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CHAPTER TWO

THE sound of that dry, slightly hoarse voice ran through Lexi in shivering stings of sharp recognition and she dropped her gaze to the bed, unaware that she’d been avoiding it in fear of what she was going to see.

She discovered that she could not see anything other than a swathe of starched white linen. She saw no pillows, and a cage had been erected over his legs. Her wildly skipping heart suddenly felt all curled up in her chest, cowering, as if something was threatening it. For when someone was forced to lie flat it usually meant a back injury. A cage usually meant broken legs. And whatever those tubes were feeding into him made her squirm, because she hadn’t bothered to ask anyone what his injuries were. Not the nurse, not Pietro … Perhaps she should go back out there and—

‘Lexi …’ Franco murmured impatiently when she took too long to answer him. ‘If you are thinking of making a quick exit—don’t.’

‘H-how did you know it was me?’ she asked.

‘You still wear the same perfume.’

She was surprised he remembered, bearing in mind the trail of different perfumes that had passed through his life since her. Dozens of women listed in celebrity magazines. All smooth, sleek, sophisticated, with—

‘Since I cannot move, have some pity on me, cara. Come over here where I can see you, per favore.’

Curling taut fingers around the shoulder strap of her bag, Lexi peeled herself free of the door and walked forward on limbs that shook. Pulling to a halt at the foot of the bed, she felt her hectic breathing dry up altogether when she got her first glimpse of Franco’s powerful length, laid out flat on the bed like a corpse. A white linen sheet covered three-quarters of him—his upper torso left uncovered to reveal the muscled solidity of his wide shoulders and arms like a splash of polished bronze against the starched white. White bandaging formed heavy strapping around his left shoulder and bound his ribs, and she gulped as a wave of distress broke through her when she caught sight of the dark, inky bruising spreading out from beneath the edges of the strapping.

‘Ciao,’ he murmured, in a husky low tone that sounded scraped.

Lexi gave a helpless shake of her head as her eyes began to sting with hot aching tears. ‘Just look at the state of you,’ she whispered.

Franco did not care that he was really pleased to see the evidence of those tears appear like deep pools in her beautiful eyes. He wanted Lexi to be upset. He even wanted her to pity him—was in fact ready and willing to push her sympathy buttons for all they were worth.

Dio mio, she looked good, he thought as he lay there waiting for her to look directly into his face. Her hair floated around her slender shoulders like a burnished halo, framing the exquisite triangle of her face with its wide spaced eyes and cute little nose and pointed chin. He did not care that she was pressing her soft lips together in a failed attempt to stop them from trembling, or that the grey patterned scarf she wore looped around her neck was as unflatteringly drab as the grey jacket she was wearing, which hid away from him all that he knew was softly curvy and gracefully sleek. For him she was still his first glimmer of sunlight in the darkest days of his life.

‘Look at me,’ he urged, feeling her fierce tension throb between them like an extra heartbeat. He could feel the fight she was waging with herself over allowing her eyes to make contact with his, and he understood why it was a fight. Once upon a time they hadn’t been able to look at each other without wanting to devour each other. When they’d stopped looking their whole fated relationship had gone into an acute downward slide.

‘Please, cara,’ he husked, then watched as her eyelashes fluttered, the long dusky crescents rising upwards to reveal the depth of the ocean swirled by a hundred different emotions; that caused a clutch of agony so deep inside him the machine behind him started bleeping like mad.

Lexi shot a startled look at it, her breath lurching free from her strangled throat. Things were happening. She hadn’t a clue what a normal pulse or blood pressure should read, but the flickering numbers on that machine were rising fast, and it scared her enough to send her shooting round the edge of the bed.

‘What’s wrong?’ She reached for his hand where it lay on the bed, only to stare down in horror when she found herself clutching hold of a plastic shunt with tubes coming out of it. But before she could snatch her hand away Franco turned his hand over and imprisoned hers inside his warm, surprisingly strong grip.

‘I’m OK,’ he said, without enough strength to convey confidence.

The door suddenly flew open and the nurse swept in. With a brief vague smile at Lexi, she went around to the other side of the bed and began checking things.

‘I think your wife must have surprised you.’

