Claiming His Scandalous Love-Child. Julia James

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       CHAPTER ONE

      THE SONOROUS MUSIC SWELLED, lifting upwards to one last crescendo before falling silent. The hushed murmurings of the congregation stilled as the priest raised his hands and began to speak the words of the ancient sacrament in the age-old ceremony.

      Inside his breast Vito could feel his heart beating strongly. Emotion filled him, and he turned his head towards the woman now standing at his side.

      Gowned in white, her face veiled, his bride waited for him. Waited for him to say the words that would unite them in marriage...

      * * *

      Eloise sipped her champagne, her eyes drifting around the gilded salon privée of the hotel, one of the most famous on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice on the Cote D’Azur in the South of France.

      The salon was crowded with women in jewels and evening gowns, men sleek in tuxedos. But Eloise knew with absolute conviction that no other man present could possibly compare with the man she was with. For he was, quite simply, the most devastatingly handsome male she had ever seen in her life, and her pulse quickened every time she looked at him. As she did now.

      Her eyes returned to his tall, distinctive form, so superbly sheathed in a hand-tailored tux, his sculpted Roman profile and the sable hair that moulded his well-shaped head. Her gaze caressed the smooth, tanned skin, taut over high cheekbones and chiselled jawline, the ready smile of his mobile mouth as he chatted in French—which he spoke as well as he did English and his native Italian—to the others in their little group. She felt her stomach give its familiar little skip.

      Is this really me, being here like this? Or am I dreaming it?

      Sometimes she thought it must be the latter, for the past weeks had been a headlong, heady whirl in the arms of the man at her side now, at whose feet she had, quite literally, fallen.

      Memory, warm and vivid, leapt in her consciousness...

      She had been hurrying along the airport concourse towards her departure gate, where her flight was already closing. It was her first holiday for ages, snatched before she knuckled down to look for a new placement as a nanny. Her most recent post had come to an end when the twins she’d been looking after had started school.

      They would miss her for a bit, but they would soon adjust to her absence, Eloise thought—just as she herself had coped with a succession of nannies and au pairs in her own childhood. Her mother had not just been a mother with a busy job, but one supremely lacking in maternal feelings, and Eloise had long had to acknowledge this—just as she’d had to acknowledge that, because she’d been born a girl, her father—faced with her mother’s adamant refusal to have any more children—had abandoned them both to seek a new wife who would give him the sons he craved.

      Eloise’s mouth tightened in a familiar fashion at the thought of her father rejecting her for his new family, playing no further part in her childhood.

      Is that why I became a nanny? Eloise sometimes wondered. To give warmth and affection to children who don’t see much of their parents? Like me?

      She certainly loved her job—even though her mother had never been able to understand it. Just as she couldn’t understand why her daughter would have preferred her father to stay in her life. Her mother’s views were simple—and stark.

      ‘Fathers aren’t in the least necessary, Eloise. Women are perfectly capable of single motherhood! And it’s just as well. Men let you down—far better never to depend on them. Far better to raise a child on your own!’

      Eloise had refrained from pointing out that actually she had been raised by nannies, not by her mother...

      But I’m not going to be like that—and I won’t pick a man who’ll desert me, either!

      No, her life would be very different from her mother’s—she was determined on it. She would prove her mother completely wrong. She would fall deeply in love with a wonderful man who would never leave her, never let her down, never abandon her for another woman, and never reject their children, whom they would raise together in loving devotion.

      Just who that man would be, she had no idea. Oh, at twenty-six she’d had her share of boyfriends—she knew without vanity that her blonde good-looks had always drawn male attention—but none had touched her emotionally. Not yet...

      But I’ll find him, I know I will! The man I’m dreaming of! The man I’m going to fall in love with! It will happen one day.

      But as she’d raced onward to the closing gate that day, she had been fine with being footloose and fancy-free, ready for a good holiday, travelling as lightly and comfortably as she could, wearing jeans, a T-shirt and casual jacket, and well-worn pumps.

      The shoes must have been a tad too well worn, for suddenly, without warning, she’d skidded, her foot shooting sideways. She had gone careering down in a heap on the hard floor, her pull-along cabin bag slewing in the other direction, slamming into the legs of another passenger. She’d heard a short, sharp expletive in a foreign language, but had paid it no attention. Pain had been shooting up her sprawled legs, and she’d given a cry.

      ‘Are you all right?’

      The accented voice had had a low, attractive husk to it. But as Eloise had lifted her head, still feeling the sting of pain from her fall, her line of sight had impacted with a crouched pair of very male trouser legs, the fine light grey material straining over hard-muscled thighs.

      She’d lifted her gaze further up. And the breath had just stopped in her throat. She’d stared. She’d been able to do nothing else.

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