Mills & Boon Stars Collection: Ruthless Demands: The Sicilian’s Stolen Son / The Greek Demands His Heir / The Greek Commands His Mistress

‘Of course,’ she conceded, wondering why she didn’t feel reassured by that moral statement.

He wanted to stay on the right side of the law. She quite understood that. Only, where did that leave her? Julie had committed her crimes in Jemima’s name and the only way for Jemima to clear her name was to own up to her sister’s identity theft. Unfortunately doing that would also mean that she lost the right to care for Nicky. How could she bear that loss? How could she risk it? All she could do in the short-term, she thought in a panic, was fake being Julie until she was confronted by the police. At that point she would have to come clean because she would have no other choice.

Luciano studied his quarry, his gaze instinctively lingering on her ripe mouth and the porcelain smoothness of the upper slopes of her full breasts. He was a man and he supposed it was natural for him to notice her body, but the pulse of response at his groin and the sudden tightening there infuriated him. He turned away dismissively, broad shoulders rigid below his exquisitely tailored charcoal-grey suit jacket.

‘The technician will call to take the sample this afternoon,’ he delivered.

‘You’re not wasting any time,’ Jemima remarked gingerly.

Luciano swung back, eyes narrowed and cutting as black razors. ‘You have already wasted a great deal of my time,’ he told her with brutal bluntness.

Jemima clenched her teeth together and glanced at his companion, whose discomfiture was unhidden. There was civilised and civilised, she guessed, and Luciano Vitale had no intention of treating someone like her with kid gloves. It was clear that he saw her as inferior in every way. She would have to toughen up, she told herself urgently, toughen up to handle someone who disliked and distrusted her without showing weakness. Weakness, she sensed, he would use against her.

Shell-shocked as Jemima was by Luciano’s visit, once he had left she followed her usual routine with Nicky. She had looked forward to spending the long summer holidays with the little boy before she had to make childcare arrangements to enable her to return to work at the start of the new term. Now she was wondering if she would lose custody of him before then. She was down on the floor playing with Nicky when the doorbell went again.

It was the technician from the DNA-testing facility. The woman extended a consent form on a board for her to sign and then asked her to hold Nicky. The swab was done in seconds and Jemima waited for the technician to use the same procedure on her but instead she packaged the swab and departed, her job evidently complete. Heaving a sigh of relief that she herself had not been asked to give a sample, Jemima was in no mood for further company and she suppressed a weary groan when yet another caller turned up at the door.

Her face stiffened when she recognised her ex-boyfriend. Yes, she was still friends with Steven because her parents liked him and she had had to deal with the awkwardness of continuing meetings whether she liked it or not. Steven was a big mover and shaker in the church she attended and ran a young evangelical group to great acclaim.

‘May I come in?’ Steven pressed when the polite small talk about her parents’ little holiday had dried up and she was rather hoping he would take the hint and leave.

‘Nicky’s still up,’ Jemima warned him.

‘How’s the little chap doing?’ Steven enquired with his widest, fakest smile.

‘Well, his father may have turned up,’ Jemima heard herself say without meaning to. That she had admitted that much to Steven was evidence of how much emotional turmoil she was in because once she had realised how much he disapproved of her taking responsibility for Julie’s son she had stopped confiding in the tall blond man.

Steven took a seat with the casual informality of a regular visitor. A handsome dentist with a lucrative line in private patients, her ex was well liked by all. Jemima, however, was rather less keen. She had believed she loved Steven for years and had fully expected to marry him before Julie came into their lives.

‘Yes, he’s good-looking and he could give me some fun but he’s your boyfriend. I’m not poaching him,’ Julie had told her squarely.

But Jemima hadn’t wanted to keep Steven by default and once she’d realised how infatuated he was with her twin she had set him free. Of course, as a couple, Steven and Julie hadn’t suited, as Jemima had suspected at the outset. Her sister and her ex had enjoyed a short-lived fling, nothing more, and Jemima genuinely did not hold Steven’s defection against him. How could she possibly blame him for having found her colourful, lively sister more attractive? No, what annoyed Jemima about Steven was that he was smugly convinced that he could talk his way back into Jemima’s affections now that Julie was gone. Steven had no sensitivity whatsoever.

‘His father?’ Steven echoed on a rising note of interest. ‘Tell me more.’

Jemima told him about her visitors but withheld the information about the stolen credit cards and the underlying threat, reluctant to give Steven another opportunity to trash her sister’s memory.

‘That’s the best news I’ve heard in weeks!’ Steven exclaimed, his bright blue eyes lingering intently on her flushed face. ‘I admire your affection for Nicky but keeping him isn’t practical in your circumstances.’

‘Sometimes feelings aren’t practical,’ Jemima countered quietly.

Steven gave her an earnest appraisal. ‘You know how I feel about you, Jem. How long is it going to take for you to forgive me? I was foolish. I made a mistake. But I learned from it.’

‘If you had really loved me, you wouldn’t have wanted Julie—’

‘It’s different for men. We are more base creatures,’ Steven told her sanctimoniously.

