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

The doctor looked at Lexi again as though he was waiting for her to confirm that she would be there to take care of his patient. Parting her lips with the intention of refusing to have any part in Franco’s plans to walk out of there, she happened to glance at him—saw the evidence of strain showing in his proud profile and the grim tension in his elegant stance. She remembered Marco, experienced a swooping sensation deep down inside that felt as if something was twisting her organs together painfully, and she closed her mouth again, then gave a silent nod of her head.

The tension holding Franco together sprang free, almost toppling him from his increasingly painful stance. Whatever Dayton had said to her on the phone, he had not yanked on her chains hard enough—but Franco had. Sheer grim satisfaction helped to keep him upright through the ordeal of receiving the doctor’s detailed advice on maintaining his present rate of recovery. By then Pietro had arrived and, ignoring the older man’s shocked consternation when he realised what was going on, Franco quietly instructed him to collect his bag from the adjoining bathroom.

He almost collapsed into the rear of his father’s limo. He was that exhausted by keeping up the appearance that he was magically returned to robust health.

Lexi sat beside him, flitting from concern to annoyance and back again as she studied the way he was sitting there, deathly pale with his eyes closed, one long-fingered hand pressed against his chest inside his jacket, the other lying limp on the seat between them. She could see the punch holes from the shunt on the back of his hand and the bruising circling them. But what really bothered her was the shallowness of his breathing.

‘It would serve you right if you had a relapse now, Franco, what with your wicked, lying stupidity!’ she launched at him, anxiety feeding her hot temper.

‘I left that particularly drastic kind of wicked, lying stupidity to Marco,’ Franco relayed flatly in response.

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_d3f855f2-e65b-5996-82c1-5dba25b8104f)

LEXI swivelled around to stare at him. ‘M-Marco?’ she prompted, watching warily for a sign of that awful grey pallor to sink down across Franco’s face. The trouble was that he was already that greyish colour.

‘Pietro, the paparazzi—are they following us?’

He did it yet again. Blocked out the subject of his best friend.

‘Si,’ the older man responded. ‘They sit on our tail like reckless fools. You want me to lose them?’

‘You think that you can do it?’

‘Ah, si, of course I can do it.’

‘What paparazzi?’ As Lexi twisted around to take a look through the back window an eager Pietro threw the car into an acute left turn.

Trying not to wince as the swerving action lanced through him like a knife, Franco told her dryly, ‘They have been on your tail since you arrived in Livorno.’

‘Oh.’ She twisted back in her seat. ‘I’ve stopped bothering to look for them since I gave up acting.’

‘Why did you give up acting?’ Turning his head against the seat-back, he looked at her. ‘You were supposed to have a glittering Hollywood career waiting for you when you left me.’

Ignoring his last remark, even though he’d made it sound as if she’d walked away from him because of her glittering career prospects, Lexi said with a shrug, ‘Acting was never my dream. It was my mother’s dream.’ Poor Grace, who’d so wanted to be a famous Hollywood movie star all her life. ‘I fell into the movie thing by accident when I was fooling around with a script off set during one of my mother’s auditions. Someone heard me, dragged me onto the set, then made me read the same bit again. I did. I got the part.’ As she looked at Franco she caught a faintly unsettling glint in his narrowed eyes.

‘You never told me that before.’

‘You probably never asked before. Why the sinister glint?’ she demanded suspiciously.

‘It is not sinister. So, what was your dream?’

Looking foreward again, Lexi didn’t answer him. Her dream had been way too basic for a man like Franco to understand. A house with a garden, lots of kids, and a husband who worked a nine-to-five job then came home to his family each evening.

Growing up in a city apartment with a single mum who’d worked the oddest hours possible meant that she’d more or less brought herself up. Her garden—her playground—had been the set of one small movie or another, or the cloistered walls of her mother’s dressing room backstage.

No, her childhood dreams had found no romance in the acting world.

‘My mother dreamed of me becoming a great concert pianist,’ he said, lifting up his hands and spreading out his long fingers to study them with a rueful grimace. ‘All I wanted to do was to mess around with boats and engines.’

