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

Lexi slowly sank back in her seat and watched the view pass by them beyond the glass, tinted against the fierce rays of the sun. This part of Italy had to be one of the most beautiful places on earth, she observed hazily. The afternoon sunlight coloured everything such a warm golden colour, and the sheer stately elegance of tall tapering cypress trees dotted miles and miles of undulating landscape. Even the occasional silvery spread of an ancient olive tree rising up on its sturdy twisting trunk made an impact, as if one of the great Italian masters had placed them there with the gifted touch of his paintbrush. Familiar scents teased her nostrils and heightened her senses. Warm like the place, sweet and exotic.

Turning to look at Franco, she discovered that he’d fallen asleep. An achy little pang twisted inside her: even in sleep he did not look comfortable. Tension clung to the perfect symmetry of his face, pulling his sensual mouth down at the corners. He had slipped his hand back inside his jacket to cover the area around his cracked ribs, while the other hand seemed be lightly gripping his injured thigh. Perhaps they should have gone to his apartment and not added the extra half-hour drive to Monfalcone, she considered worriedly. Perhaps she should have put up a much fiercer fight against his leaving the hospital in the first place.

‘Not much longer now, signora.’

The quietness of Pietro’s voice brought Lexi’s anxious gaze into contact with the driver’s mirror, where Pietro’s dark eyes reflected the same concern that she was feeling over Franco, for he had noticed his discomfort too.

She sent Pietro a small nod to acknowledge his reassurance. ‘The press?’ she whispered.

‘They gave up once they realised where we are going.’

To a house surrounded by acres of private land they would not dare to encroach upon, Lexi thought as she slid her gaze back to the window. Another mile or so and they would turn off the main highway to head towards the hill she could see rising up in the near distance. Once over the crest of that hill they would drop into a spectacularly beautiful valley, with rolling pastures and meadows gently dipping down towards the river that meandered its way the length of the valley on its way to the sea. Once they had crossed the ancient narrow stone bridge that forged the river they would be on Monfalcone land.

Great, she thought as they crested the hill, and unhappy memories began to surface of the long, lonely weeks she’d spent trying to make herself as invisible as possible in this breathtakingly beautiful but inhospitable place. She’d been her own worst enemy—so totally off the scale of hormonal upheaval that even small problems became huge mountainous things she just didn’t know how to deal with.

As if by sheer homing instinct Franco stirred and opened his eyes as they slowed down to negotiate the narrow bridge over the river. Lexi saw him wince as he tried to change the position he’d been sleeping in.

‘All right?’ she questioned huskily.

‘Si,’ he said, but he wasn’t, and the brief, tense, wry smile he turned on her pricked at that ache she’d been feeling. It was not going to go away any time soon.

From the bridge they drove onto a long and narrow undulating ribbon of tarmac flanked by two rows of elegant cypress trees that made a grand statement about the house they were heading towards even before it came into view. As the car sped them down the lane the sunlight blinked in and out between each evenly spaced tree trunk with perfect regularity. Lexi knew from experience the effect could be dangerously hypnotic if you didn’t concentrate all your attention on the road ahead.

She knew because she’d fallen prey to it once, driving away from the house in floods of tears that had only helped to amplify the phenomenon, and she’d ended up crashing the car into one of the shallow drain ditches situated on the other side of the trees. How she’d missed making solid impact with a tree she would never know. She’d just been lucky, she supposed. Not that Francesco had seen her relatively soft landing nose-down in the ditch as fortunate. He’d been furious. He’d called her ‘bloody reckless and stupid’ as he’d hauled her body out of the crunched car in a rage.

‘Were you hoping to kill yourself, or just the baby?’

Lexi shivered as the angry echo of his voice broke over her. She’d sobbed her heart out right there in the middle of the road, and he’d taken her in his arms and let her cry herself silent. As silent as Franco had been throughout the whole wretched weeping jag, while her little car had shone silver in the ditch and his flashy red one had simmered a couple of yards away, with its driver’s door hanging open and the engine still running.

‘I did not know what to say to you.’

The quietly deep, slightly constrained timbre of his voice brought her eyes round to look at him. He was staring out of the other window, but as she turned her head so did he, and she was snared in the sombre darkness of his eyes. Through the flickering play of sunlight across his face Lexi saw the bleakness of the same painful recollection.

‘I was out of control.’ She made the confession with husky thickness, because it was the first time she’d ever accepted that. ‘I set out to make your life miserable and I succeeded.’

‘You say that as if I behaved like a saint.’ A grim smile clipped the corners of his mouth. ‘You had too much to deal with at one time. You were carrying our baby. You had just lost your mother …’

And she’d known deep down that she should have lost him too, but she’d hung onto him—clung to him even while she’d hated him by then. Staring down at her hands where they lay pleated together on her lap, Lexi felt a tremor cross her lips. Yes, she’d been out of control, both emotionally and hormonally, long before she’d crashed her car into that ditch.

They’d come here from England after burying her mother. Franco had seen to everything, even though Bruce had insisted that he should do it. It was into the middle of that angry argument between the two men that she’d dropped the news that she was pregnant. Bruce had reacted by thumping Franco. Strangely, Franco had taken the punch without retaliating at all. He’d been too stunned by her announcement, she’d realised later, but at the time …

‘I took the high-handed noble route and rushed you into marriage when what you really needed to do was to curl up somewhere on your own and grieve for your mamma …’

Poor Grace, who’d spent her life dreaming of fame, but whose death had made barely a ripple on the surface of the news media—while her daughter’s hasty marriage to Francesco Tolle had earned headlines across two countries. He was right. She had been given no time to grieve before she’d been plunged into wedding arrangements right here at Monfalcone. No one here had met or even heard of Grace Hamilton. They had been strangers to Lexi—coldly polite strangers who disapproved of her because they believed she’d ruined Franco’s life. They’d grieved for him while she’d just felt isolated, caged in by her own private grief she did not feel she could express. And the worst thing of all was that she’d known Franco had already started to cool their relationship before all the rest had happened.

San Remo … The place that had brought an end to their summer madness and begun their long winter of hell.

The car slowed down again, the cypress trees having given way to a high, neatly clipped box hedge that helped to hide the house from view. Two intricately designed iron gates bearing the Monfalcone crest in gold swung open in a gap in the hedge as they approached, and from there the full glory of a classical Italian garden opened up in front of them like some breathtakingly beautiful film set, complete with dancing fountains and lichen-stained statues surrounded by strictly regimented pathways edged by more low, clipped box hedge.

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.