‘I’m sorry,’ he said heavily, then sighed because he knew that sounded inadequate after what she’d just confessed. ‘Claudia was a jealous cat, and she aimed to hurt you deeply when she sent that video clip to your phone.’
She’d known that. Even back then she’d understood Claudia’s motives, though understanding them had not softened the pain she’d suffered.
‘She too was deeply ashamed of the part she’d played in hurting you,’ Franco went on soberly. ‘Especially so when you lost your mother not long afterwards and—’
‘The rest of my world came tumbling down,’ Lexi completed for him. Then she heaved in a breath, let it out again, and stood up. ‘I forgive you both for the bet, OK?’ she announced stiffly. ‘I will even forgive you for turning so cold on me the week before the bet came to light, and for hating being married to me. After all—’ she released a jerky laugh ‘—I hated you just as much by then. But what I refuse to forgive,’ she added, a flush of anger rising to her cheeks, ‘is you enjoying yourself with Claudia in our bed in our apartment while I was in hospital miscarrying our baby. And now I think I will go alone to bed.’
‘Just hold on a minute.’ As if she’d just shot a stray bullet at him, Franco tensed. ‘That last part did not happen!’
‘Telephones with cameras are the bastards of intrusion,’ Lexi mocked as she crossed the room at speed to the door. ‘And trust me, Franco,’ she couldn’t resist launching at him once she’d got there, ‘whatever people like to say to the contrary, cameras don’t tell lies!’
‘Lexi—come back here!’ he raked out as she flung herself out of the room at full pelt, because she’d caught the warning spark of blistering fury lighting up the gold in his eyes.
She was halfway up the stairs when she heard the crash, then a string of angry curses. ‘I hope that was you falling on your lying face!’ she stopped to yell down at him. ‘And so much for getting to know each other, Francesco! Great trip down memory lane—thanks!’
She didn’t even see Zeta standing in the hall, staring after her in appalled dismay as she raced up the rest of the stairs. Franco saw the housekeeper, though, when she appeared in the open doorway to a string of vicious curses as he got up from the floor, rubbing his thigh. One of the dining chairs lay on its side because he’d tripped over it, and the bottle of wine he’d been holding in his hand was lying next to it, dripping its red contents onto the polished oak floor.
‘Don’t say a damn word,’ he growled at the housekeeper when she opened her mouth to speak.
‘But—did she do this to you?’
‘My wife can do anything she wants to me,’ he responded harshly, gripping his shoulder because he’d wrenched it trying to break his fall. ‘She can put a loaded gun to my head and pull the trigger if she feels like it. It is her right, her prerogative … damn!’ he cursed when he tried to put his weight on his injured leg and almost collapsed again.
Zeta came hurrying forward, but he waved her back. ‘I’m OK,’ he muttered less forcefully. ‘Just get out of here, Zeta. This is private between me and Lexi, and we don’t need witnesses while we make fools of ourselves.’
Lexi didn’t feel foolish; she felt like a bubbling mass of boiling fury.
What was she doing here?’
It was all out now. The door in her head was standing wide open and everything was spilling out right in front of her: the hurt, the betrayal, all as fresh and raw as if it was only just happening. She wanted to curl up in a corner and cry her eyes out, but she also wanted to run back down there and spit out some more accusations at the man she hated so much right now it physically hurt!
Wife … what a miserable joke, she thought painfully, looking around the suite that was so similar to the suite she’d used to have—if she didn’t count the several corridors in between. Different colour coordination, different view from the window, but right now it felt just like the same luxury prison cell that had doubled as her only place of sanctuary from the cold comfort offered to her!
Grimly she stripped her clothes off, dragged her nightie on over her head, crawled beneath the cool linen sheets and then curled up in a tight ball. She was trembling—all over. Shivering and shaking with a huge lump of tears growing in her throat like an inflating balloon. To think she’d almost gone to bed with him. To think she’d convinced herself she was ready to let the past go.
Her bedroom door flew open. She knew it was Franco. ‘If you’ve come to ask politely after my health, then don’t bother!’ she launched at him from the depths of the sheet she’d pulled over her head.
