The Man Who Risked It All

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.

‘What else was I supposed to do with you? Leave you and the baby to starve on the streets?’

When true love turns bad, Lexi thought bleakly. She was still able to recall the aching throb of raw hurt she’d carried around with her for long lonely months until …

Oh, bring on the violins, Lexi, she told herself impatiently. So you had this amazing love affair with this amazingly sexy and gorgeous playboy and you got yourself pregnant? So you married the playboy and lived to regret it and lost your baby—which, to most people, was a huge relief? Grieve for your baby, but don’t grieve for a marriage that should never have happened in the first place. And don’t, she warned herself sternly, go all self-pitying again, because it earned you nothing back then and will earn you even less now.

The car slowed down and she focused back on her surroundings as they turned in through the hospital gates. It was a bright white, very modern, very exclusive place, set in the seclusion of its own private grounds.

It was the same hospital she had been rushed to three and a half years ago. As she climbed out of the car and looked at the building a whole rush of old emotions erupted inside. She did not want to walk back in there. She felt herself go cold at the thought. Her baby … her tiny baby … had been stillborn within those walls, those whisper-quiet corridors, that luxury accommodation.

‘Signor Salvatore asked me to accompany you, signora.’ Pietro’s arrival at her side made Lexi jump. She blinked, fighting—fighting—to push back the memories, the strangling agony of old feelings, of painful emptiness and grief.

‘It is this way …’

Somehow she placed one foot in front of the other. A security man guarding the front doors asked to see her passport before he would allow her to step inside. Her lips and her mouth felt paper dry as she rummaged in her bag to find it while Pietro became angrily animated, insisting that the precaution was not necessary when he could vouch for la signora’s authenticity.

Lexi just wished he would leave the guard to do his job. This was all beginning to be too much for her. Francesco didn’t need her. It wasn’t as if he was alone in the world. He had a huge network of family and friends who had to be more than willing to gather around him. If she had an ounce of good sense she would turn around and walk right back out of there.

But she didn’t turn and walk away. She followed Pietro across the hospital lobby and into a waiting lift that carried them up. Yet another walk down a hushed white corridor and Pietro was opening a door and standing back to allow Lexi to precede him inside. Beginning to feel as if she was floating on a current of icy air now, Lexi filled up her lungs and stepped into the room.

It took a couple of foggy seconds for her to realise that this was an anteroom. Comfortable chairs stood grouped around a low table topped by a small stack of thick glossy magazines. The aroma of fresh coffee permeated the air. A pretty nurse with her ebony hair neatly contained beneath a white cap sat at a desk behind a computer monitor.

She looked up at Lexi and smiled, ‘Ah, buona sera, Signora Tolle.’ She surprised Lexi by recognising her on sight. ‘Your husband is sleeping but you must go in and sit with him,’ she invited. ‘He will be more comfortable once he knows you are here.’

Lexi walked across the room towards the door the nurse had indicated. Her heart was thumping, beating like a drum in her ears. She pushed open the door, stepped through it, then swiftly closed it behind her so she could lean back against it, light-headed with fear of what she was about to see.

The room was bigger than the one she’d stayed in. A large white cube of space, shrouded by soft striped shadows cast by the slatted blinds angled against the golden light of the afternoon sun. And she could feel every pore absorbing the hush of perfect stillness as she stood glued to the spot by the sight of the drips and tubes leading to a monitor alive with graphs and numbers that silently flickered and pulsed.

‘You can come closer, Lexi. I won’t bite.’

CHAPTER TWO

THE sound of that dry, slightly hoarse voice ran through Lexi in shivering stings of sharp recognition and she dropped her gaze to the bed, unaware that she’d been avoiding it in fear of what she was going to see.

She discovered that she could not see anything other than a swathe of starched white linen. She saw no pillows, and a cage had been erected over his legs. Her wildly skipping heart suddenly felt all curled up in her chest, cowering, as if something was threatening it. For when someone was forced to lie flat it usually meant a back injury. A cage usually meant broken legs. And whatever those tubes were feeding into him made her squirm, because she hadn’t bothered to ask anyone what his injuries were. Not the nurse, not Pietro … Perhaps she should go back out there and—

‘Lexi …’ Franco murmured impatiently when she took too long to answer him. ‘If you are thinking of making a quick exit—don’t.’

‘H-how did you know it was me?’ she asked.

‘You still wear the same perfume.’

She was surprised he remembered, bearing in mind the trail of different perfumes that had passed through his life since her. Dozens of women listed in celebrity magazines. All smooth, sleek, sophisticated, with—

‘Since I cannot move, have some pity on me, cara. Come over here where I can see you, per favore.’

