But she couldn’t move a single muscle. A cold, sickening chill of a tremor had frozen her where she stood. ‘Bruce just would not lie like that … Why should he when it never happened?’
‘That’s right,’ he derided. ‘Trust loyal Bruce to always act in your best interests.’ He stilled in the bathroom doorway. ‘He showed me the evidence.’
‘He what—?’
‘He tried to fob me off with a verbal description first, then when I refused to accept it—’ his big shoulders flexed in a ripple of tense glossy muscle ‘—he showed me the evidence.’
‘But he can’t have shown you any evidence when it didn’t happen!’
The way she cried out that denial swung Franco round. His face looked as if it had been carved out of rock. ‘Your things littered all over the place.’ He speared a glance at the nightie she held crushed in her taut fingers. ‘You always were the untidiest woman I ever met. When we lived our fantastic hot affair that summer you drove me crazy because you never picked up after yourself. On the boat. At the villa we rented in San Remo—’
San Remo … where everything had turned bad for them.
‘He picked your bra up off the floor while I watched him,’ he went on harshly. ‘He dared …’ In some distant part of her Lexi felt the emotional throb of his voice. ‘He dared to send me a look, as if we were good old friends enjoying a moment of mutual understanding, as he tossed the damn bra onto a chair loaded down with your clothes.’
‘This never happened.’ Lexi took a step towards him, but he stiffened up so violently she pulled to a stop again.
‘Don’t tell me it didn’t happen when I was there,’ he ground out. ‘I saw the damn frog sitting on your pillow!’
Lexi blinked in an effort to clear the glaze of confusion from her head. ‘But—but that was m-my room.’
‘With his stuff hanging in the wardrobes?’
‘Yes!’ she cried out. ‘Bruce’s clothes were in the wardrobes! You’ve seen him, Franco, you know what he’s like about clothes! He—he must have a hundred Savile Row suits and two hundred shirts, and before I went to stay with him he spread them between the two bedrooms! I was only there for couple of months, so he didn’t bother to clear them out!’
In the trammelling silence that followed her shrill explanation Lexi stared at Franco’s angry face and took in the seething force of the vibrations still holding his naked frame so tense.
‘Y-you came to see me—?’ The frail shake wrapped around that belated enquiry made him lower his eyelids over the turbulent shimmer in control of his eyes.
‘A month after you left me.’ He relayed that answer as if it had been dragged out of him by torture.
Lexi did not miss the significance of the month and the accusations she’d just thrown at him about his women. Clasping her arms around her body, she shivered.
‘You were not there. He said you were attending several auditions in an attempt to get your stalled career back on track. He told me Hollywood beckoned,’ he mocked bitterly, ‘and you would be much better off if I …’
He didn’t need to finish that sentence. Lexi found it too easy to finish it for herself. Bruce had tried to convince her to go straight back into acting, maintaining it would be the best way to work through her broken-hearted grief. He’d even set up auditions with a couple of famous directors that she’d refused to attend. When all attempts to make her see things his way had failed to move her, he’d offered her a job working with him at the agency instead.
And she’d accepted. Bruce had been determined to keep her close this time—no matter what it took. When she’d moved into her own flat he’d been angry for weeks …
‘Oh, my God, he …’ She flattened a hand against her mouth as the ugly words dried up like water droplets hitting a sand dune; but those watered grains of sand started melding together as everything about Bruce and their long relationship came together to make a sick kind of sense.
When Franco had accused Bruce of being a control freak he had not been plucking insults out of the air. He’d had hard evidence of exactly how much Bruce was trying to control her life. Then she remembered the other things Franco had called Bruce and nausea began to claw at her stomach. Unable to just stand there in the centre of the tumbling fallout happening inside her, Lexi turned in a dizzy reel to head for the bedroom door—only she couldn’t make it that far, and ended up sinking weakly down on the side of the bed. For the last ten years Bruce had always been there, in the background of her life, a calm, often critical but always totally dependable figure watching over her—or waiting for her to grow up?
