Michelle Reid – The Italians: Franco, Dominic and Valentino: The Man Who Risked It All / The Moretti Arrangement / Valentino's Pregnancy Bombshell (страница 17)

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.

A start for what? The question pulled Lexi’s breath up short. She just had to work out what she was doing here, because—well, because it was beginning to feel permanent, and that was dangerous …

‘What is she doing?’ Franco asked as Pietro helped him out of his jacket.

‘I believe I heard her threatening to kill you,’ the older man responded evenly, and was rewarded with a crooked half smile, which quickly disappeared into a frown.

‘We make her welcome here this time, Pietro,’ he instructed grimly. ‘It is important to me.’

‘I know, sir.’ Laying the jacket aside, Pietro turned to help Franco unbutton his shirt, but his hands were impatiently waved away.

Franco was aching all over, and all he wanted to do was fall onto his bed. Even heeling off his shoes was agony, and he wondered how the hell he’d managed to put the shoes on in the first place.

Bloody-minded willpower and a grim determination to be in control of what was happening around him and to him.

‘I will do the rest.’ He turned away from Pietro’s hovering need to help. ‘Find out if my wife—’

My wife … The possessive title sounded so alien on his tongue it stopped his thoughts stone dead. He had rarely called Lexi that even when they were together—he’d rarely thought about her in those terms.

Then he remembered the last time he’d used the possessive term—to Marco—and experienced a different type of pain.

‘Check if she has eaten lunch today,’ he said, frowning again. He knew he’d deliberately missed out the my wife part because he did not feel he had the right to use it—not yet, anyway.

‘Have you eaten?’ Pietro was still hovering like a man who needed to do something helpful, but all Franco could think of was lying down on that bed.

‘Si,’ he said, though it was not the truth—but it saved him having to deal with further questions over choices of food. Or—worse—Zeta turning her kitchen upside down and making him his all his favourite foods to tempt his appetite, like she’d used to do when he was a boy and sick with some childhood ailment. ‘If you would tell Lexi—’ No. He changed that, smiling crookedly again. ‘If you would ask Lexi to come and see me after she has settled in?’

A silent nod and Pietro reluctantly departed. The moment the door closed behind him Franco gave up trying to remove his shirt and just rolled down carefully onto the bed. He would lie there for a couple of minutes to get his breath back, then …

The lingering effects of the drugs still moving around his system and exhaustion from the journey claimed him like a heavy blanket, and Franco knew nothing else.

He certainly did not know that Lexi had taken time for a shower and to change out of her dark city clothes, which were sticking to her overheated skin, into one of her new dresses that were more in keeping with a late summer in Italy. Then Zeta had arrived with a tray of tea and light pastries, which she’d discovered she was hungry enough to sit down and enjoy.

Over an hour later she let herself out of the suite she had been allocated all those years ago—two whole wings of the house away from Franco’s suite. Once deeply intimate lovers turned into married strangers, she mused as she walked the long corridors. What had the separate bedrooms said about their chance of making anything of their fated marriage? About as much chance as they’d both allowed it—which was basically none.

A grimace worked its way across her lips as she arrived at Franco’s door. About to lay a soft knock on it, she stalled her knuckles half an inch from their target when she heard a muffled noise that sounded very like a broken sob. A jolt of alarm had her bypassing the polite knock, and she just grabbed the handle and pushed the door open—only to freeze in dismay at the scene that met her unsuspecting gaze.

Franco was sitting on the side of his bed and he was not alone. Claudia Clemente, Marco’s beautiful sister, was kneeling at his feet between his spread thighs, her red-tipped fingers clutching at his head while she sobbed into his chest.

Almost anyone else walking in on this moving scene would have felt their heart rend in aching sympathy for both Franco and Claudia, but to Lexi it felt as if someone had reached into her chest and yanked her heart out. She would not have been surprised if she’d turned to stone where she stood. For Claudia was the woman who’d sent proof of that bet to her mobile phone years ago. She was also the woman Franco had spent the night with while Lexi had lost their baby and grieved alone.