Curling taut fingers around the shoulder strap of her bag, Lexi peeled herself free of the door and walked forward on limbs that shook. Pulling to a halt at the foot of the bed, she felt her hectic breathing dry up altogether when she got her first glimpse of Franco’s powerful length, laid out flat on the bed like a corpse. A white linen sheet covered three-quarters of him—his upper torso left uncovered to reveal the muscled solidity of his wide shoulders and arms like a splash of polished bronze against the starched white. White bandaging formed heavy strapping around his left shoulder and bound his ribs, and she gulped as a wave of distress broke through her when she caught sight of the dark, inky bruising spreading out from beneath the edges of the strapping.

‘Ciao,’ he murmured, in a husky low tone that sounded scraped.

Lexi gave a helpless shake of her head as her eyes began to sting with hot aching tears. ‘Just look at the state of you,’ she whispered.

Franco did not care that he was really pleased to see the evidence of those tears appear like deep pools in her beautiful eyes. He wanted Lexi to be upset. He even wanted her to pity him—was in fact ready and willing to push her sympathy buttons for all they were worth.

Dio mio, she looked good, he thought as he lay there waiting for her to look directly into his face. Her hair floated around her slender shoulders like a burnished halo, framing the exquisite triangle of her face with its wide spaced eyes and cute little nose and pointed chin. He did not care that she was pressing her soft lips together in a failed attempt to stop them from trembling, or that the grey patterned scarf she wore looped around her neck was as unflatteringly drab as the grey jacket she was wearing, which hid away from him all that he knew was softly curvy and gracefully sleek. For him she was still his first glimmer of sunlight in the darkest days of his life.

‘Look at me,’ he urged, feeling her fierce tension throb between them like an extra heartbeat. He could feel the fight she was waging with herself over allowing her eyes to make contact with his, and he understood why it was a fight. Once upon a time they hadn’t been able to look at each other without wanting to devour each other. When they’d stopped looking their whole fated relationship had gone into an acute downward slide.

‘Please, cara,’ he husked, then watched as her eyelashes fluttered, the long dusky crescents rising upwards to reveal the depth of the ocean swirled by a hundred different emotions; that caused a clutch of agony so deep inside him the machine behind him started bleeping like mad.

Lexi shot a startled look at it, her breath lurching free from her strangled throat. Things were happening. She hadn’t a clue what a normal pulse or blood pressure should read, but the flickering numbers on that machine were rising fast, and it scared her enough to send her shooting round the edge of the bed.

‘What’s wrong?’ She reached for his hand where it lay on the bed, only to stare down in horror when she found herself clutching hold of a plastic shunt with tubes coming out of it. But before she could snatch her hand away Franco turned his hand over and imprisoned hers inside his warm, surprisingly strong grip.

‘I’m OK,’ he said, without enough strength to convey confidence.

The door suddenly flew open and the nurse swept in. With a brief vague smile at Lexi, she went around to the other side of the bed and began checking things.

‘I think your wife must have surprised you.’

Lexi translated the nurse’s smiling tease from Italian to English.

‘She did something to me anyway,’ Franco returned ruefully.

Catching onto his meaning, Lexi tried to reclaim her fingers but Franco just tightened his grip, and after a second or so compassion took over and she let her fingers relax in his. The moment she did so he closed his eyes and inched out a very controlled sigh. Almost immediately the number readings began to ease downwards. Flanking each side of the bed, the nurse and Lexi watched the monitor—the nurse with her fingers lightly circling his wrist, Lexi with her fingers still enclosed by his.

By the time everything seemed to have gone back to normal Lexi felt so weak she reached out with her free hand for the chair positioned to her right, drew it closer to the bed and sat down.

Franco didn’t move or open his eyes, and as the room slowly settled back into quiet stillness, Lexi let herself look at his face again. She was instantly drenched by the old fierce magnetism that had always been her downfall where Franco was concerned.

He was, quite simply, breathtakingly handsome. There wasn’t even a cut or a bruise to distort the sheer quality of masculine perfection stamped into that face. Working at a theatrical agency had, she’d thought, made her immune to so much male beauty, because she dealt with handsome men on a day-to-day basis. But everything about this man set her own blood pressure rising, she acknowledged helplessly—soaking up every small detail while he lay there, unaware of her scrutiny. The smooth, high and intelligent brow below ebony hair cropped short to tame its desire to curl. The subtle arch of his eyebrows above heavy eyelids tipped with eyelashes so long they rested against the slanting planes of his cheekbones. Half of his blood was pure Roman on his mother’s side, and the line of his long, only slightly hooked nose, gave credence to that; while the wide, sensual contours of his well shaped mouth belonged to his proud Ligurian father.

Though right now that mouth was pressed shut and the corners turned down a little due to the pain he must be suffering, the agony of overwhelming grief.