The Man Who Risked It All

by Michelle Reid

  ‘Y-you want me to leave?’ Even she heard the hurt choking up her voice.

  ‘You and I both know I’m not about to do anything stupid, Lexi,’ he said grimly. ‘I should not have … I used emotional blackmail to get you here, then to keep you here. Now it is time for me to start playing fair again. So I am letting you know that you can go home—no regrets.’

  She hadn’t expected this. After all the things they’d been throwing at each other over the last few days she just had not expected him to—to … ‘S-so all that stuff about—about us trying again was what? You using me as a diversion so you didn’t have to think about M-Marco?’

  He rose to his feet, a frowning black scowl on his face now. ‘I am just trying to play fair.’

  ‘I don’t want you to play fair!’ Tears were gathering. She could feel them building in her throat. ‘I want you to be honest with me and just tell me—have I been a diversion so you did not have to face your guilt and grief about Marco?’

  ‘No!’ he rasped.

  ‘Then what?’ she persisted.

  Like a man driven to commit murder he strode towards her, took her by her trembling shoulders and heaved her up against his chest. ‘You just don’t know when it is safer to say nothing, do you?’ he raked down at her angrily. ‘You were like this four years ago—a yappy little temptress who never knew when to shut up!’

  ‘Y-you said you liked me yappy back then.’

  ‘I like you yappy now. That is the whole damn point!’ He sighed when he saw her soft mouth was trembling. Her eyes looked huge and hurt and—’Santa cielo,’ he groaned in exasperation. ‘I am trying to do the honourable thing by giving you a choice here, you aggravating female. Go because you want to go or stay because you want to stay—no extra coercive strings attached, your damn choice!’

  ‘Stay,’ Lexi whispered.

  He frowned again, as if she’d given the wrong answer. ‘Why?’ he charged. ‘When I have given you nothing but aggravation, hassle and hurt?’

  ‘I was just getting used to the idea of—of us trying to be married and …’ She attempted a helpless little shrug within the firm grip of his hands. ‘I still have feelings for you, OK?’

  Defensive and tense, she waited for him to say something. He was still frowning down at her, but a searching glint was happening behind the frown, and at least that horrible blackness had left his eyes so she could see the golden bits again. The silence stretched. Lexi wished she knew what he was thinking. Like a stork, she swapped her weight from one leg to the other, then, because she couldn’t stop it, she let out a soft, slightly husky, nervy little laugh.

  ‘And I love your legs. You always did have great legs …’

  ‘My legs?’ Franco repeated.

  Lexi nodded, biting down on the quiver moving across her lips. ‘Kind of long, tough and tanned. Sexy—even with all the scars you’ve accumulated over—’

  He shut her up with a hot, bruising kiss. She dropped the things she was holding because she needed to grab hold of his arms to steady herself. Somewhere in the back of her mind she knew they hadn’t finished with the Claudia thing but did not want to think about that right now.

  This was what mattered: the heat of his mouth claiming hers with the same burning hunger it used to, the remembered dark groan of pure pleasure when he felt her melting response. Franco had taught her everything she knew about the power of her own deep flowing rivers of passion and he plundered deep, savouring the eager heat with which she responded to him.

  No drawing back this time. Lexi knew it as surely as she knew that Franco knew it. He meshed one of his hands into her hair, the other cupping the silk covered shape of her bottom to bring her close up against him so she could feel the power of his desire for her. Thick potent heat swam through her veins and pooled low between her thighs in an erotic swirl of excitement. Her hands moved, anxiously scoring over the soft cambric of his shirt and feeling the powerful set of his biceps, his shoulders, the alluring heat of him. Her bare legs made brushing contact with his, increasing the bright sting of need growing inside her as the hair-roughened quality of his skin rasped against her smooth softness. It was like being wired up to an electric grid and she quivered, her restless fingers clutching at him so tightly she felt him shudder, then flinch.

  ‘Oh …’ she choked, remembering, and drew her head back a little. Her heart was racing and she was breathing too fast. She clashed with the simmering darkness of his eyes. No gold in evidence—just dark, dark caverns of hunger she wanted to drown in. ‘I hurt you,’ she groaned.

