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

In the background stood Monfalcone, its deep gold stone walls basking in the afternoon sun. Once upon a time there had been a moat, complete with drawbridge to pull up across the coach entrance that led into the inner courtyard when feuding neighbours came to call. The moat had been filled in long ago. Now neat lawns formed a skirt around the outer walls, and the drawbridge had been replaced by another set of iron gates that Lexi had never seen closed.

As they plunged into the ink darkness of the deep stone arch the sultry warm air developed such a distinct chill that Lexi shivered and goosebumps rose on her flesh. Then they were out again, and driving into a huge sunny courtyard where deep, gracefully arching upper and lower terraces flanked each wing of the house. When she’d first come here Lexi had been in awe of the sheer classical splendour of her surroundings. The interior was just as elegant as the exterior—a place of pale cool marble and richly polished wood and the kind of furniture collected through many centuries that somehow lived comfortably side by side.

On one level she’d loved this place for its surprisingly warm and relaxed form of living. On another level she’d hated it because she’d been so unhappy here. She wasn’t sure how she was going to feel this time around—it probably depended on the memories evoked by coming back here.

Franco obviously did not have the same uncertainty, for he opened his door the moment the car came to a stop at the front entrance. The long hiss he made at his first attempt to get out of the car dragged Lexi’s attention to him. As she’d feared, his bruised body had stiffened up during the journey, making it painful for him to move.

‘Wait, I’ll come round and help you,’ she said quickly, and scrambled out of the car as Pietro did the same thing.

Gravel crunched beneath the soles of her boots as she shot around the back of the limo, only to find that Franco had already hauled himself upright and was standing in a ray of sunlight, his face turned up to it as if he was paying homage to its golden warmth.

Lexi pulled to a jerky standstill, her breath trapped in her throat. He looked so much taller and younger, strikingly handsome, and yet so very vulnerable standing there like that. She knew instinctively what he was doing. Not once in the last twenty-four hours had it occurred to her that he might have believed he would not live to see his home again, that coming back here had been the powerful force driving him today. Suddenly all the strange things Franco had been meting out since his accident were afforded a painful kind of sense in this moment of silent homage.

Then the two long glass-fronted doors swept open and Zeta appeared—a short round woman with silver hair swept back from her plump, anxious face. Her eyes barely grazed across Lexi before they swept to Franco.

‘Just look at you,’ she scolded him. ‘You are not fit to be walking, never mind leaving the safety of the hospital. Are you crazy or something?’

‘Buongiorno, Zeta,’ Franco responded dryly. ‘It is good to see you too.’

Zeta huffed out a breath, then threw up her hands as if in despair. ‘If your papà had any wits left after you robbed him of them he would—’

‘Do you think I could cross the threshold into my home before I am henpecked?’ Franco cut in.

Quivering with wounded pride and emotion, the housekeeper stepped to one side of the doorway. Both Lexi and Pietro leapt to offer Franco support.

‘I can do this by myself,’ he ground out, making them all freeze, including Zeta, and watch as he pushed his long body into movement and managed to walk past the housekeeper without revealing so much as a hint of pain.

Once he’d made it into the house all three rushed to stand in the doorway, tense, like three runners standing on the starting line, ready to move with the sound of the gun.

Lexi wanted to yell at him that displays of macho pride and stubbornness did nothing for her! But he was already negotiating the stairs by then, and she swallowed the words whole in case she encouraged him to make a sudden movement that would cause him to lose his balance.

He did it. Mr Macho and Stubborn made it all the way up those polished wood stairs to the galleried landing above. The moment he was safely there, Lexi released her pent-up tension with, ‘I hope you feel very pleased with yourself for achieving that—because I don’t!’

He turned his head to look down on her. ‘Very pleased,’ he admitted, and then one of his really charismatic rakish smiles appeared, to soften the strain from his features. ‘Now you can come up and help me out of this uncomfortable suit.’

Arrogant too, she thought, and responded accordingly. She tossed up her chin and turned to Pietro. ‘Either you go up there and help him, or I go up there and kill him,’ she said, her eyes alight with simmering defiance.

