunders of other girls, had been forced into a situation which could scandalise the family her sister had married into only an hour ago.

She shivered and swallowed the champagne with an effort. It revived her so she could feel Rome Demario's hand pressing against her body, reminding her acutely of that other time when she had been without defence in his arms.

'You had no right to come here!' she said tensely. 'So you could gloat a-and look at me in front of my friends as if you—you—'

'As if I own part of you?' he murmured, and his grey eyes looked directly down into hers, making her burn with a sudden overwhelming blush… it seemed to go all over her and she gasped at what she saw in his eyes, a rekindling of those memories of a night when for a brief moment it had seemed as if he might give her those IOUs without demanding that she pay for them. He had stood there, his shoulders against the door, and he had gestured around the beautifully furnished room as if to remind her that no longer was he the errand boy at her grandmother's house.

'We are now man and woman,' he said to her. 'Now we are equal.'

'I don't consider myself the equal of a gambler who allows young girls to play for high stakes at his tables,' she had retorted freezingly. 'I wouldn't want to be that low.'

'So I am low, eh?' It was then he had approached her with such deliberate intent. 'Then I shall bring you down to my level, my high and mighty Miss Van Holden.'

Julia shrank against the stonework of the hotel balcony and her face was so white that her eyes seemed to throw green shadows on to her skin.

'You will not look like that!' he exclaimed. 'I didn't come to this wedding to gloat over you. As a matter of fact I was going to tear up the invitation, and then I thought to myself how intriguing it was that Rome Demario should receive an invitation to a Van Holden reception. I recall a time when he wasn't good enough to mingle with their refined guests.'

'That's what this—this torture is all about, isn't it?' Julia's eyes blazed into his. 'You're getting your own back, making one of the Van Holdens pay for something that happened a long time ago. I couldn't help it that my grandmother behaved so arrogantly and dismissed your mother from her employment. I didn't want your mother to be out of work. I was only a child and you made me cry—something you'll never do again, Signor Demario. Never!'

He stared down at Julia's face, utterly white except for the smudges of shadow beneath her green eyes. Her face had a slender delicacy, a quiver she couldn't control to the full soft lips that betrayed a passion her cool look of poise-was inclined to deny. Most people would have said at once that Verna Van Holden was more ardent than her sister, but the truth simply was that she was less innately shy and sensitive, and could never have suffered as Julia was suffering right now.

The very touch of Rome Demario was insufferable to Julia. When he looked at her it was as if he stripped her of clothing, of virtue, of every decency she had held dear not out of prudery but because she was so innately modest, with reserves of a deep loving kind he had forced, made her yield; a throbbing, sensual destruction of the chastity which had been hers to give with love… which he had taken without love.

'When I look at you,' she said, 'I feel cheap and dirty. I'd want to die if my friends—least of all my sister—knew why you really came here. I couldn't bear for them to know!'

'Something,' he said very quietly, 'is very much amiss. You will tell me—come, I insist on knowing!' His arm gripped her and he moved in closer until his long legs were pressing against her and she could feel the masculine warmth of his body penetrating through the soft material of her dress; leaf-green chiffon silk, clinging softly to the slim soft contours of her body. Closer, his warm hardness a threatening reminder of what he had done to her and what his physical dominance was capable of doing again.

'You're an affront,' she gasped. 'Did you imagine—what did you think,
signore
, that I'd be thrilled to see you? Do you fondly imagine you've aroused pangs of burning hunger in me and I'm thrilled to see your face again? It's a face I've hoped never to see again!' Her eyes were fixed wide and tormented on the Italian features she had tried so hard to blot from her mind… a look Bernini had surely visualised when he painted the canvas she had seen in the Borghese art gallery in Rome, leaning over the seduced Proserpina.

'I've aroused something,
signorina
.' That intent look was there in his eyes and Julia was trapped by his lean body whose strength she had tried to fight, learning the hard way how much deep-coiled power there was in the shoulders and arms of Rome Demario. He had subdued her then, and he'd do it again if he had to… Julia saw the threats in the depths of his eyes where those devil fires burned… those fires which had still smouldered behind his dark lashes when the dawn light came through the windows high above a Neapolitan street and she was allowed to leave him, feeling as if shame was something she would never cease to live with. She remembered now that he had murmured
arrivederci
.

'You have about you a look I don't quite remember.' Suddenly he had his fingers beneath her chin and was forcing up her face so he could study its every angle. He moved his long fingers up against her cheek and touched a fingertip to her shadowed eyes.

'Let me go before someone sees us!' She was arching away from him, trying somehow to escape the touch of his body… her own body was reacting to him, as if it were separated from her mind and was primitively drawn to his as if in some strange effort to protect what she intended to kill.

'I beg of you,
signore
! My sister's in-laws would be affronted if any of them saw me like this—with you—'

'With me?' he mockingly echoed. 'The Italian whose mother used to peel potatoes in your grandmother's kitchen? What is he now, eh? He's very much Italian and he's putting one and one together and it's adding up to three. You're with child, aren't you?'

'No!' It was almost a scream, which he swiftly stifled with his hand.

'You are having a baby,' he said quietly, 'and I am the father. I feel it, Julia, so don't attempt to deny it. Your face is more slender but your body is less so—you are carrying my child!'

'No,' she said again, desperate to convince him that it wasn't true. 'Babies don't come from that sort of thing— from a woman's hatred of the man who—who forces her to sleep with him. You're the very last man whose child I'd want to be carrying!'

