The Italians: Franco, Dominic and Valentino: The Man Who Risked It All / The Moretti Arrangement / Valentino's Pregnancy Bombshell

Dio mio, she looked good, he thought as he lay there waiting for her to look directly into his face. Her hair floated around her slender shoulders like a burnished halo, framing the exquisite triangle of her face with its wide spaced eyes and cute little nose and pointed chin. He did not care that she was pressing her soft lips together in a failed attempt to stop them from trembling, or that the grey patterned scarf she wore looped around her neck was as unflatteringly drab as the grey jacket she was wearing, which hid away from him all that he knew was softly curvy and gracefully sleek. For him she was still his first glimmer of sunlight in the darkest days of his life.

‘Look at me,’ he urged, feeling her fierce tension throb between them like an extra heartbeat. He could feel the fight she was waging with herself over allowing her eyes to make contact with his, and he understood why it was a fight. Once upon a time they hadn’t been able to look at each other without wanting to devour each other. When they’d stopped looking their whole fated relationship had gone into an acute downward slide.

‘Please, cara,’ he husked, then watched as her eyelashes fluttered, the long dusky crescents rising upwards to reveal the depth of the ocean swirled by a hundred different emotions; that caused a clutch of agony so deep inside him the machine behind him started bleeping like mad.

Lexi shot a startled look at it, her breath lurching free from her strangled throat. Things were happening. She hadn’t a clue what a normal pulse or blood pressure should read, but the flickering numbers on that machine were rising fast, and it scared her enough to send her shooting round the edge of the bed.

‘What’s wrong?’ She reached for his hand where it lay on the bed, only to stare down in horror when she found herself clutching hold of a plastic shunt with tubes coming out of it. But before she could snatch her hand away Franco turned his hand over and imprisoned hers inside his warm, surprisingly strong grip.

‘I’m OK,’ he said, without enough strength to convey confidence.

The door suddenly flew open and the nurse swept in. With a brief vague smile at Lexi, she went around to the other side of the bed and began checking things.

‘I think your wife must have surprised you.’

Lexi translated the nurse’s smiling tease from Italian to English.

‘She did something to me anyway,’ Franco returned ruefully.

Catching onto his meaning, Lexi tried to reclaim her fingers but Franco just tightened his grip, and after a second or so compassion took over and she let her fingers relax in his. The moment she did so he closed his eyes and inched out a very controlled sigh. Almost immediately the number readings began to ease downwards. Flanking each side of the bed, the nurse and Lexi watched the monitor—the nurse with her fingers lightly circling his wrist, Lexi with her fingers still enclosed by his.

By the time everything seemed to have gone back to normal Lexi felt so weak she reached out with her free hand for the chair positioned to her right, drew it closer to the bed and sat down.

Franco didn’t move or open his eyes, and as the room slowly settled back into quiet stillness, Lexi let herself look at his face again. She was instantly drenched by the old fierce magnetism that had always been her downfall where Franco was concerned.

He was, quite simply, breathtakingly handsome. There wasn’t even a cut or a bruise to distort the sheer quality of masculine perfection stamped into that face. Working at a theatrical agency had, she’d thought, made her immune to so much male beauty, because she dealt with handsome men on a day-to-day basis. But everything about this man set her own blood pressure rising, she acknowledged helplessly—soaking up every small detail while he lay there, unaware of her scrutiny. The smooth, high and intelligent brow below ebony hair cropped short to tame its desire to curl. The subtle arch of his eyebrows above heavy eyelids tipped with eyelashes so long they rested against the slanting planes of his cheekbones. Half of his blood was pure Roman on his mother’s side, and the line of his long, only slightly hooked nose, gave credence to that; while the wide, sensual contours of his well shaped mouth belonged to his proud Ligurian father.

Though right now that mouth was pressed shut and the corners turned down a little due to the pain he must be suffering, the agony of overwhelming grief.

‘I’m so very sorry about Marco,’ she murmured painfully.

Instantly the machine started beeping again. The nurse sent Lexi a sharp frowning glance, then added a faint shake of her head to convey the message that Franco was not ready to talk about Marco.