Too late, she sensed Zeta’s shock. Too late, she regretted her impulsive reaction. For the housekeeper was now recalling months of spitting rows and seething atmospheres.

Pietro just pressed a reassuring kiss to his wife’s cheek, then bent to collect their bags, which he’d dropped to the floor ready to race to Franco’s rescue if he’d started to sway.

‘I will put your bags in your old room, signora,’ he told Lexi, and headed off up the stairs.

Leaving Lexi facing a definitely disapproving housekeeper.

She could see that Zeta was envisaging a return to the hostilities of three years ago. Back then Lexi would have answered her look with burning defiance. This time she heaved out a wavering sigh instead. ‘He knew he was pushing his luck too far when he said that,’ she said in defence of her sharpness. ‘And he frightened me … Hello, Zeta,’ she concluded, and stuck out her hand in the hope that the Tolles’ loyal housekeeper would see it as a proffered olive branch meant to try and put their past tense relationship aside.

After a few seconds of silent study Zeta nodded her head and took Lexi’s hand. They were not quite up to hugging and kissing each other, but at least it was a start.

A start for what? The question pulled Lexi’s breath up short. She just had to work out what she was doing here, because—well, because it was beginning to feel permanent, and that was dangerous …

‘What is she doing?’ Franco asked as Pietro helped him out of his jacket.

‘I believe I heard her threatening to kill you,’ the older man responded evenly, and was rewarded with a crooked half smile, which quickly disappeared into a frown.

‘We make her welcome here this time, Pietro,’ he instructed grimly. ‘It is important to me.’

‘I know, sir.’ Laying the jacket aside, Pietro turned to help Franco unbutton his shirt, but his hands were impatiently waved away.

Franco was aching all over, and all he wanted to do was fall onto his bed. Even heeling off his shoes was agony, and he wondered how the hell he’d managed to put the shoes on in the first place.

Bloody-minded willpower and a grim determination to be in control of what was happening around him and to him.

‘I will do the rest.’ He turned away from Pietro’s hovering need to help. ‘Find out if my wife—’

My wife … The possessive title sounded so alien on his tongue it stopped his thoughts stone dead. He had rarely called Lexi that even when they were together—he’d rarely thought about her in those terms.

Then he remembered the last time he’d used the possessive term—to Marco—and experienced a different type of pain.

‘Check if she has eaten lunch today,’ he said, frowning again. He knew he’d deliberately missed out the my wife part because he did not feel he had the right to use it—not yet, anyway.

‘Have you eaten?’ Pietro was still hovering like a man who needed to do something helpful, but all Franco could think of was lying down on that bed.

‘Si,’ he said, though it was not the truth—but it saved him having to deal with further questions over choices of food. Or—worse—Zeta turning her kitchen upside down and making him his all his favourite foods to tempt his appetite, like she’d used to do when he was a boy and sick with some childhood ailment. ‘If you would tell Lexi—’ No. He changed that, smiling crookedly again. ‘If you would ask Lexi to come and see me after she has settled in?’

A silent nod and Pietro reluctantly departed. The moment the door closed behind him Franco gave up trying to remove his shirt and just rolled down carefully onto the bed. He would lie there for a couple of minutes to get his breath back, then …

The lingering effects of the drugs still moving around his system and exhaustion from the journey claimed him like a heavy blanket, and Franco knew nothing else.

He certainly did not know that Lexi had taken time for a shower and to change out of her dark city clothes, which were sticking to her overheated skin, into one of her new dresses that were more in keeping with a late summer in Italy. Then Zeta had arrived with a tray of tea and light pastries, which she’d discovered she was hungry enough to sit down and enjoy.

Over an hour later she let herself out of the suite she had been allocated all those years ago—two whole wings of the house away from Franco’s suite. Once deeply intimate lovers turned into married strangers, she mused as she walked the long corridors. What had the separate bedrooms said about their chance of making anything of their fated marriage? About as much chance as they’d both allowed it—which was basically none.

