Desire Has No Mercy
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Authors: Violet Winspear
By
Violet Winspear
Contents
Julia saw devil fires burning in his eyes!
"Will you really enjoy being married to a woman who hates you?" she asked Rome.
"It could prove to be a fascinating experience," he returned. "It will provide me with the task of taming you, won't it?" He drew his fingers down the smoothness of her hair.
Julia jerked away. "Had my grandmother been still alive, she'd have had you bullwhipped."
"You mean you'd have told her?" He raised an eyebrow. "Somehow I don't think you'd have told a soul about that night. What did you do when you realized you had a memento from the bad-mannered Italian boy?"
"I cursed the very thought of you," she said. She tried to remember the boy he had been, but the memory was lost in the man he had become.
Other titles
by
VIOLET WINSPEAR
IN
HARLEQUIN PRESENTS
THE BURNING SANDS 174
THE SUN TOWER 178
LOVE IN A STRANGER'S ARMS 214
THE PASSIONATE SINNER 222
THE LOVE BATTLE 226
TIME OF THE TEMPTRESS 230
THE LOVED AND THE FEARED 238
THE AWAKENING OF ALICE 246
THE VALDEZ MARRIAGE 288
Other titles
by
VIOLET WINSPEAR
IN
HARLEQUIN ROMANCES
PALACE OF THE PEACOCKS 1318
THE DANGEROUS DELIGHT 1344
BLUE JASMINE 1399
THE CAZALET BRIDE 1434
BELOVED CASTAWAY 1472
THE CASTLE OF THE SEVEN LILACS 1514
RAINTREE VALLEY 1555
BLACK DOUGLAS 1580
THE PAGAN ISLAND 1616
THE SILVER SLAVE 1637
DEAR PURITAN 1658
RAPTURE OF THE DESERT 1680
Harlequin Presents edition published July 1979
ISBN 0-373-70800-9
Original hardcover edition published in 1979
by Mills & Boon Limited
Copyright
©
1979 by Violet Winspear
Julia fled from the wedding reception, desperate to be alone for a few minutes so she could recover her shattered composure.
Her hand clenched the stonework of the balcony where she stood and she felt shaken to the core. How dared Rome Demario come here, strolling among the guests with a champagne cocktail held in his hand, looking so boundlessly sure of himself in a beige suit of Italian cut, his darkness intensified by a speckless white shirt. She had wildly hoped never to see him again and it had come as a deep, primitive shock when he had walked in so boldly on her sister's wedding reception.
She half-closed her eyes and a tremor ran all the way through her… oh God, she had tried so hard to forget his Latin face, the firm yet full lips, the lean jaw and bronzed neck joining the well-carried shoulders. And most of all she had tried not to remember those smoke-grey eyes lit from within so that in anger and passion they were incandescent.
God help her, she had burned in those eyes that indelible night in Naples. His gaze had felt as if it were touching her when she walked ahead of him up the scarlet-carpeted stairs that led to his private domain above the casino. His eyes had dwelt on her with such deliberation when he had closed the door and there was sudden silence after the noisy hum of the gaming rooms.
The memory of that night swept over Julia in a wave and she took deep breaths of air in order to steady her swimming senses. She had prayed never to see again the man who had so disrupted her life, so that now Verna was safely married she had to make plans for her own future. An uncertain and rather frightening future for which Rome Demario was directly to blame.
'I won't go down on my knees like a beggar,' she had said to him. 'I'll see you in hell first.'
'It may well be in heaven,' he told her. 'One can be so confused with the other, that's why sinners enjoy more heaven than the saints.'
'Enjoy your sin, Signor Demario,' she said. 'You'll live to regret it, if there's any justice.'
Justice! Julia could have laughed aloud had there been a vestige of humour in her heart, which there wasn't. She couldn't even have wept, for it all struck deeper than tears could have eased.
It had started years ago, long before she was forced to pay off Verna's gambling debts in such a pride-shattering way. It had started when Rome Demario's widowed mother used to come to the Van Holden house on Grand Drive to assist with the housework, a dark-haired, slender woman whose grey eyes always looked sad, and whose young son was often seen by Julia running errands for her haughty grandmother.
