The Italians: Franco, Dominic and Valentino: The Man Who Risked It All / The Moretti Arrangement / Valentino's Pregnancy Bombshell. Michelle Reid
cool. Even his cheeks suddenly looked carved, as if someone had scooped any hint of softness out of them. Lexi felt the sudden need to redistribute her weight equally between her two booted feet, and she unfolded her arms to drop them down to her sides, her fingers curling into fists.
‘You mis—’
‘Spare me the numbers.’
Turning abruptly away from her, he pushed the stuffed rabbit into one of her bags. The moment she lost his attention Lexi reached out and snatched up the bell press; gave it a long and urgent push. He caught the movement and swung back. Lexi dropped the bell push as if it was hot. As his eyes narrowed on her like stinging lasers she pushed her chin up and fed him back a wide-eyed look of sparking defiance.
To her total astonishment Franco threw back his dark head and laughed. ‘So even you think I’ve gone crazy!’
There was no ‘even you’ about it. Lexi had considered him crazy ever since she’d arrived here. He might be reading her every thought and feeling, but she found she couldn’t keep up with his thought patterns or the fast changes in his mood.
‘You’re not leaving here without someone’s say-so.’ She struck a stubborn pose.
‘Pietro will be here in five minutes,’ was all he commented, as if that was enough to relay his intentions. ‘I sent him to your hotel to settle the bill and collect your things.’
The door swung open before Lexi could respond to that piece of smooth forward planning. Dr Cavelli walked in, then stopped when he saw his patient was dressed and standing.
As cool and casual as a long drink of water, Franco turned and strode across the room, a smile on his face and his hand outstretched. ‘Thank you,’ he murmured in smooth as balm Italian, ‘for the wonderful care and attention I have received from you and your staff. However, it is time for me leave.’
The doctor had been staring at the limp free way Franco had been moving, but he jerked his eyes up to the outstretched hand, then even further, staring dubiously at Franco’s beautifully polite mask of a face. ‘I am not sure …’
‘I am drug free and feeling much better,’ Franco pointed out in a dulcet tone, then waited as if he had the patience of a saint while the doctor glanced questioningly at Lexi and she sent a helplessly bewildered shrug in return.
‘There is no medical reason why you cannot be discharged, signor,’ Dr Cavelli murmured cautiously. ‘However, you will need to keep a watchful eye on your bruising for the next week or two. The risk of blood clots has not diminished, and you will need the dressings changed on your thigh wound.’
‘Alexia and I will promise to keep a watchful eye out for blood clots,’ Franco assured him, refusing to look at Lexi even though he was holding his breath in case she told him she was not prepared to do anything of the kind. ‘And I am capable of changing my own dressings.’
The doctor looked at Lexi again as though he was waiting for her to confirm that she would be there to take care of his patient. Parting her lips with the intention of refusing to have any part in Franco’s plans to walk out of there, she happened to glance at him—saw the evidence of strain showing in his proud profile and the grim tension in his elegant stance. She remembered Marco, experienced a swooping sensation deep down inside that felt as if something was twisting her organs together painfully, and she closed her mouth again, then gave a silent nod of her head.
The tension holding Franco together sprang free, almost toppling him from his increasingly painful stance. Whatever Dayton had said to her on the phone, he had not yanked on her chains hard enough—but Franco had. Sheer grim satisfaction helped to keep him upright through the ordeal of receiving the doctor’s detailed advice on maintaining his present rate of recovery. By then Pietro had arrived and, ignoring the older man’s shocked consternation when he realised what was going on, Franco quietly instructed him to collect his bag from the adjoining bathroom.
He almost collapsed into the rear of his father’s limo. He was that exhausted by keeping up the appearance that he was magically returned to robust health.
Lexi sat beside him, flitting from concern to annoyance and back again as she studied the way he was sitting there, deathly pale with his eyes closed, one long-fingered hand pressed against his chest inside his jacket, the other lying limp on the seat between them. She could see the punch holes from the shunt on the back of his hand and the bruising circling them. But what really bothered her was the shallowness of his breathing.
‘It would serve you right if you had a relapse now, Franco, what with your wicked, lying stupidity!’ she launched at him, anxiety feeding her hot temper.
‘I left that particularly drastic kind of wicked, lying stupidity to Marco,’ Franco relayed flatly in response.
LEXI swivelled around to stare at him. ‘M-Marco?’ she prompted, watching warily for a sign of that awful grey pallor to sink down across Franco’s face. The trouble was that he was already that greyish colour.
‘Pietro, the paparazzi—are they following us?’
He did it yet again. Blocked out the subject of his best friend.
‘Si,’ the older man responded. ‘They sit on our tail like reckless fools. You want me to lose them?’
‘You think that you can do it?’
‘Ah, si, of course I can do it.’
‘What paparazzi?’ As Lexi twisted around to take a look through the back window an eager Pietro threw the car into an acute left turn.
Trying not to wince as the swerving action lanced through him like a knife, Franco told her dryly, ‘They have been on your tail since you arrived in Livorno.’
‘Oh.’ She twisted back in her seat. ‘I’ve stopped bothering to look for them since I gave up acting.’
‘Why did you give up acting?’ Turning his head against the seat-back, he looked at her. ‘You were supposed to have a glittering Hollywood career waiting for you when you left me.’
Ignoring his last remark, even though he’d made it sound as if she’d walked away from him because of her glittering career prospects, Lexi said with a shrug, ‘Acting was never my dream. It was my mother’s dream.’ Poor Grace, who’d so wanted to be a famous Hollywood movie star all her life. ‘I fell into the movie thing by accident when I was fooling around with a script off set during one of my mother’s auditions. Someone heard me, dragged me onto the set, then made me read the same bit again. I did. I got the part.’ As she looked at Franco she caught a faintly unsettling glint in his narrowed eyes.
‘You never told me that before.’
‘You probably never asked before. Why the sinister glint?’ she demanded suspiciously.
‘It is not sinister. So, what was your dream?’
Looking foreward again, Lexi didn’t answer him. Her dream had been way too basic for a man like Franco to understand. A house with a garden, lots of kids, and a husband who worked a nine-to-five job then came home to his family each evening.
Growing up in a city apartment with a single mum who’d worked the oddest hours possible meant that she’d more or less brought herself up. Her garden—her playground—had been the set of one small movie or another, or the cloistered walls of her mother’s dressing room backstage.
No, her childhood dreams had found no romance in the acting world.
‘My mother dreamed of me becoming a great concert pianist,’ he said, lifting up his hands and spreading out his long fingers to study them with a rueful grimace. ‘All I wanted to do was to mess around with boats and engines.’
But he still played the piano like nobody else