A grimace worked its way across her lips as she arrived at Franco’s door. About to lay a soft knock on it, she stalled her knuckles half an inch from their target when she heard a muffled noise that sounded very like a broken sob. A jolt of alarm had her bypassing the polite knock, and she just grabbed the handle and pushed the door open—only to freeze in dismay at the scene that met her unsuspecting gaze.

Franco was sitting on the side of his bed and he was not alone. Claudia Clemente, Marco’s beautiful sister, was kneeling at his feet between his spread thighs, her red-tipped fingers clutching at his head while she sobbed into his chest.

Almost anyone else walking in on this moving scene would have felt their heart rend in aching sympathy for both Franco and Claudia, but to Lexi it felt as if someone had reached into her chest and yanked her heart out. She would not have been surprised if she’d turned to stone where she stood. For Claudia was the woman who’d sent proof of that bet to her mobile phone years ago. She was also the woman Franco had spent the night with while Lexi had lost their baby and grieved alone.

CHAPTER SIX

THROBBING with the need to just turn around, walk out of there and never come back again, Lexi felt nailed to the spot by the rush of emotions that flooded inside her. She was hurting. She was hurting so badly she might as well have been standing there like this three and a half years ago, witnessing their betrayal. They even had a bed there as a gut jerking prop.

A barely controllable desire to go over there and yank the dainty, black clad figure away from Franco and then punch him on his red lipstick stained mouth almost got the better of her. At that precise moment she did not care that Claudia was Marco’s kid sister, or that the two of them had every excuse to be indulging in a moment of shared agony.

How had Claudia got in here anyway? Had Zeta let her in? Pietro? One of the maids? Did Claudia have such a free run of this house that she could stroll into Franco’s bedroom without needing permission from anyone?

As if she’d been dropped behind a haze of misty red, she watched as Franco glanced up and noticed her standing here.

‘Lexi,’ he murmured, and sounded so thick and strained that the swinging punch scenario replayed itself in her head. He was either really turned on or close to tears, and the latter she refused to accept—mainly because it just didn’t suit the unforgiving frame of mind she was in.

It clearly didn’t suit him either, because she saw two streaks of colour shoot high across his cheeks.

Guilty and with an eye witness, she noted.

She hated him.

Claudia lifted her face up off his chest and turned her beautiful dark head. She was two years older than Lexi. Once upon a time those two years had felt more like a decade to Lexi, in smooth sophistication and worldly experience. Now the age-gap felt like nothing at all, and Claudia’s amazing sloe-shaped bottomless black eyes were still the most exotically beautiful eyes she had ever seen. She looked nothing like her light-haired, blue-eyed brother. She certainly did not have Marco’s sunny temperament. Claudia was devious, calculating and jealously possessive of both her brother and of Franco.

‘Lexi,’ Marco’s beautiful sister whispered as she climbed slowly to her feet. ‘I did not expect to see you here.’

Lexi believed it. Claudia was so visibly shocked to see her standing there she could not contain the horror from sounding in her voice.

Lexi did not spare Franco another glance. Her insides had gone into meltdown and were churning up with the ugliest kind of bitterness. It took all of her control to keep breathing in and out. She kept her eyes focused on Claudia, who was wearing the silver wash of tears glistening on the tips of her long black eyelashes.

Crocodile tears? No, that was just too mean for her even to think it.

Claudia had just lost her beloved brother, after all. Of course she would want to come here and commiserate with Franco over their mutual loss. She had the right.

But it was still difficult for Lexi to part her bloodless lips and murmur, ‘Hello, Claudia,’ peeling her tense fingers off the door handle and still feeling the tension in them when she dropped them to her sides.

Deep breath, Lexi. Walk forward, she instructed her legs, which tingled because they did not want her to go anywhere near Claudia Clemente. ‘I’m so very sorry about Marco.’

At least that was a genuine response. She offered commiserating kisses to the other woman’s cheeks and felt Claudia’s floral perfume dry her throat. From the corner of her eye she caught the way Franco’s facial muscles clenched when she said Marco’s name.

Well, too late for that, she thought, with a cold feeling that sat like a lump where her understanding and sympathy should be. With Claudia here there was no way he could avoid talking about Marco. With Claudia here there was no way he could continue pretending the accident had not happened, or that Lexi was the only person he could bear to have close.

