Lexi shivered as the cold, cold truth of her complete humiliation simultaneously creeped up her and chilled her to the bone.
Six months after it had all started it was over—the wreck of her life floundering amongst the wreckage of so much more destruction. Her mother and her new stepfather killed in a freak car accident. The shattering discovery that Philippe Reynard had lived his whole life in hock and, during his short marriage to her mother, had neatly and cleanly stripped Grace of all the money Lexi had earned until there was none of it left.
He’d called it ‘investing in Lexi’s future.’ What a sick joke.
And even all that was not what had dropped her into the lowest, darkest place to which she had ever sunk. No. Her pale face was pinched as she stared at the man who had taken over her life. Lexi recalled the other damning piece of information that had really shattered her. She’d finally learned about the bet her new friends had placed to see which male ego would relieve her of her so obvious innocence before the end of that golden summer. She’d learned about the way all those people she’d stupidly called friends had watched and wagered and eventually laughed their exclusive heads off when Franco had won the prize. If she lived to be a hundred she would never be able to blank out the video someone had sent to her phone of Franco collecting his winnings. She still saw the date, the time and his lazily complacent smile. The only thing missing had been photographic evidence that he had actually bedded her. But that did not mean such evidence had not been around. Once the veils had been ripped from her eyes about Franco, she’d been able to believe him capable of anything. She’d been nothing but a big joke to him, and when the joke had backfired he had not known how the hell to cope.
In the way fate had of balancing things out, Francesco Tolle, golden boy of Europe’s glittering society, had found himself punished for his callous treatment of her when she’d found herself orphaned, pregnant and broke.
Lexi blinked back to the present as a door closed, and she realised the nurse had left them alone. Looking back at the monitor, she saw that everything had settled back down again while she’d been taking a walk down memory lane.
Franco still did not open his eyes, and Lexi began to wonder if he’d fallen asleep. She looked down at their hands still clasped together, his long strong fingers totally engulfing hers in the same way they’d used to do—only without the worrying shunt piercing the back of his hand, feeding liquids and drugs into his veins.
Hands that knew her more intimately than any other pair of hands, she thought, shifting on the chair when the thought became a physical memory that skittered across the surface of her skin. Lexi frowned, annoyed with herself for being so susceptible to a mere memory. It wasn’t as though he had the smooth caressing hands of an office dweller. His were firm, slightly callused capable hands, because Franco was at his happiest when he was hauling sail ropes on his yacht, Miranda, which he’d lived on that summer—or covered in grease and grime taking a boat engine to bits before he painstakingly put it back together again. Franco was a mariner through to his soul. Sailboats, powerboats, natty fast speedboats—even the giant supertankers and cruise liners the Tolle shipyard constructed near Livorno. As a qualified marine engineer Franco was in his element, no matter what size the craft. That he could also be successful at the business end of the Tolle empire was an extra string to his talented bow.
Then there was his well documented success with women. And why not? Lexi thought, unable to stop drifting her eyes over his powerful form, most of which was now hidden beneath the sheet. Leonardo da Vinci would have loved to meet Franco, she decided, for he was his ‘Vitruvian Man.’ Everything about him was in perfect proportion—even the strength reflected in his squared chin. He badly needed a shave, she noticed, feeling her fingers start to tingle with an urge to run them over the rough shadow that gave him the look of a reckless buccaneer. That he was—reckless, anyway; or he would not enjoy racing a supercharged powerboat at such dangerous speeds.
It was no wonder she’d fallen for him like an adolescent, dazzled by his larger than life personality. Physically he was every woman’s secret fantasy man, complete with that other vital ingredient—a powerfully magnetic sexual virility. It radiated from him even as he lay there, bruised and weakened.
Lexi tugged in a small breath, overcome by the desire to stroke her fingers over the rest of him, let her senses reconnect with all that glorious male beauty laid out in front of her like a sacrifice. As a lover he’d been wildly exciting—the kind of lover who loved to be stroked and petted as much as he loved to do both. 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 assuran
ce 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 could bring to mind, except—A sound of thickened horror broke free from her throat. ‘Are you saying it was because I sent you divorce papers that you crashed your boat?’
‘No, I am not saying that,’ he snapped, then let out a groan, as if even getting angry hurt him.
Lexi’s eyes went straight to the monitor. ‘You OK?’
‘Si,’ he muttered, but she could see that his breathing had gone shallow, his beautifully shaped mouth drooping with tension. ‘Damn ribs kill me every time I breathe.’
‘And you look ready to pass out,’ Lexi said anxiously, watching the grey pallor wash across his face again.
