‘It wasn’t your fault.’ Lexi turned to put her arms around him and looked at him anxiously. ‘You have got to stop thinking that it was. You spoke so beautifully about him today, Franco,’ she reminded him softly. ‘Remember Marco as that person—the one you loved as a brother.’
They arrived at their destination then, and the boat demanded their attention. Perhaps it was a good thing, because it gave them time to detach themselves from the ugliness of the past—to throw it all away for good. They worked well together, in unison, like they’d used to do—as Franco had taught her all those years ago. Then they cooked Zeta’s pasta and took it up on deck to eat beneath the stars, drinking beer out of the bottles like they’d used to.
It was pretty much an exact replay of that perfect summer, Lexi thought as she sat cross-legged on the deck beside Franco’s outstretched strong golden legs and watched the restaurant lights beyond the tiny cove shine softly in the distance.
Yet there was still one small question that begged an answer. ‘What made you decide that Marco had been lying about me?’ she murmured softly.
He didn’t say anything for such a long time Lexi felt all the tension start to creep back. Then he heaved in a deep breath and reached for her, lifting her up to bring her down so she straddled his warm thighs. His eyes were dark in the soft light from the single lantern they’d lit. He looked sombre and thoughtful as he gently combed a lock of her hair away from her cheek.
‘Let me tell, instead, what loving you meant to me,’ he murmured deeply. ‘Loving you, anima mia, meant losing the ability to focus for long on anything without thinking about you. It meant checking the phone a hundred times a day in case you’d called. It meant walking into a room and searching it in case you might be there, and waking in the middle of the night with your name on my lips and your perfume in my nose and the taste—Dio,’ he husked, ‘the taste of you on my tongue. It meant I was lonely in a crowd of people. It was the joke I laughed at while I was crying inside, and the nagging ache that constantly dogged me low down in my gut, always there, driving me insane—yet the hell of it was I never wanted it to go away.’
Close to tears, Lexi pressed her fingers against his lips. ‘Please don’t say any more,’ she whispered. ‘You’re breaking my heart.’
‘My heart was broken,’ he said, reaching up to remove her fingers, kissing them, then keeping hold of them. ‘Don’t cry. When you cry it tears me apart. Loving you was wishing, and hating myself for wishing, and wanting you so badly. I used to conjure up the image Marco had put in my head of you with him, but the image always faded to show me just you. This Lexi,’ he described softly. ‘The one with the toffee-gold hair and the ocean-green eyes—loving me. Loving me, Lexi. And you never stopped, did you? After everything I did to murder your feelings for me, you could not stop loving me either. I saw it from the moment I looked into your beautiful face.’
‘Are you saying that you didn’t bring me back to Italy because you realised that Marco had been lying to you?’
Reaching up, he ran the tip of a finger along the trembling line of her mouth. ‘I did tell you several times that I’d already been planning to see you before the crash happened,’ he reminded her. ‘I just wanted you back. Your divorce papers gave me one hell of a jolt. They made me realise it was time to stop fighting myself, put the thing with Marco behind me and fight to get you back. Then, as I flew through the air that day and wondered if I was going to survive, it came to me in a blinding flash that Marco had lied to me. He had implied as much before the race, but …’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Lexi put in quickly. She did not want to think of him flying through the air, believing he was going to die. ‘I love you, Franco,’ she murmured urgently. ‘In every single way you just described about me, but I don’t want—’
Whatever it was Lexi did not want became lost when Franco captured her mouth in a hungry, hot, passionate kiss. Before she knew it she’d lost her bikini top and they were lying flat on the deck, making love in the velvet darkness—the way they’d used to do.
Later they went to the stateroom, holding hands all the way even though it made moving through the narrow doorways almost impossible.
‘You forgot to kiss the frogs,’ Franco said as they came together beneath the sheets.
‘To hell with the frogs,’ Lexi responded irreverently. ‘It’s you I want to kiss.’
* * * * *