‘Oh, please don’t say his name,’ Claudia begged, and her fabulous eyes filled up with fresh tears. ‘I think I am going to die from my grief.’

As a sob broke free from her throat Lexi felt a pang of guilt for suspecting the quality of her grief. Whatever else Claudia was that she despised, she could not take away from her that she’d adored her older brother. Pushing her own stony feelings aside, Lexi plucked a box of tissues from the bedside table and quietly encouraged Claudia to dry her tears.

‘I had to come,’ Claudia explained once she’d regained control again. ‘I knew that Franco would be tormenting himself. I needed to tell him that we do not hold him to blame.’

Well, that was truly thoughtful and caring of her, but while Claudia was busy dabbing her eyes Franco had closed his eyes and was turning that sickly shade of grey.

‘And M-Mamma and Papa needed to know if he would be well enough to attend M-Marco’s funeral next Tuesday.’

‘We will be there.’ The man himself spoke at last. Then he fell into deep, dark, husky Italian, spoken too fast for Lexi to follow; but that sent Claudia to her knees again, her arms locking tightly around his neck.

Lexi removed herself over to the window and stayed there until Claudia made her final farewells and eventually left. The ensuing silence hung like a woodchopper’s axe, hesitating over the downward slice that would split them clean in two.

Three and a half years was a long time to hang onto such a poisonous grudge, she tried hard to tell herself. She’d grown up an awful lot in those years, so it was logical that Claudia had done the same thing.

Deep down, though, she didn’t believe that Marco’s sister had changed. She’d seen something in the possessive trail of the other woman’s fingers as they’d let go of Franco, and in the way she hadn’t been able to resist bruising his lips with a final kiss before she’d dragged herself away from him.

The atmosphere she’d left behind pulsated with Lexi’s continued silence.

What am I doing here?

Once again she asked herself that question. Franco needed people like Claudia around him—friends, family, lovers who would gently ease his grief out into the open.

‘What’s wrong, Lexi?’ he murmured quietly.

‘How did she get in here?’ she asked.

‘She arrived a few minutes ago. I could not deny her need to see me.’

She twisted around to look at him. ‘In your bedroom?’

‘I was asleep.’ Raking slightly unsteady fingers through his hair, he explained, ‘Zeta woke me to tell me that Claudia was here. Apparently she had driven here directly from the hospital after discovering I—we had left.’

Lexi nodded her head. It was weird how she was feeling—kind of closed off and iced over. ‘You talked with her about Marco?’

Rubbing his hands over his face, Franco nodded. ‘What time is it?’ He frowned down at his watch. He was still using the same blocking tactics against her where Marco was concerned, Lexi noted. ‘I could do with a drink. My mouth is parched. Do you want one?’ He was reaching for the house phone beside the bed.

‘If you like I can call Claudia back in here and let her share a drink with us,’ Lexi suggested coolly.

‘What is this?’ He frowned. ‘So you walked in here and found Claudia in my bedroom? It isn’t as if I am in a fit state to seduce the poor woman. You always were a jealous cat about her.’

‘Marco said—’

‘Marco is not here any longer to say anything!’ Driving himself to his feet, he groaned and struggled to gain his balance.

His shirt was hanging open, Lexi saw. His trousers resting low on his waist. He was no longer strapped up there, she noticed, and the extent of his bruising was horribly dark. Unable to stop her eyes from following the shock of dark hair that ran down his front, she imagined a pair of red tipped fingers stroking over him and felt her insides grow hard.

‘Marco once warned me that you would probably end up marrying Claudia,’ she persisted despite his attempt to head her off. ‘He believed the two of you were made for each other—that bringing your two volatile temperaments together would be like capturing forked lightning.’

‘Explosive?’ Franco said dryly. ‘I am not volatile. You are the volatile one in this relationship.’

But they did not have a relationship—that was the whole point! They had a marriage certificate, a load of miserable memories to share, and that was all they had!

