The Man Who Risked It All

‘A cunning little starlet willing to prostitute her body to you for the pot of gold.’

She’d overheard Salvatore slicing those cutting words at Franco. She did not know what Franco had said in response because she’d fled in a flood of wild, wretched tears.

‘I asked him to hold,’ said the indomitable Bruce, who bowed to no one—not even a heavyweight like Salvatore Tolle. ‘I thought you could do with a few minutes to … to get your act together before you listened to what he has to say.’

‘Thanks,’ she mumbled, opening her eyes to stare down at her tensely twined fingers. ‘Did … did he tell you wh—why he was calling?’

‘He wouldn’t open up to me.’

Attempting to moisten the inside of her dry mouth, Lexi nodded, then made an effort to pull herself together yet again.

‘OK.’ She managed to stand up somehow. ‘I had better talk to him then.’

‘Do you want me to stay?’

Well, did she? The truth was she didn’t have an answer to that question. In her life to date, first as a fifteen-year-old thrust into fame by the starring role she’d taken in a low-budget movie that had surprised everyone by taking the world by storm, Bruce had already played a big part—working alongside her actress mother, Grace, as her agent. Later, when Lexi had gone off the rails and walked away from her shining career to be with her handsome Italian boyfriend, Bruce had not allowed her to lose touch with him. When her mother had died suddenly, Bruce had been ready to offer her his support. But back then she’d still had Franco. Or she’d believed she still had Franco. It had taken months of pain and heartache before she’d finally given in and flown home to Bruce in a storm of heartbreak and tears.

Now she worked for him at his theatrical agency. The two of them worked well together: she understood the minds of his temperamental clients and he had years of rock solid theatrical experience. Somewhere along the way they had become very close.

‘I’d better do this on my own.’ Lexi made the decision with the knowledge that this was something Bruce could not fix for her.

He remained silent for a moment, his expression revealing not a single thing. Then he gave a nod of his head and straightened up from the desk. Lexi knew she’d hurt his feelings, knew he must feel shut out; but he’d also understand why she had refused his offer to stay. For the phone call involved Franco, and where he was concerned not even Bruce was going to be able to catch her when she fell apart if the news was bad. So she preferred to fall apart on her own.

‘Line three,’ was all he said, indicating the phone on her desk before he strode back across her office.

Lexi waited until the door shut behind him and then turned to stare down at the phone for a few seconds, before tugging in a breath and reaching out with a trembling hand.

‘Buongiorno, signor,’ she murmured unsteadily.

Across hundreds of miles of fibre-optic line a pause developed that made her heart pump that bit more heavily and her fingers clench around the telephone receiver so tightly they hurt. Then the emotionally thickened voice of Salvatore Tolle sounded in her ear.

‘It is not a good day, Alexia,’ he countered heavily. ‘Indeed, it is a very bad day. I assume you have heard the news about Francesco?’

Lexi closed her eyes as a wave of dizziness broke over her. ‘Yes,’ she breathed.

‘Then I can keep this conversation brief. I have made arrangements for you to travel to Livorno. A car will collect you from your apartment in an hour. My plane will fly you to Pisa and someone will collect you from there. When you reach the hospital you will need to show proof of who you are before you will be allowed to see my son, so make sure you have the relevant—’

‘Francesco is—alive?’ she shrilled on a thick intake of air, feeling as if someone had hit her hard in the solar plexus.

Another pause on the line pounded and thumped in Lexi’s head for a couple of seconds before she heard a softly uttered curse.

‘You believed he was dead. My apologies,’ Franco’s father offered brusquely. ‘In the concern and confusion since the accident it had not occurred to me that reports have been confused about … Si.’ His voice sank low and thickened again as he gave her the confirmation she was waiting so desperately to hear. ‘Francesco is alive. I must warn you, however, that he has sustained some serious injuries. Though how the hell he …’

He stopped again, and Lexi could feel the fight he was having with his emotions. Trapped in a spinning swirl of aching relief and fresh alarm due to those injuries he’d mentioned, she recognised that Franco’s father must be suffering from a huge shock himself. Francesco was his only child. His adored, his precious, thoroughly spoiled son and heir.