One afternoon there had been a birthday party for Verna, with lots of ice-cream and cake, and smartly dressed children dancing to a record-player in one of the large ground-floor rooms. When Julia noticed the Demario boy watching the fun through the French windows she had thought it would be a nice gesture to offer him a strawberry ice-cream, which instead of eating he had deliberately dropped on to her new shoes with the little shining buckles. Like a little idiot she had burst into tears and Grandma Van Holden had angrily told the boy's mother not to come and work at the house any more. Mrs Demario had gone very white and had pleaded that work was hard to find and she had a growing boy to feed. Grandma had turned a deaf ear to her pleading and had marched Julia back to the party, telling her in a voice that carried that in future she was to stay well away from bad-mannered Italian boys.
As long ago as their childhood had been lit in Rome Demario a flame of hurt pride and anger, which finally in Naples he had quenched by humbling her pride.
The single blessing was that he hadn't made her cry, as she had cried when the ice-cream splashed her buckled shoes. When she left the casino she had walked out unbowed, the IOUs in her purse. At the hotel she had given them to Verna and warned her that such reckless gambling in the future might cost her the man she was soon to marry, a socially prominent and ambitious young lawyer. Verna wanted to be his wife and she had gratefully promised Julia that never again would she even look at a roulette wheel.
'But how did you persuade the owner of the casino to let you have the slips?' Verna looked curiously at Julia, but fortunately the obvious answer didn't occur to her. She had forgotten the Demario boy and seemed unaware that when they were children his mother had worked for their grandmother. 'It's such a lot of money, Julia, and he looked so—ruthless.'
'I expect he was feeling in the mood to be—generous.' Julia said it ironically. 'I told him you were getting married and he said to call the IOUs his wedding gift.'
Those had been his parting words to her. 'Call these an Italian's wedding gift to your sister. Let's hope she's luckier in love.'
A shadowed look crossed Julia's face, and then her spine stiffened as she caught the aroma of a cigar… a long thin Italian cigar such as the one Rome Demario had been enjoying at the casino that night, its fragrant smoke drifting about his dark head as he gazed across the room at her, compellingly grey-eyed, supple and tall, and more ruthless than Verna would ever know.
Julia had backed away from him with all the instinctive fear of a girl whose reserve and natural dignity were suddenly aware of forces beyond her control; a Van Holden whose destiny had been so well protected until the demise of Grandma Van Holden and the discovery that for years she'd been living on her dwindling capital until there was very little left for her granddaughters to subsist on. She had arrogantly denied them any sort of business training so it hadn't been easy for either of them to find employment. A friend of the family had taken on Verna as a social companion and that was how the sisters came to be taking a holiday in Italy. The kindly woman had insisted that Julia join them, and right away she and Julia had discovered a mutual joy in Italian opera, which Verna found less entertaining.
It was those evenings at the opera which had
led
to Verna seeking a diversion more to her liking… there had been other times when she had gambled, but never before had she got herself so deeply in debt. It wasn't until Julia came face to face with the owner of the casino that she realised why the debt had been allowed to mount up in such an alarming way. The moment she saw him Julia knew him and was aware that he still hated the Van Holdens.
'You've grown up to be quite the lady, haven't you, Miss Julia?' His eyes had mocked her as they travelled up and down her slim figure. 'Are you still generous with the strawberry ice-cream?'
A riot of emotions seethed in Julia as each vivid memory slid through her mind like pictures on a screen. She was gripping the balcony stonework so hard that she could feel her fingernails breaking, for he was there behind her, silently watching her and remembering as she was the details of their last encounter, etched with a clarity the weeks in between had failed to erase.
Julia felt so tormented she could hardly bear it, that he should know her with such intimacy when everyone else was so certain of her poised coolness, her dedication to her work at the art gallery, her saving of herself and her feelings for 'the right man' as her friends fondly and amusedly called him… Paul Wineman, the distinguished art critic who had begun to pay her some courtly attention.