But he still played the piano like nobody else Lexi had ever heard. He could bring the whole of Monfalcone to a breathless listening standstill with a hauntingly beautiful piece of classical music played on the grand piano in the main salon, or he could ratchet up a flagging party by belting out a wild medley of pop, hot jazz and heavy rock.

With those same long blunt fingers that took apart a boat engine with such dedicated care and knowledge.

‘She was beautiful—your mother,’ Lexi murmured, recalling the painting that hung in the same salon that contained the grand piano.

‘As was yours.’ Lowering his hands, he looked at her and an ache that came very close to mutual understanding tugged like a gentle weight on her heart. ‘I’m sorry I never got to meet her.’

So was Lexi. Grace would have fallen in love with Franco—the tall, dark Italian with oodles of bone-melting charm. She didn’t think that his mother would have fallen in love with her, though. Isabella Tolle had been hewn from a different breed entirely from Lexi—and Grace, come to that. Grace had been an eternal dreamer, whereas Isabella Tolle had been born with all of her dreams already mapped out and secured for her.

And the last thing she would have wanted for her only son would have been a hasty marriage to a one-hit movie star who’d set out to trap him … No. Lexi stopped that thought in its tracks. She had not set out to trap him. She just had trapped him, and learned to hate herself for doing it.

‘Do we go to the apartment or Monfalcone?’

Franco’s casual question intruded, making Lexi blink a couple of times before she could focus her attention back on him. Remembering what his father had said to her that morning, she said, ‘Monfalcone,’ though with the thoughts now rattling around in her head—all to do with her time spent living there—she wished she hadn’t agreed to that part of her bargain with Salvatore.

‘We go home, Pietro,’ he relayed to the driver.

‘Ah, si, si.’ Pietro smiled in approval. ‘That is good signor. That is very good indeed …’

‘At least one person approves of us, bella mia,’ Franco drawled softly.

Lexi shifted restlessly on the seat. She wasn’t sure that she liked the lazily veiled look Franco was levelling at her from his corner of the car. It made the hairs on the back of her neck tingle as if she was missing something important here that she should be working out.

‘We are not an “us.”‘ It needed saying—just in case Franco was having amorous ideas about the two of them.

‘What are we, then?’

She opened her mouth to answer, then closed it again. She did not have an answer to what they were. Estranged husband and wife? A bit more than that, since she was returning to Monfalcone with him like a wife. Friends, then? No. Once upon a time Franco had been the closest thing to a friend she’d ever known—until she’d discovered he was only in the relationship for the fun of the sex, and of course, the bet. The only other reason had to be Marco. She was here with him because he’d lost his closest friend. But she was not allowed to mention that.

Frowning, she shook her head and turned her face to the window, leaving the question to hang in the air. Franco studied her taut profile and felt an ache deep down inside, like a battering ram trying to bridge the gap between them so he could answer the question for her the physical way.

Great strategy, Francesco, he mocked himself grimly. The doctors had gagged her, he had chained her to his side, and his father had used subtle manipulation to bring Lexi back to Monfalcone with Franco. Now you want to ruin it all with a smash-and-grab approach you are not physically capable of carrying out.

And then there was that other unknown element stirring around in the soup of their fragile relationship. ‘What did Dayton call to say to you?’ he prompted coolly.

The way he’d used Bruce’s last name spoke volumes to Lexi. Franco had always disliked Bruce as much as Bruce disliked him. ‘I work for him.’

‘I know you do.’

He did? That surprised her. She’d thought he’d shut her right out of his life, much as he was doing with Marco right now. Another bad thing obliterated from Franco’s world.

‘Well, then—you are an employer, so you know how it works. Don’t ask stupid questions.’ Lexi reacted stiffly, turning away again. She refused to discuss Bruce with him, because … Well, because she was loyal to the people that she loved, and right now she loved Bruce more than she loved …

Back-pedalling desperately, determined not to face what she had been about to think, Lexi moved in the seat as if she was trying to push something truly frightening away from her. And maybe she was, she admitted, aware of why she had severed that last too disturbing thought before it could round itself off.

I don’t even have the excuse of a tragic accident to make me block out that which I don’t want to face, she recognised grimly.

The journey continued with silence thickening the car’s confines. The silent smoothness of the drive was a testament to the quality of luxury engineering and design.