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

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.