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