The Italians: Franco, Dominic and Valentino: The Man Who Risked It All / The Moretti Arrangement / Valentino's Pregnancy Bombshell. Michelle Reid
As a companion he’d possessed enough lazy charm and captivating charisma to blind her to all his faults.
He was kind to old ladies and animals. He could laugh without constraint at the absurd, and—all the more potent—he could laugh at himself. He had a brilliant technical brain that had allowed him to design and build his first sailing yacht at the age of thirteen. He was super-confident and totally fearless when it came to any sport that took place on water. And he could lie in the sun for hours without moving. Relaxing for Franco was as important as competing in some crazy sport or his other favoured pastime: sex. Long afternoons and nights of deeply sensual, stunningly uninhibited loving was the sweet honey that gave him his boundless energy.
And he could be cruel enough and ruthless enough to take on a bet to seduce the naive interloper in his circle of elite friends because he liked to be challenged and he liked to win—to hell with the cost to the targeted victim.
Something else swept through Lexi. It was the rumbling of a hurt she had buried so deep it still had not worked its way back to the surface—though she was letting herself remember all the things she had shut away with that hurt. Things like the hard clench of dismay on his face when she’d broken the news to him that she was pregnant. The change in his eyes, as if someone had splashed the warm brown iris with a glaze of ice. Then there was the quiet sombre way he’d taken responsibility for his mistake and ultimately taken responsibility for her.
Where had her pride been when she’d let him do that? Smothered, by blind love and the desperate fear of losing him. Lexi was ashamed of that. But she felt more ashamed knowing that, for all the unforgivable things Franco had done to her all those years ago, she’d more or less walked into marriage with him to punish him for that ugly, humiliating bet.
And maybe that was the reason why she had come here—because she’d always known deep down that she had behaved no better than Franco had.
Looking up, she collided full on with a pair of stunning dark eyes the multicolours of tiger’s-eye quartz. Yet another heated flush flared through her body, leaving her feeling stripped bare and exposed. Because she knew him. She knew by his carefully impassive expression that he’d been lying there so still because he had been reading her every thought as it had passed across her face.
Pulling her hand free of his grasp, she sat back in her chair, tense now and skittish. ‘I don’t know why I’ve come here,’ she confessed in a helpless rush, laying something else bare for him: the battles she’d been having with herself.
Franco wished he did not feel so damn weak. There were tears in her eyes again, though she was trying her best to fight them. And her hair was catching the sunlight streaming in through the slatted blinds, setting it on fire with a thousand different shades of gold and red.
‘I had this h-horrible premonition you were going to die, and if I didn’t come I would always regret being so m-mean to you.’
‘Would it help you to feel better if I complied with your premonition, cara?’ he offered flatly. ‘It would make you a rich widow, at all events.’
‘Don’t talk like that.’ Lexi speared him with a pained look. ‘I never wished you dead and I don’t want your money.’
‘I know you don’t—which makes this situation all the more ironic.’
Ironic? ‘Where is the irony in you lying here all battered and broken?’
‘I am not in as bad a condition as I look.’ The quiet assurance sent her restless gaze tracking over him once again.
‘Explain your definition of a not bad condition.’ She waved a trembling hand to encompass all the evidence in front of her, including the computerised machine monitoring him as well as feeding all sorts of drugs into him via the shunt in the back of his hand. ‘You’re lying fl—flat on your back and you’ve got a cage over your legs.’
‘I am lying flat as a mere precaution, because I wrenched a couple of vertebra and the only thing wrong with my legs is a gash to my left thigh, which had to be stitched up.’
Her restless eyes moved to his bound chest. ‘And all that strapping?’
‘A couple of cracked ribs and a dislocated shoulder they had a fight manipulating back into place.’
She went pale as her tummy churned squeamishly at the image he’d just placed in her head. ‘Anything else?’ she squeezed out.
‘A sore head?’ he offered up.
A sore head … No broken bones, then. No crushing brain damage. No life-threatening injury to justify his father’s insistence that she come here … Lexi lurched out from the strains of anxiety to embrace the sting of annoyance in the single release of her breath. ‘You’re supposed to be seriously ill,’ she said accusingly.
‘You don’t see these injuries as serious?’
‘No.’ The summer she’d met Franco he had been cruising the Mediterranean while convalescing after breaking a leg so badly he’d required several surgeries and countless metal pins to get the leg to mend. ‘Your father gave me the impression that you—’
‘Wanted to see you?’
‘Bleeding and broken and asking for me!’ She quoted Salvatore. ‘That implied you were in a coma or s-something.’
‘People in comas don’t speak—’
‘Oh, shut up.’ Jumping to her feet, Lexi paced restlessly away from the bed—only to swing right back again. ‘Why did you want to see me?’
The heavy veil of his eyelids lowered to screen his thoughts. ‘Lose the bag and take the jacket and scarf off before you roast.’
‘I’m not stopping,’ Lexi countered edgily.
‘You’re stopping,’ he contended, ‘because you took one look at me and now you can’t help yourself staying around to keep on looking.’
She dragged in a strangled breath. ‘Of all the conceited—’ Fiercely she breathed out again.
‘Dio mio,’ he ground out. ‘Even as I am lying here injured and in pain, and pretty damn helpless, you could not resist mentally stripping me of the covers so you could reacquaint yourself with what I look like.’
‘That’s not true!’ Lexi denied hotly.
He just smiled the smile of a cat who’d cornered the mouse. ‘I might be physically flattened, but all my other faculties are in good working order. I know when I’m being lusted after. You look sensational too, bella mia,’ he diverted smoothly. ‘Even trussed up in all those clothes you’ve got on.’
‘It’s cold in England.’ Why she’d said that Lexi didn’t have a single clue.
‘Glad I didn’t make it there, then,’ Franco responded. ‘September should be a glorious month. English weather has lost its good taste …’
He closed his eyelids all the way now, as if he didn’t have the strength to hold them up any longer. Lexi chewed on her bottom lip for a few seconds, wondering what she should do next.
‘You’re tired,’ she murmured. ‘You should rest …’
‘I am resting.’
‘Yes, but …’ She slid a restless glance over him again. ‘I should leave you to do it in peace.’
Irritation tightened his facial muscles. ‘You have only just arrived here.’
‘I know …’ She was uncomfortably aware that she had moved back to the side of the bed. ‘But you know you don’t really need me here, Franco. It’s just—’
‘I was going to come to London to see you after the race, then—this happened.’ The impatient flick of his unencumbered hand adequately relayed what this was. ‘There are things we need to talk about.’
None that Lexi