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

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.