Nicky looked up at her, dark eyes cross and shimmering with tears.
Jemima dug the baby cup out of the bag and proceeded to pour some water into it while still cradling Nicky.
‘Seems that he is one little boy who knows what he wants,’ Lisa remarked.
‘You’re spot on.’ Jemima watched the baby moisten his lips and then try a tiny sip. Forced to swallow, he grimaced and sobbed again while she praised him and told him what a brave, wonderful boy he was.
Luciano watched the performance unfolding with blazing dark golden eyes, angry frustration assailing him. He knew when he was facing a fait accompli. Jemima handled Nicky beautifully, clearly knew him inside out and responded smoothly to his needs. He himself and the highly qualified nanny had failed utterly to provide the comfort his son had needed. He wondered if little boys were programmed to want mothers over father figures. He wondered tensely how his son would cope without a mother, particularly with her sudden disappearance. Bemused by that flood of concern and the sort of deep questions he normally suppressed, Luciano grated his teeth together in frustration and called someone to show out the doctor.
‘It is only a mild illness,’ Jemima remarked quietly. ‘Relax.’
‘How the hell am I supposed to relax when my son is suffering?’ Luciano lashed back at her in fierce attack.
‘Sometimes you can’t fix things and the normal childhood illnesses fall into that category,’ Jemima pointed out gently.
Well, he cared about Nicky; he was quite accidentally revealing that with his behaviour. Of course, he had to be aggressive even in that, but then he was an aggressive man. And intelligence warned her that Luciano Vitale would not voluntarily share anything with her that he considered to be private or personal. Obviously his feelings about his son would fall squarely into that territory and it was not for her to pry, she told herself doggedly as Nicky snuffled into an exhausted sleep on her lap.
Luciano strode to the door, raking an impatient hand through his blue-black glossy hair. A dark shadow of stubble outlined his sculpted mouth and strong jawline. He was obviously the sort of man who had to shave twice a day. He had loosened his racy red tie at the collar, unbuttoned the top button of his white shirt. He looked a little more human and a little less perfect than at their previous meeting and she censured her selfish sense of satisfaction that he was finding his son more of a challenge than he had expected. Such a feeling was mean and ungenerous, she reminded herself angrily. Nicky was Luciano’s flesh and blood and she should be pleased that he was so keen to get to know his child.
Lisa reappeared and hovered.
‘The nanny will put my son in his cot for a nap now,’ Luciano announced. ‘We have to talk.’
Talk? What about? A frown indented Jemima’s brow as she passed her nephew carefully over to the young woman and the door closed in their wake.
‘What do you want to discuss?’ she asked stiffly.
Luciano shot her a chilling appraisal. ‘Oh, please, don’t come over all naïve on me now. I prefer honesty. You’ve made it clear that you want to make the most profit you can from having brought my child into the world,’ he pointed out with unconcealed contempt. ‘But I simply want what makes my son happy and it is patently obvious that in the short-term at least Niccolò will not be happy if you suddenly vanish from his life.’
Jemima studied him, surprised he was willing to admit that possibility.
‘Although there is nothing I can like, respect or admire about you, Jemima...my son is attached to you,’ he conceded in a grim-mouthed tone of finality. ‘I do not want to damage him by immediately forcing you out of his life. He deserves more consideration from me. After all, he did not choose the unusual circumstances of his birth—I did.’
His ringing assurance that he did not like, respect or admire her cut Jemima surprisingly deep and yet she was wryly amused by her apparent vulnerability towards his low opinion of her morals. He thought she was Julie and while she faked being Julie she had to own her sister’s mistakes and pay the price of them too.
Luciano watched her porcelain-fair skin wash a guilty pink that simply accentuated the ice-blue eyes, which reminded him of very pale aquamarines he had once glimpsed in his mother’s jewellery box. Those eyes and that full, soft pillowy mouth were snares that any man would zero in on, he told himself, his attention widening its scope to encompass the full, buoyant swell of her breasts below the simple tee she wore. He wondered what colour her bra was and marvelled at the ludicrous thought. What was he? A randy schoolboy? He had access to many sexual choices and almost any one of those women would be classier, safer and more beautiful than Jemima Barber, he reminded himself impatiently. Even so, it was his son’s mother who was making him hard and taut and needy where it mattered, when he was all too often indifferent to female fawning and flirtation.
But then possibly what annoyed him most about Jemima was that he had yet to see any sign that she was making the smallest effort to sexually attract him. She did not appear to be wearing make-up and her plain denim skirt came to her knees while she sat with her pale slim legs neatly and modestly folded to one side. It was like a simulated virginal act, he reasoned in exasperation. Possibly she had already worked out that hooker heels and too much exposed female flesh were not his style.
Sex was no big deal, he thought impatiently. That was a truth he had embraced long ago. He didn’t make time for sex, though, and perhaps that explained his reaction to his son’s mother. Possibly any reasonably appealing woman would have given him the same response. But the nanny did nothing for his libido, he conceded, and neither did any of the very attractive female staff he employed. No, Jemima Barber had something special about her, something insidiously sexy he had yet to pin down and label, and it drew him like a very strong magnet. And he loathed it, loathed it like poison in his system, because she was everything he despised in a woman.
The silence smouldered like a simmering pot on a gas hob. Jemima could feel heat striking through her, spreading up from the warmth in her pelvis. He did that to her. He made her tummy fill with butterflies. He made an embarrassing hot, slick sensation pulse between her thighs. He made her nipples tighten and push against the barrier of her bra.
That reality mortified and shamed her and reminded her of her first crush as a teenager when her body had gone haywire with a physical longing she hadn’t understood and hadn’t really been ready to embrace. But this was different because those responses were now attacking her adult body. She found herself studying that gorgeous face of his even though she didn’t want to stare, didn’t want to notice the perfection of his sleek cheekbones, the classic jut of his nose or the strong line of the jaw cradling that superbly masculine mouth. And then she fell into the dark and dangerous enticement of his deep-set eyes that were tigerish gold in the light from the window and once she looked she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t even function, she thought in bemused dismay.
The door opened and an older woman came in carrying a tray. Coffee was poured. Luciano took his black and without sugar. Jemima took hers milky and sweet, their differences as pronounced in coffee as in everything else.
Cradling his cup in one elegant, long-fingered hand, Luciano murmured, ‘I’ve decided that I want you to accompany us to Sicily as the nanny you offered to be...’
Shock made Jemima’s lower lip part from her upper and she breathed again and a little faster, her eyes widening at that bombshell of a suggestion.
‘It would ease the transition for my son but it would be on the strict understanding that you would begin stepping back from him while allowing others to step forward to take your place in his little world,’ Luciano spelt out coolly. ‘He must learn to do without you.’
Jemima tried and failed to swallow as he described the role. He had delivered the killing blow of truth by telling her what he ultimately expected and wanted from her. Sicily and the nanny job would be very temporary for her and would come at a high cost for a woman who loved the child she cared for. She lost colour,