Desire Has No Mercy by Violet Winspear Read Free Book Online Page B

you.' Her fingers tensed and curled as she looked into his dark handsome face, wanting to make him bleed, wanting to make him curl into an agonised heap on the floor, where she had lain for a long time wishing that despair could lead quietly and quickly to death itself.
    Then as if he saw in her face some residue of the despair she had felt, he said quietly: 'You are safe now, Julia. Matters have been adjusted, and no one knows except the two of us that our marriage was a necessity.'
    'You promised me that our marriage would be—' She bit her lip, for the words would sound archaic and yet she had to say them. 'You promised it would be in name only.'
    'Have some sense, Julia.' He frowned and flipped open his cigar case. 'How can you expect a man to behave like a monk with a woman who has his name and is to bear his child? I know I'm every sort of villain in your eyes, capable of every sort of lowdown trick, but I had to make you marry me. No way was I going to allow my child to be removed from you as if it was garbage. That baby will be born, and I'm too much flesh and blood not to want the woman who carries it for me.'
    He shrugged and applied a flame to his cigar. 'Love is -good for a woman. It gives her a glow.'
    'Love?' Julia looked at him in total incredulity. 'Do you know what you are, Rome Demario?'
    'A man,
carina
?' Smoke drifted lazily from his lips. 'You tell me what you think I am.'
    'A devil who'd break every commandment in the book just for the hell of it! I hope you never showed your true self to your poor mother!'
    Through the drifting cigar smoke he stared at Julia and suddenly he had a brooding look. 'I don't discuss my mother with a Van Holden. I've told you how she died, now we'll let her rest.'
    Julia bit her lip and turned her head away from him. She gazed out upon the sky where the great balls of cloud looked solid enough to bounce. Soon they would be over Naples, and her hand clenched against her body. Rome wanted this child with a kind of passion she couldn't fully understand… unless it gave him a cruel kind of satisfaction because he had forced it upon her.
    She sat there, resolve hardening in her to deny him the ultimate joy in his vendetta against the Van Holdens. He could only feel that when he held the baby in his arms… what would he feel if she lost it? Would agony clutch at his insides and drag him down on his knees in abject misery?
    How that would pleasure her, to see that happen to Rome Demario!
    'Soon we'll be landing.' He reached up for her travelling coat of smooth cashmere, with a deep velvet collar, ex-pensive and perfectly tailored and bought in place of the fur coat she had refused adamantly to accept. 'There's enough cruelty and destructiveness in this world,' she had said meaningly.
    He assisted her into the coat and flicked her hair out of the collar. 'You'd look stunning in mink, the dark shining variety,' he murmured. 'I know a furrier in Naples—'
    'From whom you've bought furs for your other conquests?' she broke in. 'No, thank you! I only accepted this coat at your insistence but I won't wear fur and be a walking advertisement for the suffering and slaughter inflicted on poor dumb animals. I don't expect
you
to understand my point of view, you're too used to fleecing human beings to have any mercy for mere animals.'
    'Always you find something flattering to say to your husband, don't you,
mia
?' He gripped her shoulders; there was a menacing smile in his eyes and the cleft in his chin looked deep and dark. 'Fools and their money are easily parted and if I didn't rake it in at my tables someone else would. Look where honour and trust in others put my father! Believe me, Julia, I learned my lessons very young and I've never forgotten them… expect very little from other people and you won't be disappointed, for it isn't the meek who inherit the earth, it's those with the gall to take the plums off the tree before they fall to the ground.'
    'Rome,' she sighed, 'you're a real