‘I’m—sorry you’ve been put through this,’ she managed to whisper.

‘I don’t need your sympathy.’ His voice hardening, Salvatore fired the words at her like a whip.

If she’d had it in her Lexi would have smiled, for she could understand why this man did not want sympathy from her. Loathing the likes of which Salvatore felt for her did not fade away with the passage of time.

‘I simply expect you to do what must be done,’ he continued more calmly. ‘You are needed here. My son is asking for you, therefore you will come to him.’

Go—to Franco? For the first time since the news had tossed her into a dark pit of shock, Lexi blinked and saw daylight. It was one thing to know that Franco had finally taken one wild risk too many, and even to stand here experiencing the full horror of the result, but—go to him?

‘I’m sorry, I can’t do that.’ It felt as if the words had peeled themselves off the walls of her throat, they were so difficult to utter.

‘What do you mean, you cannot?’ Salvatore ground out. ‘You are his wife. It is your duty to come here!’

His wife. How very odd that sounded, Lexi thought as she twisted around to face the window, her eyes taking on a bleak blue glint. Her duty to Franco as his wife had ended three and a half years ago, when he—

‘His estranged wife,’ she corrected. ‘I’m sorry that Francesco has been injured, signor. But I am no longer a part of his life.’

‘Where is your charity, woman?’ her father-in-law hissed in an icy tone that was more in keeping with the man Lexi remembered. ‘He is bleeding and broken! He has just lost his closest friend!’

‘M-Marco is … dead?’ It was yet another shock that held Lexi frozen as the shattering chill of loss seemed to crystallise her flesh.

She stared blindly at the grey skies beyond her office window and saw the handsome laughing face of Marco Clemente. Her heart squeezed with aching grief and the sheer unfairness of it. Marco had never done a bad thing to anyone. He’d been the easygoing one of the two lifelong friends. Where Franco had always been the high charged extrovert, the reckless daredevil, Marco had tagged along because, he’d once told her, he was lazy. It was easier to go with Franco’s flow than waste energy trying to swim against it.

Knowing Franco as she did, he was probably crucifying himself right now for involving Marco in his thirst for danger and speed. He would be blaming himself for Marco’s death.

‘I’m so very sorry,’ she whispered across the fresh ache in her throat.

‘Si,’ Salvatore Tolle acknowledged. ‘It is good to know that you feel sadness for Marco. Now I ask you again—will you come to my son?’

‘Yes.’ Lexi said it without thought or hesitation this time, for no matter how hurt and bitter she felt about Franco, his losing Marco had just changed everything.

Marco and Franco … One without the other was like day without night.

Lowering the phone back onto its rest, Lexi began to shiver again. She just could not stop herself. Lifting a hand to her eyes, she covered the threat of tears stinging there and wished she knew if she was feeling like this because she was relieved that Franco was alive or because poor Marco was … not.

‘He’s alive, then?’

Spinning around to find that once again Bruce had entered the room without her hearing him, Lexi pressed her quivering lips together and nodded her head.

Bruce’s slender lips twisted into a grimace. ‘I thought the lucky swine would be.’

‘There is no luck involved in being flung through the air with a load of lethal debris, Bruce!’ Lexi reacted fiercely.

‘And the other one—Marco Clemente?’

Wrapping her arms tightly around her body, she gestured a mute negative.

‘Poor devil,’ he murmured.

At least that comment conveyed no sarcasm, she noticed. She pulled in a deep, fortifying breath of air. ‘I am going to have to take some time off.’

Bruce stood regarding her through narrowed eyes and Lexi could tell that he was not impressed by that announcement. ‘So the Tolle effect still holds strong with you, then?’ he said eventually. ‘You’re going to go to him.’

‘It would be wrong of me not to.’

‘Even though you are in the process of divorcing him?’

Flushing in response to that challenging question, Lexi half wished that she had not told Bruce that the papers had gone out to Francesco’s lawyers two weeks ago.

‘That isn’t relevant in this situation,’ she defended. ‘Marco and Franco were like twin brothers. It’s only right and fitting that we put our differences aside at a time of tragedy like this.’