His disconcerted stillness sizzled across the darkened room.
‘And you forgot to knock!’
‘What the hell are you talking about now?’ he fired back.
‘Tell me …’ Fighting with the sheet so she could sit up, Lexi yanked her hair back from where it had tumbled across her hot face. He was standing there, lit by the light on the landing, a huge great dark silhouette that still managed to look disgustingly gorgeous. ‘Were you sent by your father to check on me each morning?’
‘Sent to check on you?’ Naturally he didn’t know what she was talking about, since he had not been privy to her thoughts.
‘The last time I lived here,’ she enlightened him. ‘I had this—’ she gave a flick with her hand ‘—this image of your father, ordering you upstairs to my room to check on my health every morning before you both left for Livorno. You used to knock so politely, then stand there in the doorway—just like you’re doing now—and look at me like you wished I wasn’t there …’
Franco stiffened as if she’d leapt up and slapped his face. ‘I was not ordered upstairs and I never wished you were not here!’ he denied harshly.
‘Man and wife with bedrooms five miles apart?’ Lexi muttered in a thick voice that shook. ‘You didn’t bother to have me moved then, did you? You liked having three quarters of this stupid house between us.’
She heard his sigh as he walked towards the bed, and knew he’d caught the tremor of hurt in her voice.
‘I was out of my comfort zone,’ he confessed heavily. ‘You did not say anything about where you were sleeping, and I didn’t know how to broach the subject without sounding like an oversexed monster eager to have you close enough to jump on when I felt like it, so I left it alone.’
‘You didn’t want to jump on me.’
He said nothing.
‘And I would have needed nerves of steel to complain about my accommodation when I knew how much you hated me.’
‘You hated me too, Lexi …’
She sighed at that comeback, because it was only the truth, and he sighed too, then lowered himself down to sit on the edge of her bed. Lexi saw him wince, saw him lay a hand on his injured thigh, wished she didn’t love and hate him at the same time. Then she almost choked on the sob she had to fight back when it hit her that she did—still love him. Oh, what a pig!
‘What do you want me to say? That I made a mess of the whole thing? OK, I made a mess of the whole thing,’ he admitted. ‘I believed …’ He stopped, causing a sting of a rift to open up while Lexi sat waiting for him to finish. When he did continue she got the feeling he’d carefully rethought what he wanted to say. ‘I let … other people dictate to me how I should be thinking and feeling about you. But I never wished you gone—ever.’
The tagged on ever rang like a low-sounding bass bell, striking out dark, intense sincerity.
‘I used to cry into my pillow each morning after you’d left.’ She wasn’t looking at him now, but down at her fingers where they crushed the sheet. ‘I wanted so badly for my mother to walk into that bedroom and sweep me up in her arms and carry me away from here.’
‘Lexi …’ he growled unsteadily.
But Lexi just shook her head against whatever that unsteady ‘Lexi’ was meant to relay. ‘You’d turned cold on me before we married. Before Grace died, before I learnt about that stupid bet. Knowing that, I should not have married you.’
G
rinding out a soft curse, he reached to grasp her twisting fingers. ‘Look, I’m really sorry about the bet. I mean it. I’m sorry. I was an arrogant fool. I believed something someone told me about you and I—I wanted to hit back at you, so I … collected my—my winnings, knowing that Claudia was recording the moment and that she was likely to send it to you.’
‘You believed something someone told you about me?’ Lifting up her head Lexi looked at him. ‘What something?’
But he just frowned and shook his head, ‘Let’s talk about convenient cameras and sex romps that did not happen.’
Being reminded of that, Lexi tugged her fingers free and threw herself back down on the pillows. ‘No. Go away,’ she muttered, and pulled the sheet over her head.
Without any warning whatsoever that it was going to happen, Franco lost his temper. The next thing she knew she lying pinned beneath his weight, because he’d stretched out on top of her like a wrestler, pinning her to the bed.
