The Italians: Franco, Dominic and Valentino: The Man Who Risked It All / The Moretti Arrangement / Valentino's Pregnancy Bombshell. Michelle Reid
tarmac flanked by two rows of elegant cypress trees that made a grand statement about the house they were heading towards even before it came into view. As the car sped them down the lane the sunlight blinked in and out between each evenly spaced tree trunk with perfect regularity. Lexi knew from experience the effect could be dangerously hypnotic if you didn’t concentrate all your attention on the road ahead.
She knew because she’d fallen prey to it once, driving away from the house in floods of tears that had only helped to amplify the phenomenon, and she’d ended up crashing the car into one of the shallow drain ditches situated on the other side of the trees. How she’d missed making solid impact with a tree she would never know. She’d just been lucky, she supposed. Not that Francesco had seen her relatively soft landing nose-down in the ditch as fortunate. He’d been furious. He’d called her ‘bloody reckless and stupid’ as he’d hauled her body out of the crunched car in a rage.
‘Were you hoping to kill yourself, or just the baby?’
Lexi shivered as the angry echo of his voice broke over her. She’d sobbed her heart out right there in the middle of the road, and he’d taken her in his arms and let her cry herself silent. As silent as Franco had been throughout the whole wretched weeping jag, while her little car had shone silver in the ditch and his flashy red one had simmered a couple of yards away, with its driver’s door hanging open and the engine still running.
‘I did not know what to say to you.’
The quietly deep, slightly constrained timbre of his voice brought her eyes round to look at him. He was staring out of the other window, but as she turned her head so did he, and she was snared in the sombre darkness of his eyes. Through the flickering play of sunlight across his face Lexi saw the bleakness of the same painful recollection.
‘I was out of control.’ She made the confession with husky thickness, because it was the first time she’d ever accepted that. ‘I set out to make your life miserable and I succeeded.’
‘You say that as if I behaved like a saint.’ A grim smile clipped the corners of his mouth. ‘You had too much to deal with at one time. You were carrying our baby. You had just lost your mother …’
And she’d known deep down that she should have lost him too, but she’d hung onto him—clung to him even while she’d hated him by then. Staring down at her hands where they lay pleated together on her lap, Lexi felt a tremor cross her lips. Yes, she’d been out of control, both emotionally and hormonally, long before she’d crashed her car into that ditch.
They’d come here from England after burying her mother. Franco had seen to everything, even though Bruce had insisted that he should do it. It was into the middle of that angry argument between the two men that she’d dropped the news that she was pregnant. Bruce had reacted by thumping Franco. Strangely, Franco had taken the punch without retaliating at all. He’d been too stunned by her announcement, she’d realised later, but at the time …
‘I took the high-handed noble route and rushed you into marriage when what you really needed to do was to curl up somewhere on your own and grieve for your mamma …’
Poor Grace, who’d spent her life dreaming of fame, but whose death had made barely a ripple on the surface of the news media—while her daughter’s hasty marriage to Francesco Tolle had earned headlines across two countries. He was right. She had been given no time to grieve before she’d been plunged into wedding arrangements right here at Monfalcone. No one here had met or even heard of Grace Hamilton. They had been strangers to Lexi—coldly polite strangers who disapproved of her because they believed she’d ruined Franco’s life. They’d grieved for him while she’d just felt isolated, caged in by her own private grief she did not feel she could express. And the worst thing of all was that she’d known Franco had already started to cool their relationship before all the rest had happened.
San Remo … The place that had brought an end to their summer madness and begun their long winter of hell.
The car slowed down again, the cypress trees having given way to a high, neatly clipped box hedge that helped to hide the house from view. Two intricately designed iron gates bearing the Monfalcone crest in gold swung open in a gap in the hedge as they approached, and from there the full glory of a classical Italian garden opened up in front of them like some breathtakingly beautiful film set, complete with dancing fountains and lichen-stained statues surrounded by strictly regimented pathways edged by more low, clipped box hedge.
In the background stood Monfalcone, its deep gold stone walls basking in the afternoon sun. Once upon a time there had been a moat, complete with drawbridge to pull up across the coach entrance that led into the inner courtyard when feuding neighbours came to call. The moat had been filled in long ago. Now neat lawns formed a skirt around the outer walls, and the drawbridge had been replaced by another set of iron gates that Lexi had never seen closed.
As they plunged into the ink darkness of the deep stone arch the sultry warm air developed such a distinct chill that Lexi shivered and goosebumps rose on her flesh. Then they were out again, and driving into a huge sunny courtyard where deep, gracefully arching upper and lower terraces flanked each wing of the house. When she’d first come here Lexi had been in awe of the sheer classical splendour of her surroundings. The interior was just as elegant as the exterior—a place of pale cool marble and richly polished wood and the kind of furniture collected through many centuries that somehow lived comfortably side by side.
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