Elizabeth Power - Blackmailed For Her Baby

The music was still pounding away in the sitting room. Animated shouts with the rhythmic thud of feet reverberated through the apartment. Suddenly a loud banging was cutting insistently through the pandemonium.

‘Your neighbours?’ Fran suggested with a grimace.

‘Oh, good grief!’ If it was, then they had every right to complain. ‘Help me get rid of this lot, will you?’ Libby appealed despairingly to her friend.

‘I will,’ Fran promised, giving her an affectionate squeeze. ‘After all, it was my fault you got stuck with…’ Her words were drowned beneath a wall of sound as the bedroom door opened and the blond technician who had been on the shoot peered round it.

‘Having a tête-à-tête?’ His words were a little slurred, Libby noted, guessing that he had already been drinking heavily before he’d arrived and was clearly the worse for too much champagne. ‘I thought for a moment the lovely Blaze had got herself a man in here, but I should have known better, shouldn’t I?’

‘Leave it, Cullum,’ Fran advised, wiser now to what made Libby such a loner.

Steve Cullum, though, Libby noticed, looked aggressive enough to swing a punch at someone, and hurriedly she made to defuse the situation.

‘Let’s go back and join the others,’ she suggested to him in a placatory tone, pushing him gently back into the other room so that she could go and answer the persistent thudding on her front door.

‘Only if you’ll dance with me.’

‘All right. All right,’ she promised recklessly. ‘After I’ve answered the door to whoever’s out there first.’ Humour him. Don’t be offensive, she warned herself, knowing from experience that it was the only way to handle drunks. ‘Someone turn the music down!’ she shouted, making a move towards the hall.

‘Turn it up!’ The technician was grabbing her arm, shouting at the top of his voice, ‘Turn it up! Blaze wants to dance! Blaze wants to dance with me!’

Libby tried to resist as he spun her round in the middle of the floor and, with his arms crossing her chest, pulled her back against him, forcing her body to sway with his to the raucous music.

His aftershave lotion was cloying, and his alcohol-stained breath was revoltingly warm against her throat. Somewhere in her repulsed brain it registered that the banging on the front door had stopped. That the neighbour had given up all hope of being heard and gone—probably to call the police!

‘Come on, baby, dance. You know how to move.’ The scoop-necked sweater she had changed into when she’d showered had slipped off one shoulder and the man’s mouth was suddenly moving, hot and moist, across her bare flesh. Trapped in his arms, she jerked her head aside, but he only laughed and tightened his hold on her.

In a minute, she decided, she was going to elbow him—hard!

The only thing that stopped her was the shocking silence as the music was cut dead, along with every other sound in the room.

All eyes were turned towards the CD player and the man in the impeccable dark raincoat and executive suit who was straightening up beside it. And it wasn’t just the formality of his clothes but that hard air of command that set him apart from everyone else in the room.

Romano Vincenzo!

Stunned, Libby could only gaze speechlessly at his strong, tanned face and those glittering black eyes, which, focusing only on her now, flared, like those proud nostrils, with unequivocal anger.

‘I think you’d better ask your friends to leave.’ His recommendation fizzed with seething displeasure.

Barely able to grasp that it must have been him who had been thundering on the door—that someone had let him in—Libby could only despair at the compromising position in which he had walked in and found her, locked as she still was in the technician’s arms. Things couldn’t look worse, she thought, knowing that it wasn’t the first time that he had caught her in a situation like this.

‘Romano!’

It was all she could utter as Steve Cullum lifted his head to demand in a slurred voice, ‘Are you suggesting I quit this party and walk out of here—just because you said so?’

Beneath his rain-splashed coat, Romano’s shoulders squared. The last thing he wanted was trouble. But the sight of Libby, the girl who had plagued his thoughts and got under his skin as he had allowed no other woman to do—filling him with self-disgust when she was married to his brother—and who still aroused the same complexity of emotions in him—not only living it up after all he had told her today without a care for her child, which just went to prove just how heartless she was, but also crushed against that lecherous drunk, which she was obviously consenting to, only fuelled his anger, filling his veins with cold, jealous fury.

‘That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.’ Anger blanched the skin around his taut upper lip. ‘Unless you’d rather be thrown.’

Feeling the technician’s body tightening up behind her, Libby sucked in a breath. The last thing she wanted to witness was a brawl. But one step forward from the man who was taller, broader and light-years ahead in the fitness stakes than the inebriated Steve Cullum had the technician instantly backing off.

‘OK, mate. OK. Keep your shirt on.’ Hands held up in acquiescence to the other man’s dominant will, he moved grudgingly away, while the others, bottles in hand, their eyes fixed on Romano, also started filing out, muttering their goodnights to Libby as they yielded to an authority they recognised as one not to be tested.

‘Still denying it?’ Fran grimaced as she moved past Libby.

Denying what? Libby asked herself, quietly fuming. That Romano Vincenzo was her lover? Because he was certainly acting like one, she thought angrily, her aching head throbbing even more from the thought of being alone with him; from imagining the scene she didn’t want, but which she knew would inevitably follow.

‘Are you going to be all right?’ the lingering Fran whispered protectively to her.

Libby darted a glance towards Luca’s brother. His sheer physical presence and that dark charisma sent something like untapped electricity crackling across her nerve-endings.

‘Of course,’ she croaked, not at all sure she would be before Fran, too, went the same way as the others and the front door banged loudly behind them all.

An interminable silence filled the flat as Libby faced hard, unrelenting features across the carpeted space of her sitting room.

‘What the devil did you think you were doing?’ Her voice shook with her own hot emotion. ‘What gave you the right to come in here and speak to my guests so rudely?’ Hardly guests! she thought with a mental grimace, immensely relieved that he had driven them away, even if she didn’t approve of the way he had done it.

‘Forgive me if I broke up such a wildly enjoyable party.’ The deep tones were anything but contrite. ‘I would have thought even you would have had the decency to skip the good time when you’ve just been informed of how much your child needs you. Obviously it means far less to you than entertaining your precious friends!’

‘They aren’t my friends!’

His head cocked to one side. ‘No?’

‘Well, only one of them is and—’

‘Evidently!’

Libby stifled a small, despairing sigh. It was clear he meant the man who had been forcing his attentions upon her.

‘Steve Cullum was drunk,’ she emphasised, as though that would somehow vindicate her. ‘And they came here uninvited!’

‘But it didn’t take you long to get into the swing of things!’

Which is what it would have looked like, Libby realised, especially if he had heard Steve shouting to everyone that she wanted to dance, which he probably had!