‘That’s just bull, Lexi,’ Bruce denounced. ‘I’m the guy you ran to when your lousy marriage blew up in your face,’ he reminded her with sardonic bite. ‘I saw what he did to you. I mopped up the tears. So if you think I am going to stand by in silence and watch you walk back into that poisonous relationship then you can just think again.’

Raising her chin, she turned back to face him. ‘I’m not about to walk into a relationship with Franco.’

‘Then what are you doing?’

‘Visiting a grieving and seriously injured man!’

‘For what purpose?’

Opening her lips to let fly with a heated answer, Lexi flailed for a second and closed her lips again.

‘You still love him,’ Bruce stated contemptuously.

‘I don’t love him.’ Walking around her desk, she found herself making hard work of hunting through drawers for her bag.

‘You still lust after him, then.’

‘I do not!’ She found the bag and pulled it out of the drawer.

‘Then why are you going?’ Bruce persisted doggedly as he prowled towards her, reminding her of a sleek hunting dog gnawing on a particularly tough bone.

‘I’m only taking a couple of days off, for goodness’ sake!’ Lexi breathed out heavily.

‘Did he find time to come to your bedside when you were losing his baby?’ Bruce thrust the words at her like a fisted punch. ‘No. Did he give a damn that you were heartbroken, frightened and alone? No,’ he punched again. ‘He was too busy rolling around in a bed somewhere with his latest bit of skirt. It took him twenty-four hours to turn up, and by then the well-laid bitch had made sure you knew where he’d been. You owe him nothing, Lexi!’

‘None of that means that I have to behave as badly as he did!’ Lexi cried out, pale as parchment now, because everything he had just said was so painfully true. ‘He’s hurt, Bruce, and I liked Marco. Please try to understand that I would not be able to live with myself if I didn’t go!’

‘At the expense of us?’

The us held Lexi trapped as she stared at the sharply attractive man standing in front of her desk, looking the epitome of sartorial elegance in a cool grey suit, and she felt the ache of wretched tears return to her throat. Bruce was thirty-five years old to her twenty-three, and the glossy patina of his maturity and sophistication sometimes threatened to drown her in intimidating waves. The cold anger glinting in his pale blue eyes, the cynical edge to his grimly held mouth … Bruce rarely showed this side of himself to her, and in truth she’d never dreamed he would do this—bring out into the open what the two of them had been carefully skirting around for months. Bruce was her mentor, her saviour, her closest friend, and she loved him so much—in a very special way she reserved just for him.

But not in the way she knew he wanted her to love him, though she so desperately wished that she could.

‘No, forget I said that.’ He sighed suddenly, throwing out a hand as if he was tossing the explosive challenge aside. ‘I’m angry because the—’ He stopped to utter a softly bitten curse before he continued, ‘Franco has raised his handsome head again just at the point when you were …’ A short sigh censored the next words too. ‘Go,’ he sanctioned in the end, turning away to stride back to the door. ‘Perhaps seeing him again after this length of time will make you recognise that you’ve grown up, while he’s still the … I just hope you find closure on your feelings for him and when you get back you will finally be able to get on with the rest of your life without that bastard in it!’

Standing behind her desk, clutching her bag to her front and fighting the urge to run after him and beg him to understand, Lexi knew right then, in that struggling moment, that something else had just been brought to a close: her long relationship with Bruce. Tears burned hot as she took on board what that revelation truly meant. She’d been a fool—unfair, selfish. She’d known how he felt about her but had crushed the knowledge down so she didn’t have to face up to it and deal with it. In the last few months she’d even started to convince herself that an intimate relationship between them would be possible—they worked so well together and liked each other so much.

But liking wasn’t enough, and she knew it—had probably always known it. She had not been playing fair with Bruce from the moment she’d recognised how his feelings towards her had changed from good friend and mentor to prospective lover.

With her tongue cleaving tautly to the roof of her mouth and her lips pinned tightly together in an effort to stop them from trembling, Lexi dragged on her coat. She didn’t have the time right now, but when she got back from Italy she knew that she and Bruce were going to have to have a long talk about where their relationship was heading.