  ‘No,’ he denied, and tried to recapture her lips, but Lexi held them away from him.

  ‘I did,’ she insisted. ‘You’re one big bruise, and I don’t know how we are going to do this without putting you through torture.’

  Franco released a short mocking laugh and moved his fingers against her bottom, sliding them sensually against silk as he eased her into greater contact with him. ‘You think this isn’t already torture?’

  It was pure instinct that made Lexi move against his potent hardness, and he groaned and shuddered, his other hand shifting from her hair to her back, then sliding with a compulsive movement to her waist to press her even closer as he captured her mouth again and this time gave her no chance to think. Passion flared between them in a fevered hunger. Liquid heat was pooling in just about every erogenous zone she possessed.

  ‘I want you, tesoro, so badly it is eating away at me.’ The heat of his lips moving across her cheek as he husked the words made her shiver as he tasted the sensitive flesh below her ear.

  Lexi tilted her upper body back a little so she could begin unbuttoning his shirt. Her fingers trembled so badly she struggled over the simple task, and it didn’t help that Franco was tasting her neck now, whispering words in low, sexy Italian while his hands dealt with the removal of her nightie in one smooth, deft move that sent the scrap of silk pooling to her feet.

  Naked in front of him for the first time in years, she froze for a few seconds and he did the same thing, even taking a step back so he could look at her, the simmering flame of his study lashing her skin with hot stings which tightened the swelling tips of her breasts so her nipples bloomed like crowns of dusky pink. Reaching out, he cupped a hand around one breast—gently, as if he was reacquainting himself with its size and its weight. Seeing the power of his fierce concentration, Lexi stood perfectly still and watched him as he stretched out the other hand and curved it around the gentle swell of her hip.

  The air around them throbbed with sexual tension. His shirt was hanging open, the wedge of dark hair trailing over his front to the waistband of his undershorts a virile contrast to the deep bronze sheen of his skin. Her tongue moistened in her mouth with a desire to lean in and taste him, her fingers twitching by her sides in an anxious need to move away the shirt. She could see the jutting evidence of his manhood pressing against his undershorts, traced its powerful length with her eyes. Memories of what it was like to feel him deep inside her awoke with an excitement that held her gripped in its thrall.

  As if he could tell what she was thinking he moved his hand to her stomach, then stroked downwards—and she shivered out a gasp of expectancy just before his fingertips sank into the triangular cloud of dusky curls. As he made that first fingertip dip it was as if he was laying claim to something he believed was totally his. She was hot and she was damp and her body welcomed his touch by clenching the muscles there, which he felt with a brief, tense smile of acknowledgement.

  By mutual need they came together again—urgent, maybe even a little desperate, their lips fusing while she dealt with the shirt, then moved to hook her fingers into the waist of his shorts. Pushing them down his lean, smooth, tautly muscled flanks, she felt his tremor and then his gasp as she stroked her fingers along his length, then closed them around him. His fingers became buried in her hair again, so he could tilt back her head. Her lips were already parted and ready to receive the driving force of his kiss that carried them all the
way down onto the bed. Lexi found herself stretched out on the cool sheet and losing contact with him as Franco rid himself of his shorts.

  When he stretched out beside her and then rolled onto her she saw his bruising. ‘We should take this carefully,’ she whispered worriedly.

  ‘To hell with being careful,’ he growled, then dipped his dark head and claimed a protruding nipple with the burning heat of his mouth. He grazed her with his lips, his teeth, the fiery heat of his breath as he slowly moved across the swollen mound of that breast to the other breast and captured the rosy peak with a searing hunger that dragged a keening cry from her lips.

  ‘You taste like heaven,’ he told her.

  Her anxious fingers speared into the glossy thickness of his hair. ‘Francesco …’ was all she could manage to say in response.

  ‘Si, amore, it is I.’ He sounded amused, yet oddly sombre at the same time. ‘You remember this? How good we are together? How it took so little to drive us out of our minds?’

