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

Good time to make your silent exit, Lexi, she told herself—not wanting to feel like the person she had turned into back then. Stooping down to pick up her bag from where she’d placed it on the floor, she rose to her feet and turned towards the door.

‘Where are you going?’ Franco murmured.

Surprise stung down her spinal cord. ‘I thought I’d go now and let you sleep.’

‘If I promise to fall into a deep coma will you stay?’

Lexi swung back round. ‘That wasn’t even remotely funny, Francesco!’

Through the gloom she saw his mouth stretch into a mocking kind of grimace, ‘You sound like a really snappy wife.’

‘And that was even less funny, considering my track record in that particular role.’ She sighed heavily.

‘And I was the selfish husband from hell.’

Yes, well, she had no argument with either assessment. Neither of them had been any good at being married. Great at being lovers—warm and carefree, fabulously imaginative and gloriously passionate lovers—but as for the rest …

‘Listen … ‘She heaved a deep, fortifying breath. ‘I hope you get better soon. And I am truly sorry about—about Marco.’ She had to say it, even though the nurse had indicated that Franco wasn’t ready to talk about his best friend. ‘But you must know as well as I do that I don’t belong here.’

‘I want you here,’ he stated grimly.

Lexi shook her head. ‘You’re going to be OK. In a couple of days you’ll be wondering why you wanted me to come here at all.’

‘I know exactly why I want you here.’

Ignoring that, ‘I’m going back to London,’ she said.

‘Go through that door and I will pull out these tubes and come right after you, Lexi,’ Franco warned her flatly.

She uttered yet another sigh. ‘Why would you want to do something as stupid as that?’

‘I told you.’ The line of his mouth was severely compressed now, ‘We need to talk.’

‘We can talk through our lawyers.’ Lexi continued determinedly towards the door.

‘You will have this particular talk to my face, cara, because I don’t want a divorce.’

She swung round yet again. ‘Until today we haven’t so much as spoken a word or set eyes on each other for three and a half years!’ Lexi reminded him. ‘Of course you want a divorce. I want a divorce.’

That said, she turned and reached for the door handle, heard a sound from behind her that sent a cold chill racing down her spine, and spun right back to discover that Franco was sitting up and attempting to pluck out the shunt from his hand. But his coordination was obviously wrecked by the drugs.

‘What do you think you are you doing?’ Shrieking alarm sent Lexi darting back to the bed to cover his hand and the shunt with her both of her own hands in an effort to stop him, but he just changed tack and threw back the covering sheet instead. Even as she tried to grab it the cage went flying onto the floor. The next shock wave hit her when she saw for the first time what the cage and sheet had been covering up. More bandaging strapped one powerfully structured thigh, but it wasn’t that that shocked. Even in the gloom she could see the sickening extent of his bruising, which spread right the way down his left side.

‘Oh, my God,’ she choked, fighting to wrest the sheet from him at the same time as she tried to block him from getting up off the bed. The beeps and alarms started sounding like crazy. Reacting as if programmed to do it without thinking, Lexi reached out and took Franco’s face between her palms, made him look at her.

‘Please stop it,’ she begged, then, because he looked so totally hurt and stubborn, she bent her head and crushed her trembling lips against his.

She kissed him without understanding why she kissed him. And she continued to kiss him even after Franco stopped fighting and went perfectly, perfectly still. It was like her own moment of madness: she didn’t even stop when bright lights were suddenly blazing and the nurse was letting out a sharp gasp of shock. The alarms played a riotous symphony in harmony with the stirring mud of long subdued pleasures that split open huge fissures across her aching heart.

When she did eventually pull away she was breathing fast. She felt his fast breath feather her face and looked into eyes turned to stunning black-onyx. Tears gathered—hot tears, pained tears—and she was trembling.

‘I’ll stay,’ she shook out thickly and brokenly. ‘I will do anything so long as you lie down again. Please, Franco. Please, I will stay …’

CHAPTER THREE

LEXI sat in one of the chairs in the anteroom beside Franco’s room and clutched the hot cup of coffee the nurse had just pressed on her, while a white coated man who had introduced himself as Dr Cavelli sat beside her, waiting for her violent shivers to stop.

