LITMIR.BIZ

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pale-coloured carpet covered the floor, merging with equally pale walls. The bed—surely the widest Julie had ever seen, and equally surely, she decided, with distaste, intended for the sort of sex games and romps her sister had freely and boastfully indulged in rather than merely for a good night’s sleep—barely filled a third of the floor space.

      ‘The controls for the bed are here,’ the steward was telling her. ‘You can raise it to read or watch TV.’ He pressed several buttons on the remote he was holding in demonstration, causing one half of the bed to tilt up as though it were a chair, whilst almost magically a huge TV screen appeared from a narrow cupboard on the opposite wall.

      ‘We’ve set up the sky cot here,’ he added. ‘Right next to the seat you’ll need to strap yourself into for take-off and landing. It pulls down out of the wall, like so. The bathroom and dressing room are through that door next to the bed. I’ve unpacked a few things for you and the baby, and hung them up. I’ll be serving dinner in about half an hour. If Rocco follows his normal form he’ll want to work as soon as he’s had dinner, so you might want to think about getting a few hours’ sleep. We’ll be landing shortly before one in the morning. I don’t know what the baby’s exact routine is, but I shall be on standby if you need me for anything. I’ll bring the heated milk as soon as we’re airborne.’

      Julie would have liked to tell him that she’d rather eat her food on her own, and as far away from Rocco Leopardi as possible, but she didn’t—because she didn’t want to cause the steward any extra work.

      A light above the door started to flash.

      ‘Take-off,’ the steward told her briskly.

      Two minutes later Josh was strapped into his sky cot and Julie into her seat.

       CHAPTER TWO

      ‘HERE’S the baby’s milk, and I’ve brought you a pot of tea.’

      Julie nodded her thanks to the steward. Their take-off had been smooth, but even so it had left Josh fretful, and he was grizzling as Julie lifted him out of the sky cot to feed him. She tested the heat of the formula and then settled down with him. At first he sucked greedily, but then to her dismay he suddenly rejected the teat, crying in pain and drawing his legs up towards his body.

      He was having an attack of colic, Julie recognised anxiously as she tried to comfort him, gently rubbing his torso the way the doctor had shown her.

      To her relief, almost immediately he started to relax. The disruption to his routine meant that this feed was late. He must have been so hungry, poor baby, that he’d tried to take it too fast. He was tired as well.

      Ten minutes later, when he had only managed a third of the bottle, Julie admitted defeat, putting the bottle to one side and lifting him against her shoulder to wind him. Almost immediately he was sick, covering both himself and Julie’s jumper with sour-smelling sticky formula.

      He was crying again now, and Julie felt a bit like crying herself. It was so important that he got the nourishment he needed, but the attacks of colic he suffered meant that feeding times had become a nightmare of anxiety for her— even though the doctor had assured her that she was doing everything correctly.

      He felt so light. Lighter than he had yesterday? Was he losing weight instead of gaining it?

      She’d have to change him and then try again, Julie acknowledged, replacing the bottle in the thoughtfully provided insulated container before carrying Josh through into the bathroom.

      Mirrored walls gave back to her an unprepossessing and unwanted image of her own too-thin body and wan face. The pair of them looked half-starved, pinched, and with too-sharp features, she admitted, as she stripped off Josh’s soiled clothes and placed him down on his changing mat.

      To her astonishment, the steward had told her that there were clean baby clothes and nappies in the drawers in the dressing room, along with clothes for herself. How Rocco Leopardi had managed to arrange that she had no idea—but perhaps when you were a Leopardi everything was possible. She suspected that Rocco would believe that being a Leopardi meant that it should be possible.

      It would be a long time before she could forget the feel of those hard hands on her body, and even longer—if ever—before she could forget the feel of his mouth on hers. As an adult woman who earned her own living, she found the thought of wearing clothes bought for her by someone else made her body stiffen in angry rejection—but, whilst she might be able to afford the luxury of pride and self-denial for herself, she couldn’t do that to Josh.

      When she found the carefully folded baby clothes she looked at them with a mixture of anger and pain. Designer label baby clothes. What a shocking waste of money. All Josh or indeed any baby needed, surely, was simply clothes that were warm and clean and fitted? Even so, it was hard to stop herself from drawing in a small breath of delight as she removed a complete matching set of baby boy’s clothes in soft blue, cream and beige. The little shirt had an identifiable designer check, the beige trousers were vaguely ‘cargo’ style, and the cardigan was blue and trimmed again with the same check—like the socks that completed the outfit. Even the babygro to go under everything had its own designer logo, and the disposable nappies were not only the right size, but were also ‘boy’ nappies—a luxury she had never been able to afford, and which she had told herself was little more than a cynical marketing ploy designed to add yet another expense to being a parent.

      It was impossible to even think of touching such exquisite clothes whilst she was still wearing her formula-encrusted jumper—which, of course, would have to be washed and somehow dried in time for her to put it back on before she left the plane.

      In the bathroom, Josh had started to cry. Quickly Julie pulled the jumper over her head. She needed a shower every bit as much as Josh needed a bath, so she might as well remove her skirt and her tights as well.

      If there was one thing Josh did enjoy it was his bath, and with all the splashing around he did she’d be better off bathing him wearing only her bra and knickers.

      It was amazing what wealth could do: nothing that Josh might need had been forgotten—right down to a baby bath and luxury products that smelled deliciously of vanilla.

      Lifting Josh out of the bath, Julie wrapped him in a towel and carried him through into the bedroom, where she finally managed to coax him to take a bit more of his formula.

      He was falling asleep as she put a clean nappy on him and then fastened him into a brand-new, deliciously soft sleep suit patterned with floppy-eared rabbits.

      Kissing him tenderly, she put him in the sky cot, making sure that he was secure and safe before returning to the bathroom, where she washed out her jumper, cleaned up the baby bathtime mess, and then finally—blissfully—stepped into the shower.

      In the main salon, Rocco finished writing thee-mail he was sending his elder brother and then tapped the ‘send’ button, mentally reviewing the events that had led to the search for Antonio’s child.

      Rocco hadn’t planned to spend Christmas with his father and his brothers. He’d intended to fly to Colorado to stay with friends and ski, but then his eldest brother had telephoned him with the news that their father was terminally ill, so Rocco had flown home instead.

      Home. Rocco lifted his arms to link his hands behind his head, exhaling as he did so. He was naturally strongly built, but the hard physical labour he had done during his teenage years, when he had preferred to work on a building site during his summer holidays rather than be financially tethered to his father, had honed and developed his muscles in a way that had left a legacy Rocco’s tailors deplored and his lovers adored. Happily, one of the benefits of being a billionaire was that he could afford to have his shirts hand-made and made to measure, to accommodate the powerful muscles of his chest and upper arms.

      Falcon, aesthete that he was, tended to look down his long, proud nose at what he somewhat derisorily termed Rocco’s ‘prize fighter torso’. Alessandro, his second brother, was less critical.

      ‘Who says that Father

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