Her own lips pinching together in an effort to control a painful surge of understanding, Lexi looked back at Franco. A stark greyish tint had settled like a veil across his face, and she knew he was looking that way because he was blaming himself for Marco’s death. Where Franco led Marco always followed. Anyone who knew the two friends knew that. But the slavelike loyalty Marco had bestowed on Franco had been both flattering and a burden—as Lexi knew only too well, since she had enslaved herself to him in the same way. And look at the burden she had become.

Was that the reason she had come here? Because she knew her slavish love and total dependency on him had become a terrible burden and she now felt guilty about that?

Right there, Lexi fell back in to that long summer four years ago when, at nineteen years old, she had finally done something all by herself after years of being sheltered by her over protective mother, Grace—beautiful Grace Hamilton, who’d sacrificed her own acting career to manage her daughter’s surprise rise to fame.

But the year Lexi was nineteen Grace had fallen in love for the first time in her life and married Philippe Reynard, a French entrepreneur with all the outward trappings of celebrity and wealth so yearned for by Grace. He’d owned a fancy apartment in Paris and a rambling château in Bordeaux; and a yacht on which he’d spent most of his summers. He’d made Grace feel like a princess, and encouraged her to loosen the chains on her daughter so that the two of them could enjoy an extended honeymoon sailing around the Greek Islands on his yacht.

Lexi had been allowed to travel to the Cannes Film Festival without her mother playing strict chaperone.

Excited about striking out on her own for the first time in her life, she had let the freedom go straight to her head and she had become sucked into the glamorous high life. She had proceeded to live it with the destructive blindness of a junkie—until it had been over her ability to think straight about anything … especially what she was doing to herself.

From Cannes to Nice, Cap Ferrat, Monte Carlo, San Remo—

San Remo …

Lexi closed her eyes and saw the same radiant blue skies and glistening waters she’d seen on the television screen. She saw the rows of fancy yachts berthed in exclusive marinas, the stylish boulevards lined with fashionable designer shops, and the pavement café bars frequented by the spoiled offspring of outrageous wealth. Places for the golden people to hang out, with their golden skins and golden smiles and glittering golden futures already mapped out for them. She could hear the golden ring of their laughter—feel the wildly seductive tug of their totally unflappable self-belief. When they’d allowed her entry into their select assembly she’d truly believed that she was one of them—the current golden girl of movie fame.

And of course there’d been Franco, the most golden of them all. The one possessed of all the male beauty his richly aristocratic Italian heritage could bestow. Older than her, so much more experienced than her, the leader of the pack of those super-exclusives. And she’d caught him. She, little Miss Totally-Naïve-and-Sheltered, had won the jewel in the crown without bothering to question how she had done it. Not once had it occurred to her that her new friends had found her naivety hilarious—a novelty worthy of turning into a highly entertaining game.

Lexi shivered as the cold, cold truth of her complete humiliation simultaneously creeped up her and chilled her to the bone.

Six months after it had all started it was over—the wreck of her life floundering amongst the wreckage of so much more destruction. Her mother and her new stepfather killed in a freak car accident. The shattering discovery that Philippe Reynard had lived his whole life in hock and, during his short marriage to her mother, had neatly and cleanly stripped Grace of all the money Lexi had earned until there was none of it left.

He’d called it ‘investing in Lexi’s future.’ What a sick joke.

And even all that was not what had dropped her into the lowest, darkest place to which she had ever sunk. No. Her pale face was pinched as she stared at the man who had taken over her life. Lexi recalled the other damning piece of information that had really shattered her. She’d finally learned about the bet her new friends had placed to see which male ego would relieve her of her so obvious innocence before the end of that golden summer. She’d learned about the way all those people she’d stupidly called friends had watched and wagered and eventually laughed their exclusive heads off when Franco had won the prize. If she lived to be a hundred she would never be able to blank out the video someone had sent to her phone of Franco collecting his winnings. She still saw the date, the time and his lazily complacent smile. The only thing missing had been photographic evidence that he had actually bedded her. But that did not mean such evidence had not been around. Once the veils had been ripped from her eyes about Franco, she’d been able to believe him capable of anything. She’d been nothing but a big joke to him, and when the joke had backfired he had not known how the hell to cope.