  Each dark question was punctuated by a different caress of his hands or his mouth. Lexi lay boneless and trembling with the need for him to keep on touching her, writhing with rising anxiety as he tracked kisses down her slender shape to her waist then sank a deep-tongued caress into her navel, where she’d always been way too sensitive to bear it without turning into a wild thing.

  He lifted his head to look at her, triumph pounding through him at how thoroughly she’d lost control. He released a low laugh and bent to issue the same torment again. Lexi caught hold of the bulging muscles in his shoulders and sank her nails in, squirming beneath him in an effort to get free from such an overload of excruciating pleasure that was threatening to send her wild.

  Then he wasn’t laughing at anything. He was snaking back up to claim her mouth in a deep, probing kiss. At the same moment his fingers timed a controlled glide into the hot, silken folds of her body. Lexi heard her heartbeat thundering in her ears and knew already she was careering close to the edge of a climax the likes of which promised to knock her off the planet with its intensity. Somewhere in the dim background she could hear Franco trying to soothe her down from the brink, but it wasn’t going to happen. For more than three years she had lived with all this passion crushed down inside, so she would not have to feel its powerful pull ever again. She’d let no other man get this close to her. She’d never wanted to feel like this again—so helplessly out of control—yet with this one particular man choice was lost to her.

  She forgot about his injuries, his bruises, his wounded thigh—everything, scoring his back and his chest with her fingernails and moving her legs in quick, anxious need up and down the corded muscles in his calves. She felt hot, breathless—totally governed by what she was feeling. ‘Please, Franco, please …’ she heard herself begging, feverishly kissing his mouth, his jaw, his neck, dragging her hands down his body so she could close them once again around the velvet steel of his proud erection.

  ‘Lexi …’ he whispered unsteadily. ‘Slow down, amore.’

  But she didn’t want to slow down. ‘Please …’ she gasped again. ‘I missed you so much … Please, Franco, please …’

  As she felt the tremors breaking over his long, powerful frame he surrendered to her pleas and with a groan slipped between her parted thighs, slid his hands beneath her, then let her guide him where she most needed to feel him before he smoothly, surely drove himself deep.

  Exhilaration ran through him like the most potent pleasure drug ever invented as her muscles closed around him, eager, possessive. He pulsed. She clung and fused her mouth to his again. They lost themselves in a voyage of rediscovery—no holding back anything. When she tripped the wire of an electric orgasm it was too soon; but he revelled in each quivering shock wave, held on and held on, until he could do so no longer and finally released his own shattering shock waves of fulfilment while their mouths remained fused and the pounding of their hearts beat in unison.

  It was like dying within the most exquisite pleasure ever and then waking up again later to find you’d discovered your soul mate. They lay in a tangle of boneless limbs, too shattered to be able to move. He was burning hot and heavy on her, but Lexi didn’t mind. In fact she rejoiced in his weight, and his lingering pulse still beat a tantalisingly potent force inside her. She didn’t want to think or even breathe if it meant spoiling this special moment. His head was pressed in against the curve of her neck and her shoulder. Her fingers held it there. She smiled dreamily, because she loved the feel of his tongue tasting the warm dampness of her skin there. I feel whole again for the first time in years, she thought dreamily.

  ‘Lexi …’

  ‘Hmm?’ she mumbled.

  ‘Accidenti, cara, but I cannot move.’

  ‘Your bruises!’ As if she’d been stung by a sharp implement, Lexi came alive with a jolt of her limbs that made Franco release a groan in protest. ‘Didn’t I say we should be more careful? Which bit hurts the most?’

  He managed to lift his head up so he could look at her, a wry humour in his slumbrous dark eyes. ‘All of me.’

  ‘Shall I try squeezing out from beneath you?’

  ‘I’m too heavy.’

  ‘I know,’ she teased, and he smiled a lazy smile.

  Several minutes went by after that, because they ended up kissing, and the kisses were so gentle and tender there didn’t seem any rush to figure out a way to separate themselves without hurting him.

