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

Biting into the inner tissue of her tense lips Lexi nodded her head. ‘I need some fresh air,’ she mumbled, making a hasty exit.

Once outside, she crossed the terracotta floor of the shady loggia that ran the length of the back of the house, then walked down the steps into the gardens—that spread out in front of her without the rigid formality so carefully nurtured at the front. Several gravel pathways wound their lazy way through informal flowerbeds down towards a small lake she could see glinting a short distance away, beyond the assortment of fruit trees that dappled the paths with leafy shade from the heat of the sun.

She did not know where she was going, though the lake seemed to lure her. Inside she felt as if she’d been switched off like a light.

Upstairs, standing in the window, Franco watched her make her bid for escape with a grating sense of déjà-vu. Cursing softly, because every movement was such damn agony, he looked around for his mobile phone, accessed Lexi’s number, and rang it.

She did not have her phone with her, he realised a minute later. Frustration biting at his temper, he walked across the room and headed out onto the landing, then strode the corridors to Lexi’s wing of the house. This was something that was about to change around here, he decided grimly as he let himself into her room, then stood for a few seconds, needing to catch his laboured breathing before he went to hunt down her bag and pluck her mobile phone from its capacious depths.

Back in his own room, he used the house phone to relay instructions to Zeta about where his wife would be sleeping tonight, then instructed the housekeeper to send one of the maids to him.

Lexi had located the old wooden bench she’d remembered stood by the lake shore, and was sitting there with her eyes narrowed against the water’s sunny glint, waiting for the scrambling clutch of emotions she was suffering to calm down so that she could try to think.

About what? she asked herself tartly. About why you are here? About what you want to do next? You keep refusing to examine why you are here, and you don’t have a clue what you want to do next.

A maid appeared beside the bench, arriving panting, as if she’d come down here at a run. ‘Signor Francesco ask me to bring you this, signora ,’ she explained breathlessly, and handed Lexi her mobile phone.

It rang the instant the maid had turned and disappeared back up the path towards the house.

‘You sent someone to my room to rummage through my bag for my phone,’ she fired at him before he had a chance to speak.

‘I went and got it for myself,’ Franco informed her. ‘And don’t ,’ he warned, ‘start lecturing me on whether striding around the house in my present condition is good for my health, because I know that it isn’t. What the hell has got into you, Lexi? Why the sudden icy exit?’

Lexi wanted to tell him. In fact she wondered why she had never told him before—three and a half years ago, when it would perhaps have meant something—but she’d run away from facing him with his unfaithfulness that time too.

‘The past is catching up with me,’ she mumbled, and wished she had not heard the thickness of tears threatening her voice. ‘And you won’t let me talk about it.’

‘Don’t start crying, cara ,’ he warned huskily. ‘I will be forced to come down there to you if you do. I know we have to talk about the past.’

Rolling her lips together to try and stop them from trembling, she asked, ‘Can I talk about Marco too?’

‘No,’ he rasped.

‘Your relationship with Claudia, then?’

‘Claudia and I do not have a relationship,’ he denied impatiently. ‘Not the kind you are implying anyway.’

Lexi watched the pair of resident white swans move across the glass smooth surface of the lake, leaving triangular ripples in their wake. Swans mated with the same partner for life, she recalled, for some reason only the convoluted inner workings of her own mind could follow. It took a lot of care and trust to be so steadfast and loyal to one person.

Something that she and Franco had never had.

‘I hate you,’ she whispered, which seemed to tie in somehow with the thoughts preceding it.

‘No, you don’t. You hate yourself for still caring about me when you don’t want to care. Come back up here to me and we will talk about that if you want,’ he encouraged.

Lexi gave a slow mute shake of her head.

‘I saw that,’ he sighed.

‘From where?’ Jumping to her feet, Lexi spun round, expecting to find him walking down the path towards her, but she saw nothing but garden and leafy tree branches.

‘From my bedroom window.’

Looking up, Lexi tracked her eyes along the upper terrace until she found his window. Her breathing pulled to a stop. She could just make out his tall figure against the long pane of glass.

‘You should be lying down or something.’

‘Then have some pity on me,’ he said wearily. ‘I ache all over, and I can do without the dramatic trip down memory lane right now, where you storm out and I have to work out what the hell I have done to cause it this time.’

But Lexi gave another shake of her head. ‘You’re bad for me, Franco,’ she told him sadly. ‘I know I shouldn’t even be here with you, and … and I don’t want to become attached to you again.’

‘Madre de Dio,’ he growled, then added a torrent of angry Italian that he did not know if she could follow. Switching to English, he said fiercely, ‘I want you to become attached to me again! Why do you think I asked you to come back to me in the first place?’

‘I don’t know …’

‘But you came anyway.’

Yes, she’d come anyway. ‘Did you crash your boat because I’d sent you those divorce papers?’

Another set of angry curses was followed by an explosive, ‘No.’

‘Then how did it happen?’

A band of pain across Franco’s chest tightened, catching at his breath. He didn’t want to think about that yet—not now. Perhaps later, when—’Come back up here or I will come down there to you,’ he warned again. ‘In fact I am already walking towards the door—’

Watching him disappear from the window, Lexi cut the connection and started running—fast. She knew she’d been bluffed the moment she arrived in his room, to find him sprawled in the chair by the window, looking pathetically weak and endearingly bad-tempered as he waged an uneven battle with the cufflinks still anchoring his shirt cuffs to his wrists.

‘Help me with these,’ he ground out in frustration, cutting short whatever she’d been about to say to him as he slumped back in the chair and closed his eyes as if the small task had exhausted him.

Crossing the room to his side, she squatted down. ‘Is your vision still bad?’ she queried, taking hold of his wrist so she could work the first gold link free.

‘No,’ he grunted, annoyed that she could be so damn perceptive. ‘What made you just walk out?’

‘I don’t like the rules you’ve set up around here.’ Having freed that cufflink, she made him wince when she reached across him to lift up his other wrist—the one on his injured side. ‘If you can allow a visit from Claudia then I don’t see why you can’t let in the rest of your friends and family as well.’

‘Claudia is a special case— ouch ,’ he complained.

‘Sorry,’ Lexi said. ‘I accept that she has to be a special case, but …’ Her hair was getting in her way as she bent over the task in hand, and she paused to loop the long tresses back behind her ear, meeting Franco’s fingers as they arrived to do the same thing. Like an idiot, she glanced up and caught the full power of his glowing dark gaze as the back of his fingers stroked against her warm cheek. Sensation erupted with a swirling coil of sensual heat low down in her belly.