Or not heading, she amended bleakly. If today’s shock had done anything, it had made her take a hard look at herself. She was only twenty-three years old, and already she’d fallen in love with a rich, irresponsible playboy, become pregnant with his child, become his wife, learned how to hate him for using her, learned how much he’d resented her for turning him into a husband, lost their baby and lost him.

So why are you walking back into his life?

Lexi was still grappling with that question late that afternoon as she made her way out onto Pisa’s busy airport concourse, a long delicately built figure of medium height, wearing skinny stretch blue jeans and a soft grey jacket, with a scarf looped loosely around her throat. Her hair was loose, floating around her strained, pale face; and her tense blue-green eyes were scanning the crowds in front of her for a sign to tell her who would be there to pick her up. Almost immediately she spotted a familiar face.

Pietro, a short, dapper man with a shock of silver hair and smooth olive skin stood waiting for her by the barrier. Pietro was Salvatore’s personal chauffeur, and his wife Zeta was housekeeper at the fabulous Castello Monfalcone, the Tolle private estate situated just outside their home town of Livorno. Both Pietro and Zeta had always been coolly polite to Lexi; that had been a small something in a place filled with animosity and resentment.

Striding forward, Pietro greeted her sombrely. ‘It is good to see you again, signora, though not so good the circumstances.’

‘No,’ Lexi agreed.

Taking charge of her small bag, he indicated that she follow him. Ten minutes later he was driving her towards Livorno in the kind of luxury car she had once turned her back on without a single pang of regret. Strange, really, she pondered as she stared out at the familiar sights sliding by the car window. She had come to love Livorno itself during her brief stay there, even if she’d hated everything else.

Her escape, she recalled, from tension and disapproval. A nineteen-year-old pregnant married woman—still just a girl, really—made to feel like an interloper and an outcast at the same time. Salvatore hadn’t been able to stand looking at her. Francesco had reminded her of a beautiful golden eagle who’d had his fabulous wings clipped and his freedom to fly wherever he wanted to ripped away. He’d snapped at anyone who dared to approach him, picked fights—with his father most of all. He’d resented Salvatore’s attitude towards Lexi, to his marriage, to their coming child. He’d hated it that he couldn’t defend her because he had never been certain that she hadn’t set him up in a baby trap as his father had accused her of doing.

‘Why did you bother to marry me?’

Lexi moved with a jolt as her own shrill voice echoed inside her head.

‘What else was I supposed to do with you? Leave you and the baby to starve on the streets?’

When true love turns bad, Lexi thought bleakly. She was still able to recall the aching throb of raw hurt she’d carried around with her for long lonely months until …

Oh, bring on the violins, Lexi, she told herself impatiently. So you had this amazing love affair with this amazingly sexy and gorgeous playboy and you got yourself pregnant? So you married the playboy and lived to regret it and lost your baby—which, to most people, was a huge relief? Grieve for your baby, but don’t grieve for a marriage that should never have happened in the first place. And don’t, she warned herself sternly, go all self-pitying again, because it earned you nothing back then and will earn you even less now.

The car slowed down and she focused back on her surroundings as they turned in through the hospital gates. It was a bright white, very modern, very exclusive place, set in the seclusion of its own private grounds.

It was the same hospital she had been rushed to three and a half years ago. As she climbed out of the car and looked at the building a whole rush of old emotions erupted inside. She did not want to walk back in there. She felt herself go cold at the thought. Her baby … her tiny baby … had been stillborn within those walls, those whisper-quiet corridors, that luxury accommodation.

‘Signor Salvatore asked me to accompany you, signora.’ Pietro’s arrival at her side made Lexi jump. She blinked, fighting—fighting—to push back the memories, the strangling agony of old feelings, of painful emptiness and grief.

‘It is this way …’

Somehow she placed one foot in front of the other. A security man guarding the front doors asked to see her passport before he would allow her to step inside. Her lips and her mouth felt paper dry as she rummaged in her bag to find it while Pietro became angrily animated, insisting that the precaution was not necessary when he could vouch for la signora’s authenticity.

