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

CHAPTER FIVE

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 Lexi had ever heard. He could bring the whole of Monfalcone to a breathless listening standstill with a hauntingly beautiful piece of classical music played on the grand piano in the main salon, or he could ratchet up a flagging party by belting out a wild medley of pop, hot jazz and heavy rock.

With those same long blunt fingers that took apart a boat engine with such dedicated care and knowledge.

‘She was beautiful—your mother,’ Lexi murmured, recalling the painting that hung in the same salon that contained the grand piano.

‘As was yours.’ Lowering his hands, he looked at her and an ache that came very close to mutual understanding tugged like a gentle weight on her heart. ‘I’m sorry I never got to meet her.’

So was Lexi. Grace would have fallen in love with Franco—the tall, dark Italian with oodles of bone-melting charm. She didn’t think that his mother would have fallen in love with her, though. Isabella Tolle had been hewn from a different breed entirely from Lexi—and Grace, come to that. Grace had been an eternal dreamer, whereas Isabella Tolle had been born with all of her dreams already mapped out and secured for her.

And the last thing she would have wanted for her only son would have been a hasty marriage to a one-hit movie star who’d set out to trap him … No. Lexi stopped that thought in its tracks. She had not set out to trap him. She just had trapped him, and learned to hate herself for doing it.

‘Do we go to the apartment or Monfalcone?’

Franco’s casual question intruded, making Lexi blink a couple of times before she could focus her attention back on him. Remembering what his father had said to her that morning, she said, ‘Monfalcone,’ though with the thoughts now rattling around in her head—all to do with her time spent living there—she wished she hadn’t agreed to that part of her bargain with Salvatore.

‘We go home, Pietro,’ he relayed to the driver.

‘Ah, si, si.’ Pietro smiled in approval. ‘That is good signor. That is very good indeed …’

‘At least one person approves of us, bella mia,’ Franco drawled softly.

Lexi shifted restlessly on the seat. She wasn’t sure that she liked the lazily veiled look Franco was levelling at her from his corner of the car. It made the hairs on the back of her neck tingle as if she was missing something important here that she should be working out.

‘We are not an “us.”‘ It needed saying—just in case Franco was having amorous ideas about the two of them.

‘What are we, then?’

She opened her mouth to answer, then closed it again. She did not have an answer to what they were. Estranged husband and wife? A bit more than that, since she was returning to Monfalcone with him like a wife. Friends, then? No. Once upon a time Franco had been the closest thing to a friend she’d ever known—until she’d discovered he was only in the relationship for the fun of the sex, and of course, the bet. The only other reason had to be Marco. She was here with him because he’d lost his closest friend. But she was not allowed to mention that.

Frowning, she shook her head and turned her face to the window, leaving the question to hang in the air. Franco studied her taut profile and felt an ache deep down inside, like a battering ram trying to bridge the gap between them so he could answer the question for her the physical way.

Great strategy, Francesco, he mocked himself grimly. The doctors had gagged her, he had chained her to his side, and his father had used subtle manipulation to bring Lexi back to Monfalcone with Franco. Now you want to ruin it all with a smash-and-grab approach you are not physically capable of carrying out.

And then there was that other unknown element stirring around in the soup of their fragile relationship. ‘What did Dayton call to say to you?’ he prompted coolly.

The way he’d used Bruce’s last name spoke volumes to Lexi. Franco had always disliked Bruce as much as Bruce disliked him. ‘I work for him.’

‘I know you do.’

He did? That surprised her. She’d thought he’d shut her right out of his life, much as he was doing with Marco right now. Another bad thing obliterated from Franco’s world.

‘Well, then—you are an employer, so you know how it works. Don’t ask stupid questions.’ Lexi reacted stiffly, turning away again. She refused to discuss Bruce with him, because … Well, because she was loyal to the people that she loved, and right now she loved Bruce more than she loved …

Back-pedalling desperately, determined not to face what she had been about to think, Lexi moved in the seat as if she was trying to push something truly frightening away from her. And maybe she was, she admitted, aware of why she had severed that last too disturbing thought before it could round itself off.

I don’t even have the excuse of a tragic accident to make me block out that which I don’t want to face, she recognised grimly.

The journey continued with silence thickening the car’s confines. The silent smoothness of the drive was a testament to the quality of luxury engineering and design.

Lexi slowly sank back in her seat and watched the view pass by them beyond the glass, tinted against the fierce rays of the sun. This part of Italy had to be one of the most beautiful places on earth, she observed hazily. The afternoon sunlight coloured everything such a warm golden colour, and the sheer stately elegance of tall tapering cypress trees dotted miles and miles of undulating landscape. Even the occasional silvery spread of an ancient olive tree rising up on its sturdy twisting trunk made an impact, as if one of the great Italian masters had placed them there with the gifted touch of his paintbrush. Familiar scents teased her nostrils and heightened her senses. Warm like the place, sweet and exotic.

Turning to look at Franco, she discovered that he’d fallen asleep. An achy little pang twisted inside her: even in sleep he did not look comfortable. Tension clung to the perfect symmetry of his face, pulling his sensual mouth down at the corners. He had slipped his hand back inside his jacket to cover the area around his cracked ribs, while the other hand seemed be lightly gripping his injured thigh. Perhaps they should have gone to his apartment and not added the extra half-hour drive to Monfalcone, she considered worriedly. Perhaps she should have put up a much fiercer fight against his leaving the hospital in the first place.

‘Not much longer now, signora.’

The quietness of Pietro’s voice brought Lexi’s anxious gaze into contact with the driver’s mirror, where Pietro’s dark eyes reflected the same concern that she was feeling over Franco, for he had noticed his discomfort too.

She sent Pietro a small nod to acknowledge his reassurance. ‘The press?’ she whispered.

‘They gave up once they realised where we are going.’

To a house surrounded by acres of private land they would not dare to encroach upon, Lexi thought as she slid her gaze back to the window. Another mile or so and they would turn off the main highway to head towards the hill she could see rising up in the near distance. Once over the crest of that hill they would drop into a spectacularly beautiful valley, with rolling pastures and meadows gently dipping down towards the river that meandered its way the length of the valley on its way to the sea. Once they had crossed the ancient narrow stone bridge that forged the river they would be on Monfalcone land.

Great, she thought as they crested the hill, and unhappy memories began to surface of the long, lonely weeks she’d spent trying to make herself as invisible as possible in this breathtakingly beautiful but inhospitable place. She’d been her own worst enemy—so totally off the scale of hormonal upheaval that even small problems became huge mountainous things she just didn’t know how to deal with.

As if by sheer homing instinct Franco stirred and opened his eyes as they slowed down to negotiate the narrow bridge over the river. Lexi saw him wince as he tried to change the position he’d been sleeping in.

‘All right?’ she questioned huskily.

‘Si,’ he said, but he wasn’t, and the brief, tense, wry smile he turned on her pricked at that ache she’d been feeling. It was not going to go away any time soon.

From the bridge they drove onto a long and narrow undulating ribbon of 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.