  ‘It is good to have you back where you belong, Signora Tolle,’ Franco husked, tasting the corner of her mouth. ‘Perhaps it is not a bad idea for us to remain like this for the rest of our lives.’ He gave a tiny nudge with his hips to highlight his meaning. ‘Someone will discover us in a few thousand years, still locked together like this turned to stone, and think we were so romantic.’

  ‘I don’t think Zeta will wait a few thousand years to check on us,’ Lexi responded with a soft giggle.

  In the end Lexi managed to slide out from beneath him, leaving Franco to collapse onto the bed.

  ‘And to think I always considered you a really macho hunk.’ Lexi sighed as she got up and started gathering their discarded clothes.

  ‘I am a macho hunk,’ he insisted, watching her move around the room. ‘Did I not just perform with supreme macho efficiency even with cracked ribs and bruises?’

  Lexi stopped what she was doing—perform with efficiency? Did he have to make it sound so—physical?

  ‘When I think of all those months of marriage when we did not indulge in sex at all, it feels like a hell of a waste now.’

  ‘Well, if you must think in those terms I suppose those months must have been a waste to you. But for me …’ She started picking up clothes again—snatching them up, actually, because if she didn’t she might—’Talking like that makes me feel like just another sexual affair to you.’

  An uneasy silence ensued for a few seconds before he said, ‘I think you had better explain that.’

  She turned to look at him lying there sprawled in all his naked glory like a beautifully tooled bronze sculpture even his bruising couldn’t spoil. Arrogant, she thought. Conceitedly sure of his own masculine beauty. Even the sleepy weight of his eyelids and the kiss warmed shape of his mouth made statements of lazy self-assurance about the deeply sensual man that he was.

  And why not? He’d sent her wildly out of control only two seconds after their skins met. When had she not responded like that?

  ‘We had a fabulous summer affair and a lousy winter marriage.’ She looked away again. ‘One steaming hot—the other freezing cold. When I left here I don’t think you even noticed.’

  ‘I noticed,’ he murmured.

  ‘In passing? On your way back to your old life? Tell me.’ Clutching the clothes to her front, Lexi made herself face him again. ‘How long did you wait before you consoled yourself by taking another woman to your bed?’

  His eyes hooded altogether. For a brief moment she thought she saw that grey veil attempt to shutter his grim fa
ce. ‘I don’t think this topic of conversation is appropriate.’

  ‘Appropriate for what?’

  ‘We are trying to heal the past.’

  Well, Lexi didn’t feel healed—she felt hurt. Wounded, in fact, by that shuttered expression. She wanted denials. Hot, offended denials. Not—

  ‘Is this yet another subject on your banned list, Franco?’ she goaded. ‘Are we not to talk about the newspaper reports that put the first woman in your bed at the Lisbon powerboat convention a short month after I left?’ She tugged in a short breath. ‘Of course that was the first woman the press got wind of—that does not automatically mean she was the first one to grace your bed. Perhaps you had enough sensitivity to be more discreet about the preceding lovers—’

  ‘And you moved straight in with Dayton,’ he countered. ‘You tell me, Lexi.’ Despite the obvious aches of his body he climbed off the bed and moved towards her—prowled, actually, like a sleek hunter scenting a hearty meal he relished tearing to bits. ‘How long did it take him to coax you into his bed? Did he use the Let me hold you while you grieve for your baby excuse to get you there? Did you curl up against him and weep your broken heart out all over him while he subtly moved things onto something much more satisfying and intimate?’

  CHAPTER NINE

  GONE sickly pale now, she whispered, ‘That’s a disgusting thing to throw at me.’

  ‘You think so?’ Grim contempt scored lines across his handsome face. ‘So did I when the bastard relayed those bald facts to me the day I was stupid enough to go to his apartment to see you.’

  ‘That’s a lie!’ Lexi protested.

  ‘Is it?’ Reaching out, Franco yanked the clothes out of her nerveless fingers, separated his things, then stuffed her nightie back into her hands. ‘Go to bed,’ he snapped, and turned his back on her to head for the bathroom. ‘Your own damn bed.’