In the way fate had of balancing things out, Francesco Tolle, golden boy of Europe’s glittering society, had found himself punished for his callous treatment of her when she’d found herself orphaned, pregnant and broke.

Lexi blinked back to the present as a door closed, and she realised the nurse had left them alone. Looking back at the monitor, she saw that everything had settled back down again while she’d been taking a walk down memory lane.

Franco still did not open his eyes, and Lexi began to wonder if he’d fallen asleep. She looked down at their hands still clasped together, his long strong fingers totally engulfing hers in the same way they’d used to do—only without the worrying shunt piercing the back of his hand, feeding liquids and drugs into his veins.

Hands that knew her more intimately than any other pair of hands, she thought, shifting on the chair when the thought became a physical memory that skittered across the surface of her skin. Lexi frowned, annoyed with herself for being so susceptible to a mere memory. It wasn’t as though he had the smooth caressing hands of an office dweller. His were firm, slightly callused capable hands, because Franco was at his happiest when he was hauling sail ropes on his yacht, Miranda, which he’d lived on that summer—or covered in grease and grime taking a boat engine to bits before he painstakingly put it back together again. Franco was a mariner through to his soul. Sailboats, powerboats, natty fast speedboats—even the giant supertankers and cruise liners the Tolle shipyard constructed near Livorno. As a qualified marine engineer Franco was in his element, no matter what size the craft. That he could also be successful at the business end of the Tolle empire was an extra string to his talented bow.

Then there was his well documented success with women. And why not? Lexi thought, unable to stop drifting her eyes over his powerful form, most of which was now hidden beneath the sheet. Leonardo da Vinci would have loved to meet Franco, she decided, for he was his ‘Vitruvian Man.’ Everything about him was in perfect proportion—even the strength reflected in his squared chin. He badly needed a shave, she noticed, feeling her fingers start to tingle with an urge to run them over the rough shadow that gave him the look of a reckless buccaneer. That he was—reckless, anyway; or he would not enjoy racing a supercharged powerboat at such dangerous speeds.

It was no wonder she’d fallen for him like an adolescent, dazzled by his larger than life personality. Physically he was every woman’s secret fantasy man, complete with that other vital ingredient—a powerfully magnetic sexual virility. It radiated from him even as he lay there, bruised and weakened.

Lexi tugged in a small breath, overcome by the desire to stroke her fingers over the rest of him, let her senses reconnect with all that glorious male beauty laid out in front of her like a sacrifice. As a lover he’d been wildly exciting—the kind of lover who loved to be stroked and petted as much as he loved to do both. As a companion he’d possessed enough lazy charm and captivating charisma to blind her to all his faults.

He was kind to old ladies and animals. He could laugh without constraint at the absurd, and—all the more potent—he could laugh at himself. He had a brilliant technical brain that had allowed him to design and build his first sailing yacht at the age of thirteen. He was super-confident and totally fearless when it came to any sport that took place on water. And he could lie in the sun for hours without moving. Relaxing for Franco was as important as competing in some crazy sport or his other favoured pastime: sex. Long afternoons and nights of deeply sensual, stunningly uninhibited loving was the sweet honey that gave him his boundless energy.

And he could be cruel enough and ruthless enough to take on a bet to seduce the naive interloper in his circle of elite friends because he liked to be challenged and he liked to win—to hell with the cost to the targeted victim.

Something else swept through Lexi. It was the rumbling of a hurt she had buried so deep it still had not worked its way back to the surface—though she was letting herself remember all the things she had shut away with that hurt. Things like the hard clench of dismay on his face when she’d broken the news to him that she was pregnant. The change in his eyes, as if someone had splashed the warm brown iris with a glaze of ice. Then there was the quiet sombre way he’d taken responsibility for his mistake and ultimately taken responsibility for her.

Where had her pride been when she’d let him do that? Smothered, by blind love and the desperate fear of losing him. Lexi was ashamed of that. But she felt more ashamed knowing that, for all the unforgivable things Franco had done to her all those years ago, she’d more or less walked into marriage with him to punish him for that ugly, humiliating bet.

