The Man Who Risked It All

‘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.