Lexi translated the nurse’s smiling tease from Italian to English.

‘She did something to me anyway,’ Franco returned ruefully.

Catching onto his meaning, Lexi tried to reclaim her fingers but Franco just tightened his grip, and after a second or so compassion took over and she let her fingers relax in his. The moment she did so he closed his eyes and inched out a very controlled sigh. Almost immediately the number readings began to ease downwards. Flanking each side of the bed, the nurse and Lexi watched the monitor—the nurse with her fingers lightly circling his wrist, Lexi with her fingers still enclosed by his.

By the time everything seemed to have gone back to normal Lexi felt so weak she reached out with her free hand for the chair positioned to her right, drew it closer to the bed and sat down.

Franco didn’t move or open his eyes, and as the room slowly settled back into quiet stillness, Lexi let herself look at his face again. She was instantly drenched by the old fierce magnetism that had always been her downfall where Franco was concerned.

He was, quite simply, breathtakingly handsome. There wasn’t even a cut or a bruise to distort the sheer quality of masculine perfection stamped into that face. Working at a theatrical agency had, she’d thought, made her immune to so much male beauty, because she dealt with handsome men on a day-to-day basis. But everything about this man set her own blood pressure rising, she acknowledged helplessly—soaking up every small detail while he lay there, unaware of her scrutiny. The smooth, high and intelligent brow below ebony hair cropped short to tame its desire to curl. The subtle arch of his eyebrows above heavy eyelids tipped with eyelashes so long they rested against the slanting planes of his cheekbones. Half of his blood was pure Roman on his mother’s side, and the line of his long, only slightly hooked nose, gave credence to that; while the wide, sensual contours of his well shaped mouth belonged to his proud Ligurian father.

Though right now that mouth was pressed shut and the corners turned down a little due to the pain he must be suffering, the agony of overwhelming grief.

‘I’m so very sorry about Marco,’ she murmured painfully.

Instantly the machine started beeping again. The nurse sent Lexi a sharp frowning glance, then added a faint shake of her head to convey the message that Franco was not ready to talk about Marco.

Her own lips pinching together in an effort to control a painful surge of understanding, Lexi looked back at Franco. A stark greyish tint had settled like a veil across his face, and she knew he was looking that way because he was blaming himself for Marco’s death. Where Franco led Marco always followed. Anyone who knew the two friends knew that. But the slavelike loyalty Marco had bestowed on Franco had been both flattering and a burden—as Lexi knew only too well, since she had enslaved herself to him in the same way. And look at the burden she had become.

Was that the reason she had come here? Because she knew her slavish love and total dependency on him had become a terrible burden and she now felt guilty about that?

Right there, Lexi fell back in to that long summer four years ago when, at nineteen years old, she had finally done something all by herself after years of being sheltered by her over protective mother, Grace—beautiful Grace Hamilton, who’d sacrificed her own acting career to manage her daughter’s surprise rise to fame.

But the year Lexi was nineteen Grace had fallen in love for the first time in her life and married Philippe Reynard, a French entrepreneur with all the outward trappings of celebrity and wealth so yearned for by Grace. He’d owned a fancy apartment in Paris and a rambling château in Bordeaux; and a yacht on which he’d spent most of his summers. He’d made Grace feel like a princess, and encouraged her to loosen the chains on her daughter so that the two of them could enjoy an extended honeymoon sailing around the Greek Islands on his yacht.

Lexi had been allowed to travel to the Cannes Film Festival without her mother playing strict chaperone.

Excited about striking out on her own for the first time in her life, she had let the freedom go straight to her head and she had become sucked into the glamorous high life. She had proceeded to live it with the destructive blindness of a junkie—until it had been over her ability to think straight about anything … especially what she was doing to herself.

From Cannes to Nice, Cap Ferrat, Monte Carlo, San Remo—

San Remo …

Lexi closed her eyes and saw the same radiant blue skies and glistening waters she’d seen on the television screen. She saw the rows of fancy yachts berthed in exclusive marinas, the stylish boulevards lined with fashionable designer shops, and the pavement café bars frequented by the spoiled offspring of outrageous wealth. Places for the golden people to hang out, with their golden skins and golden smiles and glittering golden futures already mapped out for them. She could hear the golden ring of their laughter—feel the wildly seductive tug of their totally unflappable self-belief. When they’d allowed her entry into their select assembly she’d truly believed that she was one of them—the current golden girl of movie fame.