And maybe that was the reason why she had come here—because she’d always known deep down that she had behaved no better than Franco had.

Looking up, she collided full on with a pair of stunning dark eyes the multicolours of tiger’s-eye quartz. Yet another heated flush flared through her body, leaving her feeling stripped bare and exposed. Because she knew him. She knew by his carefully impassive expression that he’d been lying there so still because he had been reading her every thought as it had passed across her face.

Pulling her hand free of his grasp, she sat back in her chair, tense now and skittish. ‘I don’t know why I’ve come here,’ she confessed in a helpless rush, laying something else bare for him: the battles she’d been having with herself.

Franco wished he did not feel so damn weak. There were tears in her eyes again, though she was trying her best to fight them. And her hair was catching the sunlight streaming in through the slatted blinds, setting it on fire with a thousand different shades of gold and red.

‘I had this h-horrible premonition you were going to die, and if I didn’t come I would always regret being so m-mean to you.’

‘Would it help you to feel better if I complied with your premonition, cara?’ he offered flatly. ‘It would make you a rich widow, at all events.’

‘Don’t talk like that.’ Lexi speared him with a pained look. ‘I never wished you dead and I don’t want your money.’

‘I know you don’t—which makes this situation all the more ironic.’

Ironic? ‘Where is the irony in you lying here all battered and broken?’

‘I am not in as bad a condition as I look.’ The quiet assurance sent her restless gaze tracking over him once again.

‘Explain your definition of a not bad condition.’ She waved a trembling hand to encompass all the evidence in front of her, including the computerised machine monitoring him as well as feeding all sorts of drugs into him via the shunt in the back of his hand. ‘You’re lying fl—flat on your back and you’ve got a cage over your legs.’

‘I am lying flat as a mere precaution, because I wrenched a couple of vertebra and the only thing wrong with my legs is a gash to my left thigh, which had to be stitched up.’

Her restless eyes moved to his bound chest. ‘And all that strapping?’

‘A couple of cracked ribs and a dislocated shoulder they had a fight manipulating back into place.’

She went pale as her tummy churned squeamishly at the image he’d just placed in her head. ‘Anything else?’ she squeezed out.

‘A sore head?’ he offered up.

A sore head … No broken bones, then. No crushing brain damage. No life-threatening injury to justify his father’s insistence that she come here … Lexi lurched out from the strains of anxiety to embrace the sting of annoyance in the single release of her breath. ‘You’re supposed to be seriously ill,’ she said accusingly.

‘You don’t see these injuries as serious?’

‘No.’ The summer she’d met Franco he had been cruising the Mediterranean while convalescing after breaking a leg so badly he’d required several surgeries and countless metal pins to get the leg to mend. ‘Your father gave me the impression that you—’

‘Wanted to see you?’

‘Bleeding and broken and asking for me!’ She quoted Salvatore. ‘That implied you were in a coma or s-something.’

‘People in comas don’t speak—’

‘Oh, shut up.’ Jumping to her feet, Lexi paced restlessly away from the bed—only to swing right back again. ‘Why did you want to see me?’

The heavy veil of his eyelids lowered to screen his thoughts. ‘Lose the bag and take the jacket and scarf off before you roast.’

‘I’m not stopping,’ Lexi countered edgily.

‘You’re stopping,’ he contended, ‘because you took one look at me and now you can’t help yourself staying around to keep on looking.’

She dragged in a strangled breath. ‘Of all the conceited—’ Fiercely she breathed out again.

‘Dio mio,’ he ground out. ‘Even as I am lying here injured and in pain, and pretty damn helpless, you could not resist mentally stripping me of the covers so you could reacquaint yourself with what I look like.’

‘That’s not true!’ Lexi denied hotly.

He just smiled the smile of a cat who’d cornered the mouse. ‘I might be physically flattened, but all my other faculties are in good working order. I know when I’m being lusted after. You look sensational too, bella mia,’ he diverted smoothly. ‘Even trussed up in all those clothes you’ve got on.’

‘It’s cold in England.’ Why she’d said that Lexi didn’t have a single clue.