Then her mother had met Philippe and loosened the reins on her. Lexi had tripped off and fallen head over heels in love with her tall, dark, handsome Italian while all Bruce had been able to do was watch it happen and wait for the love affair to burn itself out—as, she supposed, everyone else had waited for it to burn out.
Still standing in the bathroom doorway, Franco was wishing he’d kept his damn mouth shut. He’d never meant to tell her any of that: now he’d brutally shattered her with it. And the way he’d regarded Dayton’s obsession with Lexi did not necessarily mean it was as sinister as he’d made it out to be. Dayton was a good-looking guy, up there and out there, with a string of beautiful women trailing in and out of his life. The age gap between him and Lexi did not mean much in current society when, basically, if a guy still had it then he might as well go for it. His own father entertained liaisons with women with a wider age gap and no one batted a critical eye.
No, his view of Dayton was jaundiced by old-fashioned jealousy and the ten years the guy had hung on, waiting for Lexi to notice him as a prospective lover. He’d seen the desire in Dayton’s face the first time he’d met him, known exactly where he was coming from, and had wanted to punch him ever since.
But none of that justified the way he’d made her face the truth about Dayton, because he’d done it to wound. Now he wanted to kick something because—damn it—how the hell was he going to tell her about Marco when he’d already wounded her enough with this?
Lexi didn’t know he’d moved until she felt his fingers close around her wrists and she was pulled inexorably to her feet. He wrapped her in his arms, the hairs on his chest tickling her nose as he heaved air into his lungs, then let it out again.
‘I should not have said anything,’ he said heavily. ‘After the way we parted you had every right to try and put your life back together any way that you wanted to—’
‘But wh—what you described never happened,’ Lexi denied painfully.
‘I know that now.’ He drew her closer so her forehead rested against his chest.
Lexi tried to squeeze a hand between them so she could wipe a stray tear from her cheek. ‘Why was everyone so against us, Franco?’ she asked in a bewildered voice. ‘What were we doing that was so terrible?’
His response rumbled against her brow in its gravity. ‘They had their own agendas, Lexi. Dayton … Claudia … and …’ Another sigh eased from him. ‘What they wanted does not really matter to us—this matters.’ Combing his fingers into her hair, he gently coaxed her to lift up her head. Their eyes met: his dark and somber, with bleak golden flashes; hers ocean pools of incomprehension and hurt. ‘We are here, together, and we have not exactly hung around in making it back to this point. I call that fate giving them all a hard smack across the head for interfering in the first place.’
He wanted her to smile, to lighten the heavy weight in the atmosphere, but Lexi shook her head. ‘It took a terrible accident and Marco’s death to get us here,’ she said sadly. ‘Without the accident we would be talking through our lawyers about our divorce.’
‘That’s not true.’ As she tried to pull away Franco tightened his arms around her. ‘I told you I had already made up my mind I was coming to see you before the accident happened.’
‘For what reason?’ Her shrug told him she didn’t understand why he should want to bother.
‘Because I spent the la
st three years looking for a good excuse to do it.’
As she stilled in surprise at that dry confession, Franco lowered his head and kissed her soft, quivering mouth. Her lips clung—of course they did, she thought helplessly. He was just so gorgeously good at kissing.
‘I missed you,’ he said. ‘I got on with my life, and the focus was probably good for business, but always in the background I missed you and what we had together. Can you tell me honestly that it was not the same for you?’
She couldn’t deny it, but she was still too upset by what Bruce had done to do more than offer up a small shrug. Franco pulled her in close again and just held her. It was only when he felt her shiver he realised they’d been standing there stark naked while indulging in yet another argument.
‘You’re cold. Come on—let’s go back to bed,’ he decided.
‘But you said—’
‘I know what I said,’ he interrupted. ‘I have changed my mind.’
‘I don’t want—’
‘I’m not offering.’
