Читать книгу The Italians: Franco, Dominic and Valentino: The Man Who Risked It All / The Moretti Arrangement / Valentino's Pregnancy Bombshell - Michelle Reid - Страница 13

THROBBING with the need to just turn around, walk out of there and never come back again, Lexi felt nailed to the spot by the rush of emotions that flooded inside her. She was hurting. She was hurting so badly she might as well have been standing there like this three and a half years ago, witnessing their betrayal. They even had a bed there as a gut jerking prop.

A barely controllable desire to go over there and yank the dainty, black clad figure away from Franco and then punch him on his red lipstick stained mouth almost got the better of her. At that precise moment she did not care that Claudia was Marco’s kid sister, or that the two of them had every excuse to be indulging in a moment of shared agony.

How had Claudia got in here anyway? Had Zeta let her in? Pietro? One of the maids? Did Claudia have such a free run of this house that she could stroll into Franco’s bedroom without needing permission from anyone?

As if she’d been dropped behind a haze of misty red, she watched as Franco glanced up and noticed her standing here.

‘Lexi,’ he murmured, and sounded so thick and strained that the swinging punch scenario replayed itself in her head. He was either really turned on or close to tears, and the latter she refused to accept—mainly because it just didn’t suit the unforgiving frame of mind she was in.

It clearly didn’t suit him either, because she saw two streaks of colour shoot high across his cheeks.

Guilty and with an eye witness, she noted.

She hated him.

Claudia lifted her face up off his chest and turned her beautiful dark head. She was two years older than Lexi. Once upon a time those two years had felt more like a decade to Lexi, in smooth sophistication and worldly experience. Now the age-gap felt like nothing at all, and Claudia’s amazing sloe-shaped bottomless black eyes were still the most exotically beautiful eyes she had ever seen. She looked nothing like her light-haired, blue-eyed brother. She certainly did not have Marco’s sunny temperament. Claudia was devious, calculating and jealously possessive of both her brother and of Franco.

‘Lexi,’ Marco’s beautiful sister whispered as she climbed slowly to her feet. ‘I did not expect to see you here.’

Lexi believed it. Claudia was so visibly shocked to see her standing there she could not contain the horror from sounding in her voice.

Lexi did not spare Franco another glance. Her insides had gone into meltdown and were churning up with the ugliest kind of bitterness. It took all of her control to keep breathing in and out. She kept her eyes focused on Claudia, who was wearing the silver wash of tears glistening on the tips of her long black eyelashes.

Crocodile tears? No, that was just too mean for her even to think it.

Claudia had just lost her beloved brother, after all. Of course she would want to come here and commiserate with Franco over their mutual loss. She had the right.

But it was still difficult for Lexi to part her bloodless lips and murmur, ‘Hello, Claudia,’ peeling her tense fingers off the door handle and still feeling the tension in them when she dropped them to her sides.

Deep breath, Lexi. Walk forward, she instructed her legs, which tingled because they did not want her to go anywhere near Claudia Clemente. ‘I’m so very sorry about Marco.’

At least that was a genuine response. She offered commiserating kisses to the other woman’s cheeks and felt Claudia’s floral perfume dry her throat. From the corner of her eye she caught the way Franco’s facial muscles clenched when she said Marco’s name.

Well, too late for that, she thought, with a cold feeling that sat like a lump where her understanding and sympathy should be. With Claudia here there was no way he could avoid talking about Marco. With Claudia here there was no way he could continue pretending the accident had not happened, or that Lexi was the only person he could bear to have close.

‘Oh, please don’t say his name,’ Claudia begged, and her fabulous eyes filled up with fresh tears. ‘I think I am going to die from my grief.’

As a sob broke free from her throat Lexi felt a pang of guilt for suspecting the quality of her grief. Whatever else Claudia was that she despised, she could not take away from her that she’d adored her older brother. Pushing her own stony feelings aside, Lexi plucked a box of tissues from the bedside table and quietly encouraged Claudia to dry her tears.

‘I had to come,’ Claudia explained once she’d regained control again. ‘I knew that Franco would be tormenting himself. I needed to tell him that we do not hold him to blame.’

Well, that was truly thoughtful and caring of her, but while Claudia was busy dabbing her eyes Franco had closed his eyes and was turning that sickly shade of grey.

