The Man Who Risked It All

Lexi blinked in an effort to clear the glaze of confusion from her head. ‘But—but that was m-my room.’

‘With his stuff hanging in the wardrobes?’

‘Yes!’ she cried out. ‘Bruce’s clothes were in the wardrobes! You’ve seen him, Franco, you know what he’s like about clothes! He—he must have a hundred Savile Row suits and two hundred shirts, and before I went to stay with him he spread them between the two bedrooms! I was only there for couple of months, so he didn’t bother to clear them out!’

In the trammelling silence that followed her shrill explanation Lexi stared at Franco’s angry face and took in the seething force of the vibrations still holding his naked frame so tense.

‘Y-you came to see me—?’ The frail shake wrapped around that belated enquiry made him lower his eyelids over the turbulent shimmer in control of his eyes.

‘A month after you left me.’ He relayed that answer as if it had been dragged out of him by torture.

Lexi did not miss the significance of the month and the accusations she’d just thrown at him about his women. Clasping her arms around her body, she shivered.

‘You were not there. He said you were attending several auditions in an attempt to get your stalled career back on track. He told me Hollywood beckoned,’ he mocked bitterly, ‘and you would be much better off if I …’

He didn’t need to finish that sentence. Lexi found it too easy to finish it for herself. Bruce had tried to convince her to go straight back into acting, maintaining it would be the best way to work through her broken-hearted grief. He’d even set up auditions with a couple of famous directors that she’d refused to attend. When all attempts to make her see things his way had failed to move her, he’d offered her a job working with him at the agency instead.

And she’d accepted. Bruce had been determined to keep her close this time—no matter what it took. When she’d moved into her own flat he’d been angry for weeks …

‘Oh, my God, he …’ She flattened a hand against her mouth as the ugly words dried up like water droplets hitting a sand dune; but those watered grains of sand started melding together as everything about Bruce and their long relationship came together to make a sick kind of sense.

When Franco had accused Bruce of being a control freak he had not been plucking insults out of the air. He’d had hard evidence of exactly how much Bruce was trying to control her life. Then she remembered the other things Franco had called Bruce and nausea began to claw at her stomach. Unable to just stand there in the centre of the tumbling fallout happening inside her, Lexi turned in a dizzy reel to head for the bedroom door—only she couldn’t make it that far, and ended up sinking weakly down on the side of the bed. For the last ten years Bruce had always been there, in the background of her life, a calm, often critical but always totally dependable figure watching over her—or waiting for her to grow up?

Then her mother had met Philippe and loosened the reins on her. Lexi had tripped off and fallen head over heels in love with her tall, dark, handsome Italian while all Bruce had been able to do was watch it happen and wait for the love affair to burn itself out—as, she supposed, everyone else had waited for it to burn out.

Still standing in the bathroom doorway, Franco was wishing he’d kept his damn mouth shut. He’d never meant to tell her any of that: now he’d brutally shattered her with it. And the way he’d regarded Dayton’s obsession with Lexi did not necessarily mean it was as sinister as he’d made it out to be. Dayton was a good-looking guy, up there and out there, with a string of beautiful women trailing in and out of his life. The age gap between him and Lexi did not mean much in current society when, basically, if a guy still had it then he might as well go for it. His own father entertained liaisons with women with a wider age gap and no one batted a critical eye.

No, his view of Dayton was jaundiced by old-fashioned jealousy and the ten years the guy had hung on, waiting for Lexi to notice him as a prospective lover. He’d seen the desire in Dayton’s face the first time he’d met him, known exactly where he was coming from, and had wanted to punch him ever since.

But none of that justified the way he’d made her face the truth about Dayton, because he’d done it to wound. Now he wanted to kick something because—damn it—how the hell was he going to tell her about Marco when he’d already wounded her enough with this?

Lexi didn’t know he’d moved until she felt his fingers close around her wrists and she was pulled inexorably to her feet. He wrapped her in his arms, the hairs on his chest tickling her nose as he heaved air into his lungs, then let it out again.

‘I should not have said anything,’ he said heavily. ‘After the way we parted you had every right to try and put your life back together any way that you wanted to—’

‘But wh—what you described never happened,’ Lexi denied painfully.

‘I know that now.’ He drew her closer so her forehead rested against his chest.

Lexi tried to squeeze a hand between them so she could wipe a stray tear from her cheek. ‘Why was everyone so against us, Franco?’ she asked in a bewildered voice. ‘What were we doing that was so terrible?’

His response rumbled against her brow in its gravity. ‘They had their own agendas, Lexi. Dayton … Claudia … and …’ Another sigh eased from him. ‘What they wanted does not really matter to us—this matters.’ Combing his fingers into her hair, he gently coaxed her to lift up her head. Their eyes met: his dark and somber, with bleak golden flashes; hers ocean pools of incomprehension and hurt. ‘We are here, together, and we have not exactly hung around in making it back to this point. I call that fate giving them all a hard smack across the head for interfering in the first place.’

He wanted her to smile, to lighten the heavy weight in the atmosphere, but Lexi shook her head. ‘It took a terrible accident and Marco’s death to get us here,’ she said sadly. ‘Without the accident we would be talking through our lawyers about our divorce.’

‘That’s not true.’ As she tried to pull away Franco tightened his arms around her. ‘I told you I had already made up my mind I was coming to see you before the accident happened.’

‘For what reason?’ Her shrug told him she didn’t understand why he should want to bother.

‘Because I spent the la

st three years looking for a good excuse to do it.’

As she stilled in surprise at that dry confession, Franco lowered his head and kissed her soft, quivering mouth. Her lips clung—of course they did, she thought helplessly. He was just so gorgeously good at kissing.

‘I missed you,’ he said. ‘I got on with my life, and the focus was probably good for business, but always in the background I missed you and what we had together. Can you tell me honestly that it was not the same for you?’

She couldn’t deny it, but she was still too upset by what Bruce had done to do more than offer up a small shrug. Franco pulled her in close again and just held her. It was only when he felt her shiver he realised they’d been standing there stark naked while indulging in yet another argument.