Taking hold of the fingers she still clutched around her nightie, he prised them open and took the scrappy garment from her, shook it out, then dropped it over her head. As the silk slid down over her body Lexi let him take her hand and lead her back to the bed. She curled up there and watched him. He dragged on his undershorts as if he was making big statements with the nightie and the shorts about what they were not going to do next.
Her eyes were glued to that potent part of him until it was covered up. She felt her heartbeat go haywire, that so familiar flicker of heat deep inside her flaring up.
‘How are the bruises?’ she asked a trifle breathlessly.
‘Sore.’ Reaching out to hit a switch that plunged them into darkness, he came to lie down beside her. ‘Next time show a little pity on me and do all the work.’
‘You were so very good at it, though.’ Lexi could not resist stroking her fingers down his chest as he dragged the sheets up over them, her senses indulging in a leap of excitement when he went still.
Supporting himself on one elbow, Franco looked down at her. Through the darkness her eyes sparkled up at him, and she was biting down into the cushion softness of her lower lip.
‘You greedy minx,’ he murmured accusingly.
Flushing, Lexi wriggled. ‘Of course, if you’re so sure you’re not up to it …’
Without warning he rolled onto his back, catching hold of her to bring her to her knees beside him. Despite the sore bruises he still had more strength in his arms than Lexi gave him credit for.
‘OK, bella mia,’ he drawled. ‘Take what you want. I am all yours …’
Four days later, Lexi sat dangling her feet in the swimming pool and chewed pensively on her bottom lip as she watched Franco power his way up and down the length of the pool with the sun beating down on his glossy, wet bronzed back.
Tomorrow was Marco’s funeral. For the last four glorious days they had not so much as touched on any subject likely to spoil the old harmony they’d resurrected that night in his bed—but it couldn’t go on. She needed to shop for something suitably respectful to wear for the funeral, but the one time she’d asked if she could borrow a car to drive into Livorno he’d blocked the request with, ‘You need anything, tell Zeta. She will get it for you.’ Then he’d changed the subject.
His father was due home today. She’d heard Franco discuss his arrival over the telephone, using that same clipped blocking tone he’d used against her trip to the shops. In all the days she had been here he had not answered a single telephone call that had arrived in the house, leaving Zeta or Pietro to deal with whoever wanted to speak to him. He had, in effect, turned his home into a private sanctuary inside which the two of them lived as if the accident, or even the years they had been separated, had not taken place.
But his sanctuary was built inside a bubble that was about to burst, whether he wanted it to happen or not. He wasn’t stupid, so whatever he was thinking behind the lazily relaxed mask of contentment he wore all the time Lexi knew he must be aware that he was going to have to burst this bubble soon.
‘Franco …’ she murmured as he swam up to the pool edge beside her legs.
‘What?’ he said, only to power away again. It was a very impressive demonstration of freestyle arrogance, because he’d been swimming up and down for fifteen minutes without stopping and did not look as if he was tiring yet. His bruises had already faded into the tanned lustre of his skin, and the wound on his thigh was nothing but a fine purple line to add to the others he already wore on his powerful legs. He would still wince occasionally if she accidentally put too much pressure on his ribcage, but other than that he was, she supposed, returned to full health—except for the blanket refusal to talk about Marco’s death or his funeral.
As he powered back towards her Lexi timed the moment when she slid into the water and then stepped in front of him as he reached out to touch the pool edge. Finding the sun-kissed heat of her body obstructing him, he was quick to turn things to his advantage by taking hold of her waist and lifting her up as he rose like Neptune to his feet.
‘Mmm, I’ve caught myself a real live mermaid,’ he growled and tried to kiss her.
‘That’s corny.’ Lexi frowned distractedly, tilting her head back out of his reach. ‘We need to talk about—about tomorrow.’
‘You like corny,’ he insisted, and followed it up by capturing her mouth for a long, lazily sensual kiss. ‘You like taking walks in the sultry moonlight and holding hands even when we are only walking downstairs—all corny, romantic stuff, cara.’