And of course there’d been Franco, the most golden of them all. The one possessed of all the male beauty his richly aristocratic Italian heritage could bestow. Older than her, so much more experienced than her, the leader of the pack of those super-exclusives. And she’d caught him. She, little Miss Totally-Naïve-and-Sheltered, had won the jewel in the crown without bothering to question how she had done it. Not once had it occurred to her that her new friends had found her naivety hilarious—a novelty worthy of turning into a highly entertaining game.

Lexi shivered as the cold, cold truth of her complete humiliation simultaneously creeped up her and chilled her to the bone.

Six months after it had all started it was over—the wreck of her life floundering amongst the wreckage of so much more destruction. Her mother and her new stepfather killed in a freak car accident. The shattering discovery that Philippe Reynard had lived his whole life in hock and, during his short marriage to her mother, had neatly and cleanly stripped Grace of all the money Lexi had earned until there was none of it left.

He’d called it ‘investing in Lexi’s future.’ What a sick joke.

And even all that was not what had dropped her into the lowest, darkest place to which she had ever sunk. No. Her pale face was pinched as she stared at the man who had taken over her life. Lexi recalled the other damning piece of information that had really shattered her. She’d finally learned about the bet her new friends had placed to see which male ego would relieve her of her so obvious innocence before the end of that golden summer. She’d learned about the way all those people she’d stupidly called friends had watched and wagered and eventually laughed their exclusive heads off when Franco had won the prize. If she lived to be a hundred she would never be able to blank out the video someone had sent to her phone of Franco collecting his winnings. She still saw the date, the time and his lazily complacent smile. The only thing missing had been photographic evidence that he had actually bedded her. But that did not mean such evidence had not been around. Once the veils had been ripped from her eyes about Franco, she’d been able to believe him capable of anything. She’d been nothing but a big joke to him, and when the joke had backfired he had not known how the hell to cope.

In the way fate had of balancing things out, Francesco Tolle, golden boy of Europe’s glittering society, had found himself punished for his callous treatment of her when she’d found herself orphaned, pregnant and broke.

Lexi blinked back to the present as a door closed, and she realised the nurse had left them alone. Looking back at the monitor, she saw that everything had settled back down again while she’d been taking a walk down memory lane.

Franco still did not open his eyes, and Lexi began to wonder if he’d fallen asleep. She looked down at their hands still clasped together, his long strong fingers totally engulfing hers in the same way they’d used to do—only without the worrying shunt piercing the back of his hand, feeding liquids and drugs into his veins.

Hands that knew her more intimately than any other pair of hands, she thought, shifting on the chair when the thought became a physical memory that skittered across the surface of her skin. Lexi frowned, annoyed with herself for being so susceptible to a mere memory. It wasn’t as though he had the smooth caressing hands of an office dweller. His were firm, slightly callused capable hands, because Franco was at his happiest when he was hauling sail ropes on his yacht, Miranda, which he’d lived on that summer—or covered in grease and grime taking a boat engine to bits before he painstakingly put it back together again. Franco was a mariner through to his soul. Sailboats, powerboats, natty fast speedboats—even the giant supertankers and cruise liners the Tolle shipyard constructed near Livorno. As a qualified marine engineer Franco was in his element, no matter what size the craft. That he could also be successful at the business end of the Tolle empire was an extra string to his talented bow.

Then there was his well documented success with women. And why not? Lexi thought, unable to stop drifting her eyes over his powerful form, most of which was now hidden beneath the sheet. Leonardo da Vinci would have loved to meet Franco, she decided, for he was his ‘Vitruvian Man.’ Everything about him was in perfect proportion—even the strength reflected in his squared chin. He badly needed a shave, she noticed, feeling her fingers start to tingle with an urge to run them over the rough shadow that gave him the look of a reckless buccaneer. That he was—reckless, anyway; or he would not enjoy racing a supercharged powerboat at such dangerous speeds.