‘Talk,’ he rasped, tugging the sheet down so he could glower at her. ‘Because I did not sleep with Claudia. I have never slept with Claudia! I want to know why you ever believed that I did!’
If she hadn’t seen the proof for herself Lexi would have started to believe him. He looked so offended. Bright golden flames of denial were leaping in his eyes.
‘Where were you the night they took me to hospital?’ she challenged icily.
‘Blind drunk in a bar in town somewhere,’ he answered instantly. ‘Too sloshed to know what I was doing and too miserable about us to care.’
‘I called you—four times!’ Accusing sparks flew from her eyes now. ‘You didn’t even bother to answer me—not once!’
Franco tried to recall what else he’d been doing while he’d drunk himself into a forgetful stupor that night. ‘Marco found me and took me home,’ he recounted. ‘I could barely walk in a straight line. He put me to bed. I don’t remember any phone calls. I don’t remember anything much about that night.’
‘So Claudia hid in a cupboard, waiting to jump out once you were naked and comatose on the bed, then jumped on you?’
He looked stunned. ‘You saw that?’
‘Of course I saw that!’ Lexi tried to wriggle out from beneath him.
‘Stay still,’ he muttered. ‘I’m hurting all over as it is.’
To her annoyance, she went perfectly still beneath him. ‘Do you think I enjoy making up fantasies where my so-called husband gets passionate with another woman in our bed while I’m—?’
‘Whose phone?’ he cut in, and she could feel all the muscles in him tensing.
‘Claudia’s phone. Though how she managed to take pictures of what you were both up to while—what?’ Lexi said as his face drained of colour, his eyes turning that horrible black onyx.
He didn’t answer. Something about the way he suddenly rolled away from her to land on his feet by the bed and then just stood there stone still, staring at nothing, made Lexi sit up again, with a funny feeling of alarm crawling around in her chest.
‘Franco?’ she prompted uncertainly.
Franco didn’t even hear her. A red mist had risen across his eyes, in the centre of which was an image Marco had planted there of him twined in the throes of passion with Lexi. But the twined couple he was seeing right now was himself with Claudia, as described by Lexi, who had been sent that image by—
As if he was drunk out of his head for the first time since the night Lexi had lost their baby Franco moved across the room and out of it without saying another single word.
CHAPTER EIGHT
LEXI sat hugging her knees and stared after him, aware that something terribly dramatic had happened here—only she just didn’t know what it was.
He’d looked—shattered.
Was that her fault? A guilty squirm struck down the curve of her backbone. She was supposed to be here to take care of him, not to get into fights with him every five minutes. She was supposed to be sensitive to his fragile mental state.
Marco … He’d actually talked about Marco just before he—
Scrambling out of the bed, she ran after him. The guilty feeling worsened when she found him sitting on the edge of his own bed with his face buried in his hands.
‘Franco?’ She went to drop down in front of him. ‘Are you all right?’
For a few seconds he didn’t move or say anything. Feeling that clutch of concern growing inside her, Lexi reached up and gently threaded her fingers between the spread of his own fingers, then tugged them away from his face.
‘I’m OK,’ he husked.
Well, he didn’t look OK. The grey cast was back, strain carving out each feature, as if he was labouring under some terrible shock. And the most disturbing thing of all was that she thought she could see the burn of tears lurking behind the awful haunted look in his eyes. As if he knew what she was seeing, he lowered his heavy black lustrous eyelashes and swallowed, following it up by clearing his throat. She still held his hands, so she could feel a slight tremor running through them.
Was he finally giving in to his grief for Marco?
‘I’m sorry if I went too far fighting with you,’ she whispered contritely. ‘I keep forgetting you’re—’
‘Off my head?’ he offered, when she hesitated over saying something similar.
‘Unwell,’ Lexi substituted, making a half smile tilt the corners of his tensely held mouth.
‘Sick, crazy, stupid, blind …’ he offered as other alternatives.
‘Is your eyesight still not good?’ she asked sharply. ‘Is that why you had a fight with the furniture downstairs?’
It seemed to Franco to be as good an excuse as any to leave her with. Better that than the truth anyway. ‘I think I might have done some damage to the wound in my thigh,’ he admitted.