‘Glad I didn’t make it there, then,’ Franco responded. ‘September should be a glorious month. English weather has lost its good taste …’

He closed his eyelids all the way now, as if he didn’t have the strength to hold them up any longer. Lexi chewed on her bottom lip for a few seconds, wondering what she should do next.

‘You’re tired,’ she murmured. ‘You should rest …’

‘I am resting.’

‘Yes, but …’ She slid a restless glance over him again. ‘I should leave you to do it in peace.’

Irritation tightened his facial muscles. ‘You have only just arrived here.’

‘I know …’ She was uncomfortably aware that she had moved back to the side of the bed. ‘But you know you don’t really need me here, Franco. It’s just—’

‘I was going to come to London to see you after the race, then—this happened.’ The impatient flick of his unencumbered hand adequately relayed what this was. ‘There are things we need to talk about.’

None that Lexi could bring to mind, except—A sound of thickened horror broke free from her throat. ‘Are you saying it was because I sent you divorce papers that you crashed your boat?’

‘No, I am not saying that,’ he snapped, then let out a groan, as if even getting angry hurt him.

Lexi’s eyes went straight to the monitor. ‘You OK?’

‘Si,’ he muttered, but she could see that his breathing had gone shallow, his beautifully shaped mouth drooping with tension. ‘Damn ribs kill me every time I breathe.’

‘And you look ready to pass out,’ Lexi said anxiously, watching the grey pallor wash across his face again.

‘It’s the drugs. I will be free of them by tomorrow, then I can get out of here.’

About to remark on that overconfident statement, she held back because she could tell he was only voicing wishful thoughts.

A silence fell between them. After shifting from one foot to the other a couple of times, Lexi gave in to what she really wanted to do, but didn’t really want to do, sit down again. It was exhausting to be locked in this constant battle with herself, she admitted as she sat watching his breathing become less shallow and the tension in his face relax.

She just wished he didn’t look so achingly vulnerable, because that didn’t help her at all. Nor did it help when an old memory slunk into her head, showing her a moment—a short space in time in their hostile marriage—when Franco had sat beside her bed all night long. They’d had a horrid row, she recalled. Just another one of many rows—but this one had ended with her spinning away to walk out of the room, only to end up dropping at his feet in a faint. She must have been out for ages, because when she’d eventually come round she’d been in her bed and a doctor was leaning over her, gravely viewing the blood pressure band he had strapped around her arm.

Glancing up at the flashy screen that was monitoring Franco’s vital statistics, she grimaced. His must be scoring an OK blood pressure because the thing wasn’t beeping, whereas the old fashioned version she’d felt squeezing her arm had given her no clue at all that her pressure was a cause for concern.

She looked back at Franco. His hair had gone curly, she noticed for the first time. If he knew he would be mad. Franco went to great expense to make sure his hair didn’t show its natural tendency to curl. His hair had been curly the night she’d fainted. He’d stood like some brooding dark statue at the end of her bed but it was only now, looking back, that she remembered the ruffled curly hair and the same grey cast to his face that had been swimming over it today.

‘Your wife needs rest and no stress, Signor Tolle,’ the doctor had informed him. ‘I will come back in the morning.’ He’d then spoken to Lexi herself. ‘If your blood pressure has not fallen by then you will be going into hospital.’ It had been both a warning and a threat.

‘I’m sorry.’

Lexi blinked, because that gruff apology had sounded in her head as if Franco had only just said it.

‘Go away and leave me alone,’ she’d told him, and turned her back to him.

He hadn’t gone away. They say that misery loves company, and it had certainly been true for the two of them that long and miserable night, when he’d pulled up an armchair and sat in it, a grimly silent figure in the darkness, watching over her.

Sliding back into the present, Lexi was surprised to discover that the room had slowly darkened while she’d been sitting there, lost in her memories. Franco still had not moved so much as a glossy black eyelash as far as she could tell.

What was it they had been arguing about? She couldn’t remember, though it was likely she’d been the one who started it—she usually had. When love turned to hate it was a cold, bitter kind of hatred, she’d discovered. The target for your hatred could not do or say anything right.