She was in shock. She still couldn’t take on board what she had done. Her lips burned and felt swollen. Tears smarted her eyes; she was still feeling the buzzing effects of the fear and panic she’d felt when she’d seen Franco trying to get up off the bed. If she had not witnessed it for herself she would never have believed that he could behave in such an irrational way. For a man basically made up of one big bruise, he’d displayed shockingly phenomenal brute strength.

‘You have to understand, Signora Tolle—’ Dr Cavelli spoke gently ‘—your husband does not require twenty-four hour nursing surveillance because his physical injuries require such intensive monitoring. It is his mental state which concerns us the most.’

Lifting her head up, Lexi repeated, ‘His mental state?’ with a strangled breath of disbelief.

‘Overall, your husband is exceptionally strong and healthy—as he has just demonstrated.’ The glimmer of a rueful smile touched Dr Cavelli’s lips. ‘His physical injuries are many, but already they are beginning to heal. However, he has recently lost his closest friend in violent circumstances, and his feelings of shock and grief are great.’

‘Franco and Marco were like twin brothers.’ Lexi nodded in bleak understanding. ‘Of course he’s feeling Marco’s loss very deeply.’

‘It is the way he is dealing with that loss that concerns us. As I believe you have already witnessed, if Signor Clemente’s name is mentioned your husband either ignores the subject or becomes—agitated.’

‘Of course he becomes agitated.’ Lexi fired up in Franco’s defence. ‘How would you prefer him to react? Fall into a fit of weeping? He’s a man. He’s in shock and he’s injured. He must be suffering terrible feelings of guilt because he survived when Marco did not, and—’

‘Signora, that is the point I am trying to make,’ Dr Cavelli intruded. ‘Men and women react to extreme stress differently. A woman generally vents her distress in some way.’

Recalling the way she’d just kissed Franco, Lexi dipped her eyes from the watchful doctor’s as a heated blush surged through her face.

‘A typical male’s response, however, is to protect himself by detaching himself from the tragedy. He blocks it out.’

‘He just needs time to—recover a little.’ Lexi leapt once again to Franco’s defence. ‘The accident only happened this morning, but already you’re telling me he’s on some kind of suicide watch!’

Franco suicidal? Were they all mad?

‘I don’t think I used quite such dramatic language,’ the doctor protested distractedly.

Glowering at him—because what he’d said had been very dramatic to her way of thinking—Lexi was disconcerted to find that he was studying her from beneath a seriously puzzled frown, and there was an extra throb in the tension surrounding them that made her glance at the nurse, who was back at her station. She saw that she was staring oddly at her too.

‘What?’ she demanded sharply. ‘What have I said to make you look at me like that?’ Prickling with alarm all over again, Lexi set down the coffee before she spilled it. ‘He hasn’t attempted to—?’

Dr Cavelli gave a quick shake of his head to dispense with that fear. ‘Signora … the accident took place three days ago.’

Lexi blinked. What was he talking about? ‘But I saw it on the news today,’ she insisted, ‘It said …’ But she couldn’t remember if it had given an actual time or a date. ‘And Franco’s father only called me this morning—’

‘Your husband has been drifting in and out of consciousness for two days and only regained full consciousness this morning.’

Lexi continued to stare at him, feeling a bit like an owl perched on a branch that she was in danger of tumbling off. Twitter. She’d heard Suzy talking about Twitter. Her inner vision glanced back at the fifty-inch flat screen and recalled for the first time that they must have been watching one of those news review channels—the kind that loved reporting gory crashes and …

Laying her fingers across her mouth, she started to shake again. Franco had been lying there injured for three days and she’d known nothing about it. She—

‘His agitation erupted almost as soon as he woke up,’ the doctor continued. ‘He refused to let us speak of Signor Clemente once his father had broken the news of his friend’s death. He had his room cleared of the flowers and cards he had received from family and friends. He banned those same people from entering this hospital to visit him.’

For the first time since she’d arrived there Lexi glanced around the quiet anteroom and took in the distinct lack of friends and family she should have expected to see crowded in there.

‘Wh—Where is Franco’s father?’ she whispered.