She looked down at his legs, her dusky eyelashes trembling as she lifted up their clasped hands so she could scan his pale chinos for evidence of blood—but there was none. All he’d probably done was bruise it—just another one to add to the many he already had, he thought grimly.
Lexi heaved in a breath. ‘Right, then, we had better take a look.’ Glad to have something practical to think about other than the strange, thickly intense emotions swirling around the two of them right now, she reclaimed her hands and stood up. ‘You—you’ll have to take your trousers off.’
‘You’re intending to play nurse—dressed like that?’ Franco drawled, grazing a mocking glance over her short pink nightie.
‘One thing I will never be is a nurse,’ Lexi returned, determined to keep this light from now on, even if it killed her, because she didn’t ever want to send Franco back into that terrible dark place he’d just emerged from. ‘And you’ve seen me wearing less, so stop complaining.’
‘I was not complaining, merely making an observation.’
‘Well …’ The next deep breath she took felt dreadfully cluttered up. ‘If you can stand up, lose the trousers, then we’ll be even.’
He wasn’t joking about the wound she saw once the chinos lay discarded on the bed. There was a thin trail of blood seeping through the dressing.
She chewed on her bottom lip for a second. ‘So, what do we do now?’
‘I remove the dressing and take a look while you fetch me a fresh one.’ Sitting down again, he began to pick at the sealed edges of the white strip. ‘In the bathroom, by the washbasin,’ he instructed.
Lexi moved off obediently. She had a feeling he was deliberately playing things light too, because he didn’t want things to kick off between them again.
How had they done that? Got so far they’d almost ended up screaming at each other?
She had screamed at him, she remembered, as she took a minute to wash her hands thoroughly before picking up the sealed sterile dressing packet and taking it back into the bedroom along with a clean towel.
‘Squeamish?’ he asked when she went still half a metre away.
‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen an open wound before.’
&n
bsp; ‘It isn’t open.’
He peeled the last of the old dressing away and she saw that he was telling the truth. A four-inch purple line was all that was left to show for the surgery, except for a tiny gape in the middle, which must be where he’d knocked it.
‘That healed quickly.’ Walking forward again, she sat down beside him on the bed. ‘Does it hurt?’
‘Not much. If you open that packet you will find a small plastic tube in there, filled with clear liquid.’
Franco took the tube from her, snapped its seal and applied the liquid to the wound. ‘What does it do?’ she asked curiously as she watched.
‘Accelerates the healing process … You ask a lot of questions for a reluctant nurse.’
‘I’m not the one doing the nursing. It’s not bleeding any more …’
‘There should be a clean, dry pad in the packet,’ Franco prompted, and she found it and offered it to him, then watched again while he used it to soak up the excess liquid. When he was done she took it from him and silently handed him the fresh dressing strip, which he proceeded to smooth into place.
‘Lexi, I’m sorry,’ he murmured suddenly. ‘About everything we put you through.’
The ‘we’ sounded odd, but she didn’t pick him up on it. She was more concerned with the tension knot she could feel inside her tummy, because there was something in the way he’d made that apology that she didn’t quite like.
‘I was an easy target.’ It was amazing, she thought, how a big row followed by a fright could bring on concessions. ‘I was hateful to you most of the time.’
‘With reason.’
‘Yes, well …’ Needing something to do, she gathered up the discarded items and stood up. ‘I’ll put these in the bathroom wastebin.’
‘Then go back to bed.’
She stilled halfway to the bathroom, oddly wounded by the flat way he’d said that. ‘Thanks for the permission,’ she whispered.
‘And tomorrow, if you want, you can go back to London.’
Now she knew what it felt like to be stabbed in the back. She swung round, her face paled to parchment. He was sitting there, still smoothing his long fingers over the white dressing as if he expected it to fall off if he stopped. His head was dipped. In fact she realised he hadn’t looked at her properly once since she’d seen that horrible strained, haunted look when she’d pulled his hands away from his face.
The Man Who Risked It All Page 12