‘It’s the drugs. I will be free of them by tomorrow, then I can get out of here.’
About to remark on that overconfident statement, she held back because she could tell he was only voicing wishful thoughts.
A silence fell between them. After shifting from one foot to the other a couple of times, Lexi gave in to what she really wanted to do, but didn’t really want to do, sit down again. It was exhausting to be locked in this constant battle with herself, she admitted as she sat watching his breathing become less shallow and the tension in his face relax.
She just wished he didn’t look so achingly vulnerable, because that didn’t help her at all. Nor did it help when an old memory slunk into her head, showing her a moment—a short space in time in their hostile marriage—when Franco had sat beside her bed all night long. They’d had a horrid row, she recalled. Just another one of many rows—but this one had ended with her spinning away to walk out of the room, only to end up dropping at his feet in a faint. She must have been out for ages, because when she’d eventually come round she’d been in her bed and a doctor was leaning over her, gravely viewing the blood pressure band he had strapped around her arm.
Glancing up at the flashy screen that was monitoring Franco’s vital statistics, she grimaced. His must be scoring an OK blood pressure because the thing wasn’t beeping, whereas the old fashioned version she’d felt squeezing her arm had given her no clue at all that her pressure was a cause for concern.
She looked back at Franco. His hair had gone curly, she noticed for the first time. If he knew he would be mad. Franco went to great expense to make sure his hair didn’t show its natural tendency to curl. His hair had been curly the night she’d fainted. He’d stood like some brooding dark statue at the end of her bed but it was only now, looking back, that she remembered the ruffled curly hair and the same grey cast to his face that had been swimming over it today.
‘Your wife needs rest and no stress, Signor Tolle,’ the doctor had informed him. ‘I will come back in the morning.’ He’d then spoken to Lexi herself. ‘If your blood pressure has not fallen by then you will be going into hospital.’ It had been both a warning and a threat.
‘I’m sorry.’
Lexi blinked, because that gruff apology had sounded in her head as if Franco had only just said it.
‘Go away and leave me alone,’ she’d told him, and turned her back to him.
He hadn’t gone away. They say that misery loves company, and it had certainly been true for the two of them that long and miserable night, when he’d pulled up an armchair and sat in it, a grimly silent figure in the darkness, watching over her.
Sliding back into the present, Lexi was surprised to discover that the room had slowly darkened while she’d been sitting there, lost in her memories. Franco still had not moved so much as a glossy black eyelash as far as she could tell.
What was it they had been arguing about? She couldn’t remember, though it was likely she’d been the one who started it—she usually had. When love turned to hate it was a cold, bitter kind of hatred, she’d discovered. The target for your hatred could not do or say anything right.
Good time to make your silent exit, Lexi, she told herself—not wanting to feel like the person she had turned into back then. Stooping down to pick up her bag from where she’d place
d it on the floor, she rose to her feet and turned towards the door.
‘Where are you going?’ Franco murmured.
Surprise stung down her spinal cord. ‘I thought I’d go now and let you sleep.’
‘If I promise to fall into a deep coma will you stay?’
Lexi swung back round. ‘That wasn’t even remotely funny, Francesco!’
Through the gloom she saw his mouth stretch into a mocking kind of grimace, ‘You sound like a really snappy wife.’
‘And that was even less funny, considering my track record in that particular role.’ She sighed heavily.
‘And I was the selfish husband from hell.’
Yes, well, she had no argument with either assessment. Neither of them had been any good at being married. Great at being lovers—warm and carefree, fabulously imaginative and gloriously passionate lovers—but as for the rest …
‘Listen … ‘She heaved a deep, fortifying breath. ‘I hope you get better soon. And I am truly sorry about—about Marco.’ She had to say it, even though the nurse had indicated that Franco wasn’t ready to talk about his best friend. ‘But you must know as well as I do that I don’t belong here.’
‘I want you here,’ he stated grimly.
Lexi shook her head. ‘You’re going to be OK. In a couple of days you’ll be wondering why you wanted me to come here at all.’
‘I know exactly why I want you here.’
Ignoring that, ‘I’m going back to London,’ she said.
‘Go through that door and I will pull out these tubes and come right after you, Lexi,’ Franco warned her flatly.
She uttered yet another sigh. ‘Why would you want to do something as stupid as that?’
‘I told you.’ The line of his mouth was severely compressed now, ‘We need to talk.’
‘We can talk through our lawyers.’ Lexi continued determinedly towards the door.
The Man Who Risked It All Page 4