The chapel was small but magnificent, its ceiling and walls brilliantly frescoed with biblical images and its pews beautifully carved. Julie could feel the weight of its years of devotion, and panic started to fill her at the thought of the awesome nature of the commitment she was about to make here in this holy place.
She hesitated in mid-step and felt the quick look the lawyer gave her. She was doing this for Josh, Julie reminded herself shakily, and she focused on Rocco’s ramrod-straight back. Somehow just looking at him calmed her, and filled her with a deep spiritual awareness of the purpose of the commitment she and Rocco were making, so that her body stopped trembling. The lawyer, who was holding her arm, paused to give her an approving smile, as though he sensed her determination to do what she felt so deeply to be right.
But it was only when Rocco turned to look at her that she felt truly able to take the final steps that brought her level with him, as though somehow he himself was drawing her to him and giving her strength.
The service was simple, its words timeless and beautiful and the priest compassionate and yet stern as he underlined the gravity of the commitment they were making, joining their hands and commanding them to repeat after him their vows to one another.
This time she did not evade Rocco’s kiss. In fact she desperately wanted to cling to it and to him, needing reality in a world that seemed all too unreal.
In the small room off the chapel there were papers to sign, and then Rocco was guiding her back into the chapel and down the aisle to the font, where Maria and Josh, awake and dressed and lying happily in his buggy, were waiting for them.
It was done. Josh was safe. But at what cost to her? Only time would tell if she had the strength to endure her love for Rocco and his lack of love for her. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t already had p
ractice, she reminded herself, remembering James. But her feelings for James couldn’t in any way compare with what she felt for Rocco.
Rocco looked at Julie’s pale, set face. She was his now. His wife. A feeling he couldn’t analyse seized him: primitive, male, and very possessive. The satin gown caressed her body so lovingly that he almost felt jealous of its intimate contact with her, wanting to replace its touch with his own. He could see the admiring looks his lawyer was giving her, and he wanted to draw her away from him, to keep her from the desiring looks of all other men and for himself alone. She and the child were both now beneath his protection. His. He was now a husband and a father, and his duty was to keep them both safe. Their future was his responsibility.
A husband, but not a lover—nor loved.
Did he want to be?
That he should even need to ask himself that question was a warning that rubbed against Rocco’s pride like wet sandpaper against tender flesh.
It astonished Julie just how much attention to detail Rocco had given to the outward form of their marriage—there was a photographer to capture their images, and a small, hastily arranged but nonetheless elegant champagne reception to which a variety of local dignities had been invited. Rocco informed Julie, as they stood side by side whilst Rocco introduced her to their guests, that it was expected and would give rise to comment if he did not show public pride in their marriage and in her as his wife.
‘Oh, and by the way,’ he added, ‘I’ve told Maria that rather than disrupt Josh, since his nursery is off your bedroom, it makes sense for you to continue to sleep in your own room rather than move into the master bedroom.’
Simple enough words, and there had been a time when she would have received them with gratitude, but now they felt like a mortal blow to her heart, Julie admitted.
‘I wouldn’t want things any other way,’ she managed to answer, but she didn’t dare risk looking at him as she spoke, just in case he could see her real feelings in her eyes.
But what else could she reasonably have expected? She knew he didn’t love her, that he had only married her for Josh’s sake, and logically she ought to be pleased he had found such a tactful way of pointing out to her that he didn’t want her sharing his bed, given his almost arrogantly alpha maleness.
Their ‘guests’ had left, Rocco was escorting his lawyer to a car waiting to take him to the private plane that would fly him back to the mainland, and Josh, who had been awake to be admired during the champagne breakfast, was now a soft, sleeping weight in her arms. The silk satin dress, for all its elegance, somehow felt tawdry, given the real reason for her marriage, and Julie longed to take it off and put on clothes that she had bought for herself, no matter how cheap and unstylish they might be compared with the things Rocco had bought for her. Like the champagne that had soured her palette and left her longing for clean, fresh water, those designer clothes were part of a lifestyle that was not really hers, and they reinforced the fact that she had in one sense been bought by Rocco just as easily as Antonio had bought her sister.
But for very different reasons. Everything she had agreed to and had done was for Josh’s sake.
That wasn’t true. Hadn’t at least part of the reason she had agreed to marry Rocco been the fact that she had fallen in love with him, and had snatched eagerly at the opportunity to share his life?
Share his life? She was indeed a fool if she really thought there was any chance of that. If Rocco wouldn’t let her share his bed then there was precious little hope that he would allow her to share anything else, was there? A single tear splashed down onto Josh’s face, causing him to open his eyes and then yawn sleepily before closing them again. His trust in her touched Julie’s heart, and she curved her mouth in a softly tender smile as she bent to wipe away the tear.
Watching her unobserved from the doorway, Rocco frowned. There could be only one reason for a bride to cry tears of sorrow on her wedding day, and that was because she had married the wrong man, her love having been given to someone else. Anyone observing her with Josh could see how much he meant to her—the child of the man she loved.
With the curves of her body hidden by the sleeping baby she looked more like a Madonna than a bride, untouchable and aloof. But he wanted to touch her, he wanted to hold her, he wanted to hear her cry out to him in her need as she had done before. He wanted her, Rocco admitted, stepping back from the doorway before Julie could see him mooning over her like some yearning lovesick adolescent. For a moment he wondered if that was why he had deliberately left it too late for his brothers to make it in time for the wedding.
No, he had done his duty by Julie and Josh, that was all. Now he had a duty to his business, to the construction site where he had had to postpone several important meetings in order to make time for today’s hurried marriage.
There was no need for him to hang around the villa as though he was waiting around to beg for what few spare crumbs of attention Julie might throw his way. He had better things to do with his time.
It was Maria who informed Julie that Rocco had gone out and that she didn’t know when he would be back.
Was that sympathy or pity she could see in Maria’s eyes? Julie wondered as she asked Maria to help her unfasten her wedding dress—a duty and a pleasure that should surely have been Rocco’s. Only there was no pleasure for him in touching her, was there? Not for him. But for her that pleasure was the sweetest and the most dangerous she had ever known or would ever know.
CHAPTER TWELVE
IT WAS gone ten o’clock in the evening and Rocco had still not returned. There was nothing to keep her downstairs. The last thing she wanted was for Rocco to come in and find her hanging around as though she was waiting for him, desperate for his company. Maria had already locked up, and she might as well go up to her room as stay downstairs Julie acknowledged.
In the nursery Josh lay fast asleep, his eyelashes fanning across his healthily pink cheeks. For his sake if not for her own she knew beyond any doubt that she had done the right thing. She had no idea just why James’s sister had decided that she wanted Josh, but what Julie did know was that she would never have been a good mother to him.