The Man Who Risked It All

Remembering that kiss, and her subsequent promise, Lexi shifted tensely. ‘I told you I was staying.’

‘Tell me again so I can be sure, and this time make it a promise.’

‘Franco,’ she sighed out wearily, ‘this is all so …’

At was as if something or someone had switched her off. Franco watched her frown and catch her bottom lip with her teeth. He took in the loss of colour in her cheeks and the signs of strain and exhaustion bruising the circles around her eyes. The slight quiver in the lip she was biting told him she was upset, and the way she had to think before she spoke told him she had been gagged by the doctor from saying what she really wanted to say to him.

Lexi was stubborn. She was not the emotional pushover everyone liked to think she was. She had a hot, impulsive temper and right now he could tell she was having a fight to keep that temper in check, because he had, in effect, chained her to this bed with him.

Did he feel bad about that? No, he felt bloody elated about that. They’d gagged her and he’d chained her to his bed. All he wanted right now was for her to confirm that.

‘OK.’ She heaved in a fresh lungful of air. ‘I promise to stay around.’

‘Then I will not try to get out of this bed until they say that I can,’ he parried, and turned his hand over on the white sheet, watching as she looked down at it, knowing that she understood what the gesture meant. After a short hesitation she lifted her own hand and placed it against his.

Deal sealed, he thought as he folded his fingers around her fingers, then released a sigh of contentment and closed his eyes. ‘What time is it?’ he asked.

‘Ten o’clock,’ Lexi answered. ‘You slept through dinner—’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘—so I ate it,’ she concluded.

That brought his eyes back open, and placed a lazy smile on his lips. He turned his head to look at her and his eyes had softened. That awful blank glaze had gone to reveal deep brown irises like velvet threaded with gold that warmed her all the way through even though she did not want it to.

‘What was it?’ he questioned curiously.

‘Pomodori con riso supplied by Zeta,’ she told him. ‘Your father has arranged for her to—’

‘Did she send a dessert?’

He’d done it again—blocked her from mentioning his father. ‘A couple of truly delicious Maritozzi buns. Franco, about your father—’

He withdrew his hands from hers. ‘Since when have you been Salvatore’s biggest fan?’ he demanded impatiently. ‘He treated you like a lowlife when we were together.’

‘I’m not his adored son.’

Flattening out his lips, he shut his eyes again.

In bubbling frustration Lexi sat back in her seat, then instantly sat forward again: no matter what the doctor had advised, or what Franco himself preferred, she found she still could not let the subject rest.

She reached out to retrieve his hand. ‘Francesco, please just listen—’

‘Franco,’ he interrupted. ‘I know you are mad with me when you call me Francesco.’

Lowering her gaze to his hand, Lexi watched her own fingers drawing patterns on hi

s palm the way she’d used to do when they talked. Quite suddenly she wanted to break down and weep. They’d been together for six months. For two of those months they had been inseparable. For the other four they’d hated each other’s guts.

‘And when you extend that to Francesco Tolle,’ he continued, giving a good mimic of her cut-crystal English accent, ‘I know I am in really deep trouble.’

‘You stopped calling me Lexi altogether,’ Lexi recalled dully. ‘I became Alexia—and if you think my accent was cold, yours was made of ice picks.’

‘I was angry.’

‘I know you were.’

‘I was wildly in love with you but we—’