Lexi just wished he would leave the guard to do his job. This was all beginning to be too much for her. Francesco didn’t need her. It wasn’t as if he was alone in the world. He had a huge network of family and friends who had to be more than willing to gather around him. If she had an ounce of good sense she would turn around and walk right back out of there.

But she didn’t turn and walk away. She followed Pietro across the hospital lobby and into a waiting lift that carried them up. Yet another walk down a hushed white corridor and Pietro was opening a door and standing back to allow Lexi to precede him inside. Beginning to feel as if she was floating on a current of icy air now, Lexi filled up her lungs and stepped into the room.

It took a couple of foggy seconds for her to realise that this was an anteroom. Comfortable chairs stood grouped around a low table topped by a small stack of thick glossy magazines. The aroma of fresh coffee permeated the air. A pretty nurse with her ebony hair neatly contained beneath a white cap sat at a desk behind a computer monitor.

She looked up at Lexi and smiled, ‘Ah, buona sera, Signora Tolle.’ She surprised Lexi by recognising her on sight. ‘Your husband is sleeping but you must go in and sit with him,’ she invited. ‘He will be more comfortable once he knows you are here.’

Lexi walked across the room towards the door the nurse had indicated. Her heart was thumping, beating like a drum in her ears. She pushed open the door, stepped through it, then swiftly closed it behind her so she could lean back against it, light-headed with fear of what she was about to see.

The room was bigger than the one she’d stayed in. A large white cube of space, shrouded by soft striped shadows cast by the slatted blinds angled against the golden light of the afternoon sun. And she could feel every pore absorbing the hush of perfect stillness as she stood glued to the spot by the sight of the drips and tubes leading to a monitor alive with graphs and numbers that silently flickered and pulsed.

‘You can come closer, Lexi. I won’t bite.’

CHAPTER TWO

THE sound of that dry, slightly hoarse voice ran through Lexi in shivering stings of sharp recognition and she dropped her gaze to the bed, unaware that she’d been avoiding it in fear of what she was going to see.

She discovered that she could not see anything other than a swathe of starched white linen. She saw no pillows, and a cage had been erected over his legs. Her wildly skipping heart suddenly felt all curled up in her chest, cowering, as if something was threatening it. For when someone was forced to lie flat it usually meant a back injury. A cage usually meant broken legs. And whatever those tubes were feeding into him made her squirm, because she hadn’t bothered to ask anyone what his injuries were. Not the nurse, not Pietro … Perhaps she should go back out there and—

‘Lexi …’ Franco murmured impatiently when she took too long to answer him. ‘If you are thinking of making a quick exit—don’t.’

‘H-how did you know it was me?’ she asked.

‘You still wear the same perfume.’

She was surprised he remembered, bearing in mind the trail of different perfumes that had passed through his life since her. Dozens of women listed in celebrity magazines. All smooth, sleek, sophisticated, with—

‘Since I cannot move, have some pity on me, cara. Come over here where I can see you, per favore.’

Curling taut fingers around the shoulder strap of her bag, Lexi peeled herself free of the door and walked forward on limbs that shook. Pulling to a halt at the foot of the bed, she felt her hectic breathing dry up altogether when she got her first glimpse of Franco’s powerful length, laid out flat on the bed like a corpse. A white linen sheet covered three-quarters of him—his upper torso left uncovered to reveal the muscled solidity of his wide shoulders and arms like a splash of polished bronze against the starched white. White bandaging formed heavy strapping around his left shoulder and bound his ribs, and she gulped as a wave of distress broke through her when she caught sight of the dark, inky bruising spreading out from beneath the edges of the strapping.

‘Ciao,’ he murmured, in a husky low tone that sounded scraped.

Lexi gave a helpless shake of her head as her eyes began to sting with hot aching tears. ‘Just look at the state of you,’ she whispered.

Franco did not care that he was really pleased to see the evidence of those tears appear like deep pools in her beautiful eyes. He wanted Lexi to be upset. He even wanted her to pity him—was in fact ready and willing to push her sympathy buttons for all they were worth.

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.