‘Signor Salvatore Tolle is on your husband’s banned list, Signora,’ the doctor informed her.

Eyes rounding like saucers, Lexi gasped. ‘Are you kidding me?’

Dr Cavelli shook his head. ‘Your husband is very angry with the world right now. It is not unusual for such tragic circumstances to make people angry,’ he assured her. ‘However, when he demanded to see you and his father explained that you had not been contacted he—reacted badly. He attempted to get out of his bed, insisting he was going to London to see you. The depth of his agitation concerned us enough to suggest to his father that he contact you and bring you here as quickly as he could. Once your husband knew you were on your way here he calmed down a little.’

But when she’d tried to leave again he’d pulled the same mad stunt!

‘What we believe has happened is, to help him to block out his natural grief and guilt with regard to Signor Clemente’s death, he has transferred his full focus to you and the—forgive me—the state of your marriage.’

The divorce papers. Lexi closed her eyes tightly as her heart sank and the clamouring sickness she felt began to churn up her stomach. Franco had crashed his boat because he’d been thinking of those papers instead of concentrating on—

No. Pushing trembling, tense fingers through her hair, Lexi gave a fierce shake of her head, refusing to believe that the arrival of divorce papers had had the power to tip Franco over the edge.

‘Our marriage has been over for three and a half years,’ she mumbled, more to herself than to anyone else. She just couldn’t bring herself to consider that he would react so badly to something he must have been expecting—or even been thinking of putting into motion himself!

What Franco had seemingly done was to transfer his focus onto the divorce papers after the accident, Lexi decided. Though she couldn’t work out why he should want to use that particular thing to focus on.

‘I’ll go and talk to him,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘He can’t possibly have meant to ban his own father from his bedside. I’ll go and find out why he’s behaving like this and—’

‘He is sleeping, signora,’ the doctor reminded her as she turned towards Franco’s door. ‘Perhaps it would be wiser for you to sleep on what we have discussed before you talk to him again.’

It had not been a suggestion but a carefully worded command, and it spun Lexi about. Her eyes flashed out vivid blue warnings—she knew because she could feel them doing it. ‘He isn’t at death’s door,’ she stated bluntly. ‘Neither is he a child to be cosseted and protected from the truth. And the truth is it’s just not fair of him to take his feelings out on his father.’

‘Perhaps by tomorrow you will have calmed down a little and thought better of … challenging him right now.’

‘What kind of doctor are you?’ she demanded, suddenly suspicious.

‘The kind that deals with a patient’s mental health,’ he provided, with a small, tellingly dry smile. ‘Your husband’s injuries are many, signora. In no way would I like to think I had given you the impression that we undervalue his physical trauma, because we do not. His heart stopped beating twice at the scene of the accident. The trauma team had to fight to bring him back. His concussion was and still is very concerning—he has clouded vision and continued dizziness …’

Lexi blinked as she recalled the way Franco’s hand had kept on missing its target when it tried to pull out the shunt.

‘The wound in his thigh was deep and required several hours of careful surgery to reconnect vital nerves and muscles.’ As Lexi went pale, Dr Cavelli spread out his hands in an expression of apology for being so graphic. ‘Extensive internal bleeding required us to insert a drain in his chest cavity—I should imagine you saw the resulting spread of bruising,’ he gauged. ‘The loss of blood was significant enough to require several urgent transfusions, and we feared for a time—unnecessarily, we now know—that he had damaged his spinal cord as well. I tell you all of this because I believe facing him with questions about the way he is dealing with his current situation might goad him into doing something more drastic than attempting to get out of bed—like walking out of here altogether.’

‘Does he have the strength to do that?’ Lexi questioned dubiously.

‘He has the determination and will power to give him the strength,’ the doctor assessed, and, thinking about it, Lexi conceded that he was probably right. ‘Your husband has made you the linchpin which is holding him together right now. Therefore I must beg you most seriously to consider the responsibility this places on you to help him through this very difficult time …’

‘You lied to me about the extent of your injuries,’ Lexi said the moment Franco opened his eyes.

It was very late, and she’d ignored the doctor’s advice and come back here to sit with Franco while he slept.