'All the same, my child is here.' His hand had slid down and was now in contact with her stomach, his touch drivingly warm through the fine material of her dress, whose soft folds concealed that slight burgeoning of her figure… unless a hand touched her as Rome Demario's was touching her.

'How dare you?' she breathed. 'Your arrogance and sensuality are enough to make me ill!'

'Enough to make you pregnant,
carina
.' That strange kindling was there in his eyes, making them more intensely beautiful than such a man's eyes had the right to be. Julia writhed in an effort to get away from him, her hand reaching up convulsively as if to claw his eyes from his head. He flung aside the champagne glass as he gripped her wrist and it fell with a splintering crash to the pavement of the balcony, some of the wine splashing her silk-clad ankle, reminding her with acuteness of another time when he had flung ice-cream over her shoes… the bitter roots of all this had sprung from that moment.

'Tell me,' he insisted, his lips against her ear. 'The baby is mine, isn't it? We were together in Naples about seven weeks ago and you look and feel like a girl in the early stages of a baby. Come, why deny it when something can be done about it?'

'W-what do you mean?' Her eyes locked with his, blending her green-eyed resentment with the brilliance of his gaze. 'Are you talking about an abortion?'

'A—what?' Something writhed across his face that made instant fear clutch at Julia's heart His hands tightened until they were hurting her, bringing her so close to him that she could feel the anger seething in his body. 'Do you imagine, my girl, that I would permit such an outrage?'

'Outrage led to this, or have you forgotten,
signore
, in your Italian concern for your embryo?'

'So it is mine?' Astounding as it seemed to Julia he looked curiously pleased and taking hold of her hand he kissed the wrist and then turned it so he could place his lips in her palm.

'Don't!' Julia jerked her hand from the warmth of his mouth. 'It isn't something to look smug about! You should feel thoroughly ashamed of yourself, but I doubt if you know the meaning of the word.'

'Ashamed?' He looked at her in astonishment. 'We have made a child and I shall arrange right away that my son or daughter has my name.'

'You're out of your mind!' Julia gasped. 'I—I don't intend to bear the child—'

'You have some other intention?' His black brows were drawn abruptly together into a dangerous frown, his eyes glittering at their centres with a diamond-shaped brilliance. 'The child is in you, living and growing. Are you trying to tell me that you—' He swallowed, as if the words would choke him. 'You aren't going to kill my child, do you hear me? You are going to have it!'

'Not while I breathe.' Julia's heart was pounding, as it had that night in Naples. 'It's bad enough that I've been put in this predicament by you without being arrogantly told that I'm to go on carrying a baby I don't want. Do you honestly think I'd have a child of yours? Do you fondly imagine I'd be seen by my sister and friends in such a state?'

'I care nothing for your sister or your friends.' He bit the words out with his strong white teeth. 'I only care about what is mine and I shall see to it that you don't put yourself in some smart clinic with the intention of murdering what is part of me. That is your plan, of course, but as my wife you'll have no need to kill the baby or risk your own life in order to pretend to your friends that you are still a virgin.'

Julia was lost for words. She could only gaze at Rome Demario in dumb astonishment, until suddenly she started to laugh and he had to shake her in order to make her stop.

'Your wife?' she exclaimed. 'You think I'd stoop to marrying you? I'd sooner throw myself under a bus!'

'No doubt.' His hands gripped her and his eyes glittered as they held hers. You are welcome to do whatever you fancy, my dear Julia—after my child is born in wedlock, with my name on the birth certificate as the father and yours as the mother. Do you hear me and understand me, Julia? You are going to marry me whether you want it or not.'

'Never,' she said fiercely. 'I hate and despise you for what you've done to my life. You used me to even an old score and I shall never forgive you for assuming that night in Naples that I was as experienced as those other women who run up debts in your casino and pay their bills in your arms. It's a pity I wasn't experienced, then I wouldn't be pregnant with your—'

He stopped the word by pressing a hand over her mouth. 'There is no need for that—no need to let the hatred into the bloodstream of the baby. What has happened has to be put right and there is only one way to do it, and you know it in your heart.'

His hand slid from her mouth and moved almost caressingly to her shoulder, where it lay warm and heavy through the material of her dress. She shivered and remembered the feel of his hand on her skin, the startled exclamation against the hollow of her throat when he found himself making love to a girl who had never been with a man before. His body had tensed as if he tried to pull back, but something—passion, bitter boyhood memories—had overridden the impulse. He had made her give in to him until she was aware of nothing but the darkness and the primitive ritual… passion and terror blending together until she couldn't tell one from the other.

When daylight came she had wanted only to hurry away and forget… a forlorn hope as it turned out.

'Don't touch me!' She shrugged her shoulder away from his hand. 'You have no right to me or the child. You forced me to get this way, but you can't force me to go through with it. I can't—I won't! I have a life of my own to live and I won't drag out the next few months getting huge with your Italian brat. I hate it! I hate you! I hate what you've turned me into!'

'You're getting hysterical, so stop it, Julia, unless you want a sound shaking.' His dark face was adamant as he looked at her, the lean jaw set and firm. 'You're welcome to hate me, but all the same you are going to listen to reason and marry me. I am Italian, and that means I am also a Catholic, and I forbid you to even think about terminating the life of our child. Yes, Julia,
our child
. You might not like hearing me say it, but it happens to be true. Whatever led to its conception, the child is a fact of nature, and if I have to stand by you night and day for the next seven months I shall do so in order that you won't harm the infant or yourself. When you are safely over the birth, then I shall get a nursemaid for it and you can leave me. I make you that promise, on my heart, here and now. I neither make threats nor promises that I don't carry out—you know that, don't you?'