Refusing to be diverted, she insisted, ‘We need to talk about tomorrow, Francesco.’ She watched his expression change—tighten up—and, releasing a small sigh, cupped his damp face. ‘Please listen to me,’ she begged. ‘You can’t go on ignoring the fact that Marco will be laid to rest tomorrow, and that everyone you’ve been avoiding since the accident is going to be there.’
Frowning—no, scowling now, he countered very grimly, ‘Yes, I can.’
‘Well, I can’t afford to ignore it, then.’ Lexi changed tack. ‘I need to buy something to wear for the funeral. I need to know how you want me to respond to questions about the two of us being together again.’
‘You’re not going.’ Opening his arms, he dropped her back onto her feet.
‘Yes, I am!’ Lexi protested.
‘You’re staying here.’
He was about to dive back beneath the water again, but Lexi grabbed his arm to stop him. ‘That is not your decision to make. Marco was my friend too, you know. I liked him!’
Shrugging her hand aside, he just turned and hit the water, then swam off! Bristling with frustration, Lexi heaved herself back out of the pool, grabbed a towel and wrapped it around her as she stalked off towards the house. Entering the back way, she headed grimly for the kitchens, found Pietro there enjoying a mid-morning snack, and asked if he would mind taking her into Livorno in half an hour.
Of course he couldn’t say no to her, but she could tell by his wary expression as he agreed that he wished he could. It was the flickering way he glanced over her shoulder that made her realise why he was looking so wary. Franco stood a few feet behind her. As she spun around to look at him she caught the tail end of his frowning exchange with the other man.
Snapping her lips together, she pushed right past his obstructive frame and headed for the stairs. If he made it necessary she would call for a taxi to come and collect her, she decided stubbornly.
She’d pulled on a towelling robe and was scrambling through her small assortment of clothes looking for something to wear when she sensed Franco lounging in the bedroom doorway—the bedroom next door to the one they’d been sharing for the last four days.
‘I’m not playing this game any more,’ she announced without looking at him. ‘I’ve let you get away with it for long enough.’
‘I know.’
‘You assured me days ago that you were not going to do something stup
id, so you can quit with the blocking tactics—What do you mean, you know?’
Turning, she almost forgot how to breathe when she saw him standing there wearing nothing more than a pair of low riding swimming shorts and a towel hanging around his neck. He looked so much like the Franco from that long golden summer it came as a shock.
He shrugged a wide, still wet shoulder, the expression in his eyes shadowed by his spiky eyelashes. ‘You cannot abide most of the people who will be there.’
‘I am not paying my respects to them,’ Lexi pointed out.
His small sigh accepted that. ‘I predict it will be more like a circus than a funeral—the press will be crawling around all over the place, and you would have to be nice to Claudia.’
‘I can do nice when I know I need to,’ Lexi said stiffly, interpreting from his words that he didn’t want her to go to Marco’s funeral because he was afraid she would get into an unseemly cat fight with Claudia. ‘I played nice with Claudia when she was here weeping all over you. I can also appreciate that she has just lost her brother. You forget—I’ve been there. I lost my mother not so long ago. I remember how bad it feels to lose someone you love.’
‘OK …’ He moved, taking the towel from around his neck to use it to rub his wet hair. ‘I don’t want you there.’
Hurt beyond bearing by that blunt announcement, Lexi felt herself go pale. ‘Are you ashamed of me or something?’
He should have come back with a quick, explosive no, but he did not answer, and his silence was like a stiletto sliding smoothly into her chest. Lexi turned back to the clothes closet and blindly selected something to wear with fingers that shook so badly she dropped the skirt she’d slid from its hanger and had to bend to pick it up.
‘It is not a case of being ashamed, Lexi,’ he sighed out suddenly. ‘I just want to protect you from any cruel gossip that might blow up.’
But he’d spoken too late, and his explanation did not make any sense—unless …
The Man Who Risked It All Page 14