‘And you can’t banish your father from your bedside unless you want to break his heart,’ she tagged on. ‘Why would Salvatore think of calling me and bringing me over here? It isn’t as if you and I are friends, is it?’

The moment she saw the grey cast settle over his face Lexi recognised her mistake. Mentioning friends had reminded him of Marco, and, as the doctor had described, Franco had blocked her words out.

She heaved out a tense little breath. ‘OK.’ She tried a different tack. ‘You can’t keep trying to get out of this bed either. Not until they say that you can.’

‘Are you staying?’

Remembering that kiss, and her subsequent promise, Lexi shifted tensely. ‘I told you I was staying.’

‘Tell me again so I can be sure, and this time make it a promise.’

‘Franco,’ she sighed out wearily, ‘this is all so …’

At was as if something or someone had switched her off. Franco watched her frown and catch her bottom lip with her teeth. He took in the loss of colour in her cheeks and the signs of strain and exhaustion bruising the circles around her eyes. The slight quiver in the lip she was biting told him she was upset, and the way she had to think before she spoke told him she had been gagged by the doctor from saying what she really wanted to say to him.

Lexi was stubborn. She was not the emotional pushover everyone liked to think she was. She had a hot, impulsive temper and right now he could tell she was having a fight to keep that temper in check, because he had, in effect, chained her to this bed with him.

Did he feel bad about that? No, he felt bloody elated about that. They’d gagged her and he’d chained her to his bed. All he wanted right now was for her to confirm that.

‘OK.’ She heaved in a fresh lungful of air. ‘I promise to stay around.’

‘Then I will not try to get out of this bed until they say that I can,’ he parried, and turned his hand over on the white sheet, watching as she looked down at it, knowing that she understood what the gesture meant. After a short hesitation she lifted her own hand and placed it against his.

Deal sealed, he thought as he folded his fingers around her fingers, then released a sigh of contentment and closed his eyes. ‘What time is it?’ he asked.

‘Ten o’clock,’ Lexi answered. ‘You slept through dinner—’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘—so I ate it,’ she concluded.

That brought his eyes back open, and placed a lazy smile on his lips. He turned his head to look at her and his eyes had softened. That awful blank glaze had gone to reveal deep brown irises like velvet threaded with gold that warmed her all the way through even though she did not want it to.

‘What was it?’ he questioned curiously.

‘Pomodori con riso supplied by Zeta,’ she told him. ‘Your father has arranged for her to—’

‘Did she send a dessert?’

He’d done it again—blocked her from mentioning his father. ‘A couple of truly delicious Maritozzi buns. Franco, about your father—’

He withdrew his hands from hers. ‘Since when have you been Salvatore’s biggest fan?’ he demanded impatiently. ‘He treated you like a lowlife when we were together.’

‘I’m not his adored son.’

Flattening out his lips, he shut his eyes again.

In bubbling frustration Lexi sat back in her seat, then instantly sat forward again: no matter what the doctor had advised, or what Franco himself preferred, she found she still could not let the subject rest.

She reached out to retrieve his hand. ‘Francesco, please just listen—’

‘Franco,’ he interrupted. ‘I know you are mad with me when you call me Francesco.’

Lowering her gaze to his hand, Lexi watched her own fingers drawing patterns on his palm the way she’d used to do when they talked. Quite suddenly she wanted to break down and weep. They’d been together for six months. For two of those months they had been inseparable. For the other four they’d hated each other’s guts.

‘And when you extend that to Francesco Tolle,’ he continued, giving a good mimic of her cut-crystal English accent, ‘I know I am in really deep trouble.’

‘You stopped calling me Lexi altogether,’ Lexi recalled dully. ‘I became Alexia—and if you think my accent was cold, yours was made of ice picks.’

‘I was angry.’

‘I know you were.’

‘I was wildly in love with you but we—’

She stood up so fast Franco had no chance to react. By the time he’d dragged his heavy eyelids open it was like looking at a stranger—an achingly beautiful but distant stranger.

‘I’d better be going. I need to find somewhere to stay.’

‘Pietro will have reserved a suite for you at a hotel close to the hospital.’ Aware that he was slurring his words now, as the drugs they’d fed into him began to drag him back down, Franco decided to let her escape. ‘He will be waiting to drive you there.’

‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ she mumbled, and was gone before he could say anything else.

Releasing a sigh, Franco let his eyelids droop again and saw the other Lexi. The younger one, sitting cross-legged on the bulkhead of his sailing yacht, Miranda, relaying some convoluted story to him about an incident that had happened on the film set of the movie she’d come to Cannes to promote. She hadn’t had a clue that she was blocking his view of the open sea in front of them. She hadn’t cared that a stiff warm breeze was tangling her hair into spiralling knots, or that the tiny red bikini she’d been wearing was revealing more than it should.

And her innocence had shone out of her like a tantalising aura. She’d had no clue that what shone in him was deep, hot and very physical.

She’d liked him.

Franco threw an arm up to cover his eyes and for once wished they’d stung him with more sedatives, because he did not want to look any harder at the sexual predator he’d been then. The cabin beneath her, where he’d lived during that long summer, had already been set up ready for her seduction, and he’d been burning with anticipation while she talked.

A seduction that had taken them from Cannes to Nice, Cap Ferrat, Monte Carlo, then San Remo—

San Remo …

Franco shifted onto his side and didn’t care that it hurt him like hell. Reaching for the bell, he waited for the nurse to come to him. ‘I want this cage removed and these tubes taken out. I want a couple of pillows and I want my mobile phone,’ he reeled off with grim intent.

‘But, signor—’

‘Or I will get up and get them for myself.’

He did not get his first two requests, but he was reluctantly handed his mobile phone. ‘Grazie,’ he murmured, allowing the nurse to fuss around him, placing the pillows beneath his shoulders, mainly because he felt too damn weak to do the job for himself.

Lexi slept like a log. She had not expected to sleep at all, but the moment her head had come to rest on the pillow exhaustion had taken her out like a light, and she’d awoken this morning feeling so invigorated, but baffled as to why she should feel like that.

Or maybe she did not want to look too deeply into why, she mused with a frown, picking up the phone and ordering some breakfast, before quickly showering while she waited for it to arrive. She was starving. Despite telling Franco that she’d eaten his dinner, she’d been too stressed to do more than pick at Zeta’s delicious dishes. Now her stomach was growling as she walked across the elegant sitting room of the vast suite Pietro had reserved for her and went to take a quick look out of the window to check the weather before deciding what she was going to wear.

Not that her choices were many. Her weekend bag revealed a frustrating lack of common sense when she’d packed it so hastily back in London. Nothing in it was appropriate for hot and sunny Livorno in September; and she discovered she had not even packed any shoes.

A knock sounded on the suite door as she walked out of the bedroom wearing a long-sleeved stripy tunic top and a pair of black leggings tucked into black ankle boots. Assuming Room Service was delivering her breakfast, she opened the door—only to fall back two steps in shock.

There was no mistaking that Franco had been forged in his father’s image. Dressed impeccably as always in a dark business suit, and in his mid-fifties, Salvatore Tolle was still a very attractive if dauntingly austere man.

‘Buongiorno, Alexia,’ he greeted her soberly.

‘B-buongiorno, signor,’ she returned in a voice made breathless by surprise.

‘May I come in?’

Without saying another word Lexi stepped to one side in silent invitation for him to enter the suite. Nerves made her stay by the door once she’d closed it again. As she watched him take up a stance in the middle of the room she tried to anticipate what his visit could be about.

He took a few moments to glance around her accommodation. ‘You are comfortable here?’

She pleated her hands together at her front. ‘Yes, of course … thank you.’

He nodded his silver-threaded dark head. ‘I have spoken to Francesco,’ he announced abruptly. ‘He called me last night from his bed.’

‘Oh!’ Lexi instantly cheered up. ‘I’m so glad he did that. I was upset when I heard he had—’

‘Your concern on my behalf is touching, but I would prefer it if you resisted the urge to express it,’ Salvatore interrupted in a cool voice.

It felt like having a door slammed shut in her face.

She should be used to it, Lexi told herself. The few conversations she’d ever had with Salvatore had always felt like that.

‘Though I do thank you, Alexia,’ he then surprised her by adding, ‘for urging my son to—soften his attitude towards me.’