Franco? For the first time since the news had tossed her into a dark pit of shock, Lexi blinked and saw daylight. It was one thing to know that Franco had finally taken one wild risk too many, and even to stand here experiencing the full horror of the result, but—go to him?
‘I’m sorry, I can’t do that.’ It felt as if the words had peeled themselves off the walls of her throat, they were so difficult to utter.
‘What do you mean, you cannot?’ Salvatore ground out. ‘You are his wife. It is your duty to come here!’
His wife. How very odd that sounded, Lexi thought as she twisted around to face the window, her eyes taking on a bleak blue glint. Her duty to Franco as his wife had ended three and a half years ago, when he—
‘His estranged wife,’ she corrected. ‘I’m sorry that Francesco has been injured, signor. But I am no longer a part of his life.’
‘Where is your charity, woman?’ her father-in-law hissed in an icy tone that was more in keeping with the man Lexi remembered. ‘He is bleeding and broken! He has just lost his closest friend!’
‘M-Marco is … dead?’ It was yet another shock that held Lexi frozen as the shattering chill of loss seemed to crystallise her flesh.
She stared blindly at the grey skies beyond her office window and saw the handsome laughing face of Marco Clemente. Her heart squeezed with aching grief and the sheer unfairness of it. Marco had never done a bad thing to anyone. He’d been the easygoing one of the two lifelong friends. Where Franco had always been the high charged extrovert, the reckless daredevil, Marco had tagged along because, he’d once told her, he was lazy. It was easier to go with Franco’s flow than waste energy trying to swim against it.
Knowing Franco as she did, he was probably crucifying himself right now for involving Marco in his thirst for danger and speed. He would be blaming himself for Marco’s death.
‘I’m so very sorry,’ she whispered across the fresh ache in her throat.
‘Si,’ Salvatore Tolle acknowledged. ‘It is good to know that you feel sadness for Marco. Now I ask you again—will you come to my son?’
‘Yes.’ Lexi said it without thought or hesitation this time, for no matter how hurt and bitter she felt about Franco, his losing Marco had just changed everything.
Marco and Franco … One without the other was like day without night.
Lowering the phone back onto its rest, Lexi began to shiver again. She just could not stop herself. Lifting a hand to her eyes, she covered the threat of tears stinging there and wished she knew if she was feeling like this because she was relieved that Franco was alive or because poor Marco was … not.
‘He’s alive, then?’
Spinning around to find that once again Bruce had entered the room without her hearing him, Lexi pressed her quivering lips together and nodded her head.
Bruce’s slender lips twisted into a grimace. ‘I thought the lucky swine would be.’
‘There is no luck involved in being flung through the air with a load of lethal debris, Bruce!’ Lexi reacted fiercely.
‘And the other one—Marco Clemente?’
Wrapping her arms tightly around her body, she gestured a mute negative.
‘Poor devil,’ he murmured.
At least that comment conveyed no sarcasm, she noticed. She pulled in a deep, fortifying breath of air. ‘I am going to have to take some time off.’
Bruce stood regarding her through narrowed eyes and Lexi could tell that he was not impressed by that announcement. ‘So the Tolle effect still holds strong with you, then?’ he said eventually. ‘You’re going to go to him.’
‘It would be wrong of me not to.’
‘Even though you are in the process of divorcing him?’
Flushing in response to that challenging question, Lexi half wished that she had not told Bruce that the papers had gone out to Francesco’s lawyers two weeks ago.
‘That isn’t relevant in this situation,’ she defended. ‘Marco and Franco were like twin brothers. It’s only right and fitting that we put our differences aside at a time of tragedy like this.’
‘That’s just bull, Lexi,’ Bruce denounced. ‘I’m the guy you ran to when your lousy marriage blew up in your face,’ he reminded her with sardonic bite. ‘I saw what he did to you. I mopped up the tears. So if you think I am going to stand by in silence and watch you walk back into that poisonous relationship then you can just think again.’
Raising her chin, she turned back to face him. ‘I’m not about to walk into a relationship with Franco.’
‘Then what are you doing?’
‘Visiting a grieving and seriously injured man!’
‘For what purpose?’
Opening her lips to let fly with a heated answer, Lexi flailed for a second and closed her lips again.
‘You still love him,’ Bruce stated contemptuously.
‘I don’t love him.’ Walking around her desk, she found herself making hard work of hunting through drawers for her bag.
‘You still lust after him, then.’
‘I do not!’ She found the bag and pulled it out of the drawer.
‘Then why are you going?’ Bruce persisted doggedly as he prowled towards her, reminding her of a sleek hunting dog gnawing on a particularly tough bone.
‘I’m only taking a couple of days off, for goodness’ sake!’ Lexi breathed out heavily.
‘Did he find time to come to your bedside when you were losing his baby?’ Bruce thrust the words at her like a fisted punch. ‘No. Did he give a damn that you were heartbroken, frightened and alone? No,’ he punched again. ‘He was too busy rolling around in a bed somewhere with his latest bit of skirt. It took him twenty-four hours to turn up, and by then the well-laid bitch had made sure you knew where he’d been. You owe him nothing, Lexi!’
‘None of that means that I have to behave as badly as he did!’ Lexi cried out, pale as parchment now, because everything he had just said was so painfully true. ‘He’s hurt, Bruce, and I liked Marco. Please try to understand that I would not be able to live with myself if I didn’t go!’
‘At the expense of us?’
The us held Lexi trapped as she stared at the sharply attractive man standing in front of her desk, looking the epitome of sartorial elegance in a cool grey suit, and she felt the ache of wretched tears return to her throat. Bruce was thirty-five years old to her twenty-three, and the glossy patina of his maturity and sophistication sometimes threatened to drown her in intimidating waves. The cold anger glinting in his pale blue eyes, the cynical edge to his grimly held mouth … Bruce rarely showed this side of himself to her, and in truth she’d never dreamed he would do this—bring out into the open what the two of them had been carefully
