Public Wife, Private Mistress

CHAPTER ONE

She was not going to die.

Rico Crisanti, billionaire President of the Crisanti Corporation, stared grimly through the window that sep­arated the relatives' room from the intensive care unit, oblivious to the dreamy stares of the nurses working on the unit. He was used to women staring. Women always stared. Sometimes he noticed. Sometimes he didn't.

Today he didn't.

His gaze was fixed on the still body of the girl who lay on the bed, surrounded by doctors and high-tech machinery.

The jacket of his designer suit had long since been removed, tossed with careless disregard for its future appearance over the back of a standard issue hospital chair, and he now stood in a state of rigid tension, silk shirtsleeves rolled back to reveal bronzed forearms, his firm jaw grazed by a dark stubble that made him more bandit than businessman.

For a man as driven as Rico, a man accustomed to controlling and directing, a man accustomed to action, the waiting was proving to be the worst kind of torture.

Waiting for anything was not his strong point.

He wanted the problem fixed now. But for the first time in his life he'd discovered that there was something that he couldn't control. Something that money couldn't buy.

The life of his teenage sister.

Rico swore softly under his breath, fighting the temp­tation to punch his fist through the glass.

He'd been at the hospital for the best part of two weeks and never had he felt so helpless. Never had he felt so ill-equipped to solve a problem that confronted him.

Blocking out the muted sobs of his mother, grand­mother, aunt and two cousins, he stared in brooding, frustrated silence at the still figure, as if the very force of his personality might be sufficient to rouse her from her unconscious state.

There must be something more he could do. He was the man with a solution for everything and he refused to give up.

He sucked in a breath and tried to think clearly, but he'd recently discovered that lack of sleep, grief and worry were not a combination designed to focus the mind. Fear had induced a mind-numbing paralysis that was becoming harder to shake with each passing hour.

Trying to clear his head, he inhaled deeply and ran a hand over the back of his neck, clenching his jaw as his mother gave another poorly disguised sob of dis­tress. The sound cut like a blade through his heart. The expectation of his family weighed on him heavily and for the first time in his life he knew what it felt like to be truly helpless.

He'd flown in a top neurosurgeon who had operated to relieve the pressure on Chiara's brain caused by the bleed. She was breathing on her own but still hadn't recovered consciousness. Her life hung in the balance and no one could predict the outcome. No one could answer the question.

Life or death.

And if it were life, would it be life with disability, or life as Chiara had known it before the horse had thrown her?

He swore softly and raked strong fingers through his hair. To Rico, that was the hardest aspect to cope with. The exquisite, drawn out mental torture of waiting. He'd seen his mother worn down by it, had watched the black shadows grow under her eyes as she lived under the cruel shadow of uncertainty on a daily basis. Had watched her wither slightly as she was forced to ask herself whether this would be the day when she lost her only daughter —

Suddenly his own powerlessness mocked him and had he not been too drained for laughter, then he would have laughed at his own arrogance.

Had he really thought that he could control destiny?

The vow he'd made to his father, the vow he'd made to look after the family, seemed suddenly empty and worthless. What did it matter that he'd created an em­pire from nothing but dust using only fierce determi­nation? What did it matter that his success in building that empire had been nothing short of staggering? Somewhere along the way he'd started to believe that there was nothing he couldn't control. Nothing he couldn't do if he set his mind to it. And it had taken this accident to remind him that no amount of riches could protect a man from the hand of fate.

Driven by the monumental frustration of doing noth­ing, he loosened another button on his silk shirt with impatient fingers and paced the room, his long strides and the confined space combining to provide little in the way of relief. Emotion, as unwelcome as it was unfamiliar, clogged his throat and for the first time since he was a small child he felt the hot sting of tears threaten his usually icy composure.

Cursing his own weakness, he closed his eyes and rubbed long fingers along the bridge of his nose as if he could physically hold back the building pressure of grief.