Desire Has No Mercy

by Violet Winspear

  Desire Has No Mercy

  By

  Violet Winspear

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  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

  CHAPTER ONE

  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.

  'Buon giorno, signorina.' The cigar smoke drifted closer and Julia tensed as her nerves felt a silent and supple approach, the tread of a tiger, darkly tanned from his head to his heels… a pagan who enjoyed the Italian sun on the high terrace of his casino, so he had carelessly told her when he held her and contrasted her skin with his own. 'Milk and honey,' he had breathed. 'They mix well, don't they?'

  'Go away!' Julia had wanted to sound cold and angry, but her voice betrayed the pain and fear of a girl in trouble. 'You have no right to be here, Signor Demario. You weren't invited.'

  'But I was, Signorina Van Holden. Your sister sent me an invitation.'

  'Verna did what?' Julia swung round and was quite unable to suppress a gasp when she saw him standing only a few inches away from her, with not a crease in the fine suiting that covered his lean hard body. A pain stabbed deep inside her and she felt an intense awareness of the link she must soon find the courage to have cut, so she'd be free of him. Free to try and live the gracious, ordered life he had so disturbed with his vengeful arrogance.

  'To thank me,' he drawled, 'for returning the IOUs her fiancé wouldn't have liked receiving.'

  Julia swayed against the stone parapet and at once he was beside her, the rim of a champagne glass at her lips. 'Don't feint—sip a little of this.'

  Julia didn't dare to faint. A couple of guests at the wedding were in the medical profession and she had sworn to herself that no one was going to know that she, who prided herself on being poised and coolly detached from the romantic blunders of other girls, had been forced into a situation which could scandalise the family her sister had married into only an hour ago.

  She shivered and swallowed the champagne with an effort. It revived her so she could feel Rome Demario's hand pressing against her body, reminding her acutely of that other time when she had been without defence in his arms.

  'You had no right to come here!' she said tensely. 'So you could gloat a-and look at me in front of my friends as if you—you—'

  'As if I own part of you?' he murmured, and his grey eyes looked directly down into hers, making her burn with a sudden overwhelming blush… it seemed to go all over her and she gasped at what she saw in his eyes, a rekindling of those memories of a night when for a brief moment it had seemed as if he might give her those IOUs without demanding that she pay for them. He had stood there, his shoulders against the door, and he had gestured around the beautifully furnished room as if to remind her that no longer was he the errand boy at her grandmother's house.

  'We are now man and woman,' he said to her. 'Now we are equal.'

  'I don't consider myself the equal of a gambler who allows young girls to play for high stakes at his tables,' she had retorted freezingly. 'I wouldn't want to be that low.'

  'So I am low, eh?' It was then he had approached her with such deliberate intent. 'Then I shall bring you down to my level, my high and mighty Miss Van Holden.'

  Julia shrank against the stonework of the hotel balcony and her face was so white that her eyes seemed to throw green shadows on to her skin.

  'You will not look like that!' he exclaimed. 'I didn't come to this wedding to gloat over you. As a matter of fact I was going to tear up the invitation, and then I thought to myself how intriguing it was that Rome Demario should receive an invitation to a Van Holden reception. I recall a time when he wasn't good enough to mingle with their refined guests.'

  'That's what this—this torture is all about, isn't it?' Julia's eyes blazed into his. 'You're getting your own back, making one of the Van Holdens pay for something that happened a long time ago. I couldn't help it that my grandmother behaved so arrogantly and dismissed your mother from her employment. I didn't want your mother to be out of work. I was only a child and you made me cry—something you'll never do again, Signor Demario. Never!'

  He stared down at Julia's face, utterly white except for the smudges of shadow beneath her green eyes. Her face had a slender delicacy, a quiver she couldn't control to the full soft lips that betrayed a passion her cool look of poise-was inclined to deny. Most people would have said at once that Verna Van Holden was more ardent than her sister, but the truth simply was that she was less innately shy and sensitive, and could never have suffered as Julia was suffering right now.

  The very touch of Rome Demario was insufferable to Julia. When he looked at her it was as if he stripped her of clothing, of virtue, of every decency she had held dear not out of prudery but because she was so innately modest, with reserves of a deep loving kind he had forced, made her yield; a throbbing, sensual destruction of the chastity which had been hers to give with love… which he had taken without love.

  'When I look at you,' she said, 'I feel cheap and dirty. I'd want to die if my friends—least of all my sister—knew why you really came here. I couldn't bear for them to know!'

  'Something,' he said very quietly, 'is very much amiss. You will tell me—come, I insist on knowing!' His arm gripped her and he moved in closer until his long legs were pressing against her and she could feel the masculine warmth of his body penetrating through the soft material of her dress; leaf-green chiffon silk, clinging softly to the slim soft contours of her body. Closer, his warm hardness a threatening reminder of what he had done to her and what his physical dominance was capable of doing again.

  'You're an affront,' she gasped. 'Did you imagine—what did you think, signore, that I'd be thrilled to see you? Do you fondly imagine you've aroused pangs of burning hunger in me and I'm thrilled to see your face again? It's a face I've hoped never to see again!' Her eyes were fixed wide and tormented on the Italian features she had tried so hard to blot from her mind… a look Bernini had surely visualised when he painted the canvas she had seen in the Borghese art gallery in Rome, leaning over the seduced Proserpina.

  'I've aroused something, signorina.' That intent look was there in his eyes and Julia was trapped by his lean body whose strength she had tried to fight, learning the hard way how much deep-coiled power there was in the shoulders and arms of Rome Demario. He had subdued her then, and he'd do it again if he had to… Julia saw the threats in the depths of his eyes where those devil fires burned… those fires which had still smouldered behind his dark lashes when the dawn light came through the windows high above a Neapolitan street and she was allowed to leave him, feeling as if shame was something she woul
d never cease to live with. She remembered now that he had murmured arrivederci.

  'You have about you a look I don't quite remember.' Suddenly he had his fingers beneath her chin and was forcing up her face so he could study its every angle. He moved his long fingers up against her cheek and touched a fingertip to her shadowed eyes.

  'Let me go before someone sees us!' She was arching away from him, trying somehow to escape the touch of his body… her own body was reacting to him, as if it were separated from her mind and was primitively drawn to his as if in some strange effort to protect what she intended to kill.

  'I beg of you, signore! My sister's in-laws would be affronted if any of them saw me like this—with you—'

  'With me?' he mockingly echoed. 'The Italian whose mother used to peel potatoes in your grandmother's kitchen? What is he now, eh? He's very much Italian and he's putting one and one together and it's adding up to three. You're with child, aren't you?'

  'No!' It was almost a scream, which he swiftly stifled with his hand.

  'You are having a baby,' he said quietly, 'and I am the father. I feel it, Julia, so don't attempt to deny it. Your face is more slender but your body is less so—you are carrying my child!'

  'No,' she said again, desperate to convince him that it wasn't true. 'Babies don't come from that sort of thing— from a woman's hatred of the man who—who forces her to sleep with him. You're the very last man whose child I'd want to be carrying!'

  'All the same, my child is here.' His hand had slid down and was now in contact with her stomach, his touch drivingly warm through the fine material of her dress, whose soft folds concealed that slight burgeoning of her figure… unless a hand touched her as Rome Demario's was touching her.

  'How dare you?' she breathed. 'Your arrogance and sensuality are enough to make me ill!'