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

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.

Lexi gave a slow mute shake of her head.

‘I saw that,’ he sighed.

‘From where?’ Jumping to her feet, Lexi spun round, expecting to find him walking down the path towards her, but she saw nothing but garden and leafy tree branches.

‘From my bedroom window.’

Looking up, Lexi tracked her eyes along the upper terrace until she found his window. Her breathing pulled to a stop. She could just make out his tall figure against the long pane of glass.

‘You should be lying down or something.’

‘Then have some pity on me,’ he said wearily. ‘I ache all over, and I can do without the dramatic trip down memory lane right now, where you storm out and I have to work out what the hell I have done to cause it this time.’