‘I’m going out for a walk.’ Lexi made the decision on impulse; but once she had made it she discovered that she couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

On a growl of pure frustration, Franco raked out, ‘What the hell has got into you?’

Lexi whipped out through the door before he could say anything else. Inside she was a shaking mess of pain and—oh, God—fear. Fear because she knew she was already emotionally involved again. Attached, attracted, needy and jealous and—

‘You go out, signora?’ One of the maids she remembered from the last time she was here was crossing the hall as Lexi walked quickly towards the rear of the house.

Biting into the inner tissue of her tense lips Lexi nodded her head. ‘I need some fresh air,’ she mumbled, making a hasty exit.

Once outside, she crossed the terracotta floor of the shady loggia that ran the length of the back of the house, then walked down the steps into the gardens—that spread out in front of her without the rigid formality so carefully nurtured at the front. Several gravel pathways wound their lazy way through informal flowerbeds down towards a small lake she could see glinting a short distance away, beyond the assortment of fruit trees that dappled the paths with leafy shade from the heat of the sun.

She did not know where she was going, though the lake seemed to lure her. Inside she felt as if she’d been switched off like a light.

Upstairs, standing in the window, Franco watched her make her bid for escape with a grating sense of déjà-vu. Cursing softly, because every movement was such damn agony, he looked around for his mobile phone, accessed Lexi’s number, and rang it.

She did not have her phone with her, he realised a minute later. Frustration biting at his temper, he walked across the room and headed out onto the landing, then strode the corridors to Lexi’s wing of the house. This was something that was about to change around here, he decided grimly as he let himself into her room, then stood for a few seconds, needing to catch his laboured breathing before he went to hunt down her bag and pluck her mobile phone from its capacious depths.

Back in his own room, he used the house phone to relay instructions to Zeta about where his wife would be sleeping tonight, then instructed the housekeeper to send one of the maids to him.

Lexi had located the old wooden bench she’d remembered stood by the lake shore, and was sitting there with her eyes narrowed against the water’s sunny glint, waiting for the scrambling clutch of emotions she was suffering to calm down so that she could try to think.

About what? she asked herself tartly. About why you are here? About what you want to do next? You keep refusing to examine why you are here, and you don’t have a clue what you want to do next.

A maid appeared beside the bench, arriving panting, as if she’d come down here at a run. ‘Signor Francesco ask me to bring you this, signora,’ she explained breathlessly, and handed Lexi her mobile phone.

It rang the instant the maid had turned and disappeared back up the path towards the house.

‘You sent someone to my room to rummage through my bag for my phone,’ she fired at him before he had a chance to speak.

‘I went and got it for myself,’ Franco informed her. ‘And don’t,’ he warned, ‘start lecturing me on whether striding around the house in my present condition is good for my health, because I know that it isn’t. What the hell has got into you, Lexi? Why the sudden icy exit?’

Lexi wanted to tell him. In fact she wondered why she had never told him before—three and a half years ago, when it would perhaps have meant something—but she’d run away from facing him with his unfaithfulness that time too.

‘The past is catching up with me,’ she mumbled, and wished she had not heard the thickness of tears threatening her voice. ‘And you won’t let me talk about it.’

‘Don’t start crying, cara,’ he warned huskily. ‘I will be forced to come down there to you if you do. I know we have to talk about the past.’

Rolling her lips together to try and stop them from trembling, she asked, ‘Can I talk about Marco too?’

‘No,’ he rasped.

‘Your relationship with Claudia, then?’

‘Claudia and I do not have a relationship,’ he denied impatiently. ‘Not the kind you are implying anyway.’

Lexi watched the pair of resident white swans move across the glass smooth surface of the lake, leaving triangular ripples in their wake. Swans mated with the same partner for life, she recalled, for some reason only the convoluted inner workings of her own mind could follow. It took a lot of care and trust to be so steadfast and loyal to one person.

Something that she and Franco had never had.

‘I hate you,’ she whispered, which seemed to tie in somehow with the thoughts preceding it.

‘No, you don’t. You hate yourself for still caring about me when you don’t want to care. Come back up here to me and we will talk about that if you want,’ he encouraged.