Jemima gritted her teeth and resisted the urge to roll her eyes. It amazed her that she had failed to appreciate how sexist and judgemental Steven could be. ‘I’ve moved on now. I’m fond of you but I’m afraid that’s all.’

‘Tell me about Nicky’s father,’ Steven urged irritably.

‘I only know his name, nothing else...’

Steven started looking up Luciano Vitale on his tablet and fired a welter of facts at her.

Luciano was an only child, the son of an infamous Mafia don. Jemima did roll her eyes at that information. He was filthy rich, which wasn’t a surprise, but much that followed did take her aback. In his early twenties Luciano had married a famous Italian movie star and had a daughter with her before tragically losing both wife and child in a helicopter crash three years earlier. Jemima was shocked, very shocked by that particular piece of news.

‘So there you have it...that’s why he wants a kid...his daughter died!’ Steven pointed out with satisfaction. ‘How can you doubt that the man will make a good parent?’

‘He’s still single. How much actual parenting is he planning to do?’ Jemima traded stubbornly. ‘And maybe Nicky’s supposed to be a replacement but he’s not a girl, he’s a boy and a child in his own right—’

Steven pontificated at length about the immorality of the surrogacy agreement and how it went against all natural laws. Jemima said nothing because she was too busy looking at photographic images of the exquisite blonde, Gigi Nocella, Luciano’s late wife and the mother of his firstborn. Luciano had matched Gigi, she reflected abstractedly, two beautiful people combined to make a perfect couple. He had already lost a child, she thought helplessly, and she was filled with guilt at her own reluctance to hand over Nicky. Who was she to interfere? Who was she to think she knew everything when she was already painfully aware that her sister had made so many bad choices in life?

‘Vitale needs to know what Julie did to you and your family,’ Steven said harshly. ‘After all, if he’d kept better tabs on her, Julie would never have come here and caused so much grief.’

‘That’s very much a matter of opinion, Steven,’ Jemima said stiffly and, deciding that she had been sufficiently hospitable, she stood up in the hope of hastening his departure.

‘You’re not thinking this through, Jem,’ he told her in exasperation. ‘Nicky’s not your child and you shouldn’t be behaving as if he is. If you pass him on to his father...’

‘Like a parcel?’

‘He belongs with his father,’ Steven argued vehemently. ‘Don’t think that I don’t appreciate that that child is preventing us from getting back together again!’

‘Only in your imagination—’

‘You know how I feel about you keeping Nicky. Why are you trying to do more for the kid than his own mother was prepared to do? Let’s be honest, Julie was a lousy mother and not the nicest—’

‘Stop right there!’ Hot-cheeked, Jemima wrenched open the front door with vigour. ‘I’ll tell Mum and Dad that you called in when I phone them later.’

She closed the door again with the suggestion of a slam and groaned out loud in frustration. But grateful as she was to see Steven leave, he had left her with food for thought. She played with Nicky in the bath and stared down at his damp curly head with tears swimming in her eyes. He wasn’t her child and all the wishing in the world couldn’t change that...or bring Julie back. Luciano Vitale had lost a much-loved daughter. She must have been loved, for that could be the only reason her father had gone to such lengths to have another child. Jemima wrapped Nicky’s wet, squirming figure into a towel and hugged him close.

Luciano had searched for eight months to find his child. He wanted Nicky. She had to stop being so selfish. She had to take a step back. Was she prejudiced against Luciano because he had chosen a surrogacy arrangement to father a second child? She was conservative and conventional and she supposed she was a little bit disposed to prejudice in that line. The admission shamed her. How could she have accepted Julie and Nicky but retained her bias against Nicky’s father? Of course, what if Luciano Vitale wasn’t Nicky’s father?

Two days later, however, she received the results of the DNA testing, which declared that her nephew was Luciano’s flesh and blood, and she had barely settled the document down when the landline rang.

‘Luciano Vitale...’ Her caller imparted his identity with a warning edge of harshness. ‘I would like to meet my son this evening.’

Jemima reminded herself that there was no room for her personal feelings in her dealings with Luciano and she breathed in deep. ‘Yes, Mr Vitale. What time suits you?’

They negotiated politely for an earlier time than he first suggested because Jemima knew that the later he arrived, the more tired and cross Nicky would be. And she wanted the first meeting between father and son to go well because it would be downright mean and malicious to hope otherwise. The small living room was spick and span by the time she had finished cleaning, but Nicky was teething again and cried pathetically when she tried to put him down for his afternoon nap. Ellie had been texting her constantly with queries since she had told her friend about Luciano and was reacting to his proposed visit with as much excitement as a famous rock star might have invoked.

‘Are you sure I can’t come round and sort of hover on the doorstep?’ Ellie pleaded on the phone. ‘I’m gasping to see the guy in the flesh. He looks hotter than the fires of hell!’

‘It’s not the right moment, Ellie. He has a right to his privacy.’

‘Not looking like a walking, talking female temptation, he hasn’t!’

‘He may look good in photos but he’s not the warm, approachable type,’ Jemima reminded her friend.