‘And M-Mamma and Papa needed to know if he would be well enough to attend M-Marco’s funeral next Tuesday.’

‘We will be there.’ The man himself spoke at last. Then he fell into deep, dark, husky Italian, spoken too fast for Lexi to follow; but that sent Claudia to her knees again, her arms locking tightly around his neck.

Lexi removed herself over to the window and stayed there until Claudia made her final farewells and eventually left. The ensuing silence hung like a woodchopper’s axe, hesitating over the downward slice that would split them clean in two.

Three and a half years was a long time to hang onto such a poisonous grudge, she tried hard to tell herself. She’d grown up an awful lot in those years, so it was logical that Claudia had done the same thing.

Deep down, though, she didn’t believe that Marco’s sister had changed. She’d seen something in the possessive trail of the other woman’s fingers as they’d let go of Franco, and in the way she hadn’t been able to resist bruising his lips with a final kiss before she’d dragged herself away from him.

The atmosphere she’d left behind pulsated with Lexi’s continued silence.

What am I doing here?

Once again she asked herself that question. Franco needed people like Claudia around him—friends, family, lovers who would gently ease his grief out into the open.

‘What’s wrong, Lexi?’ he murmured quietly.

‘How did she get in here?’ she asked.

‘She arrived a few minutes ago. I could not deny her need to see me.’

She twisted around to look at him. ‘In your bedroom?’

‘I was asleep.’ Raking slightly unsteady fingers through his hair, he explained, ‘Zeta woke me to tell me that Claudia was here. Apparently she had driven here directly from the hospital after discovering I—we had left.’

Lexi nodded her head. It was weird how she was feeling—kind of closed off and iced over. ‘You talked with her about Marco?’

Rubbing his hands over his face, Franco nodded. ‘What time is it?’ He frowned down at his watch. He was still using the same blocking tactics against her where Marco was concerned, Lexi noted. ‘I could do with a drink. My mouth is parched. Do you want one?’ He was reaching for the house phone beside the bed.

‘If you like I can call Claudia back in here and let her share a drink with us,’ Lexi suggested coolly.

‘What is this?’ He frowned. ‘So you walked in here and found Claudia in my bedroom? It isn’t as if I am in a fit state to seduce the poor woman. You always were a jealous cat about her.’

‘Marco said—’

‘Marco is not here any longer to say anything!’ Driving himself to his feet, he groaned and struggled to gain his balance.

His shirt was hanging open, Lexi saw. His trousers resting low on his waist. He was no longer strapped up there, she noticed, and the extent of his bruising was horribly dark. Unable to stop her eyes from following the shock of dark hair that ran down his front, she imagined a pair of red tipped fingers stroking over him and felt her insides grow hard.

‘Marco once warned me that you would probably end up marrying Claudia,’ she persisted despite his attempt to head her off. ‘He believed the two of you were made for each other—that bringing your two volatile temperaments together would be like capturing forked lightning.’

‘Explosive?’ Franco said dryly. ‘I am not volatile. You are the volatile one in this relationship.’

But they did not have a relationship—that was the whole point! They had a marriage certificate, a load of miserable memories to share, and that was all they had!

‘I’m going out for a walk.’ Lexi made the decision on impulse; but once she had made it she discovered that she couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

On a growl of pure frustration, Franco raked out, ‘What the hell has got into you?’

Lexi whipped out through the door before he could say anything else. Inside she was a shaking mess of pain and—oh, God—fear. Fear because she knew she was already emotionally involved again. Attached, attracted, needy and jealous and—

‘You go out, signora?’ One of the maids she remembered from the last time she was here was crossing the hall as Lexi walked quickly towards the rear of the house.

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.

‘But what?’ he prompted distractedly.

Lexi struggled to remember what she had been going to say. In fact she was struggling to think of anything other than that look in his eyes that she knew so well. ‘Your rules are irrationally selective,’ she managed to finish. ‘Or is it just me you don’t want to discuss the accident and Marco with?’

‘I need a shower. Care to join me?’ he invited softly, gently stroking her hair back behind her ear so that she quivered.

More blocking tactics, she thought, and decided to ignore him for a change. Frowning, she dragged her attention back to releasing the second cufflink, then she sighed, sitting back on her heels and thereby removing herself from his easy reach.