those times when she looked in his eyes and saw pained desire burning back at her nothing but creations of her own tortured mind, like a child desperate to see Father Christmas swearing blind they saw him flying his reindeer past their bedroom window? Nothing but a hopeful, overactive imagination?
She sensed when he was ready to leave his sanctuary and swallowed, placing a hand to her rapidly beating heart.
The bathroom door opened. Their eyes met.
He held her gaze a beat too long then broke it, striding past her to the nest he’d made by her door.
She watched his every step with her heart in her mouth.
Francesca had seen Felipe with nothing but tight swim shorts on at the swimming pool but she had been some distance away. Up close his magnificence was stark enough to steal her breath and set her already ragged pulses soaring. Up close there was no escaping the bulge in the snug black boxers he wore.
Even a straight man would do a double take at him.
A silvery mark on his right calf caught her eye, pulling her out of the trance she’d slipped into. ‘What happened to your leg?’
‘Gunshot,’ he answered gruffly.
His answer had her pressing the switch behind her to turn the corner light on.
Her hand flew to her mouth.
It wasn’t just a silvery mark; there was a hollowed out section of flesh around his shin bone that covered half his calf.
Thick icy sludge crawled up her spine and through her veins, freezing her from the inside out.
She could hardly get her vocal cords working to whisper, ‘What happened to you?’
‘The perils of army life.’
‘You were shot in battle?’
‘Something like that.’
Feeling faint, she took a long breath, unable to look away from the ugly wound that made her heart hurt.
Felipe was a military man. She’d known that before she’d met him. It was his career in the army, including his time in the Special Forces, that made him so effective at what he did, that had given him the solid foundations to build the hugely successful enterprise he had now.
Yet whenever she thought about the armed forces—admittedly, before she’d met Felipe that had been rarely—she’d imagined it to be like those computer games she’d been banned from watching Daniele play when he’d been younger and she much younger still but, of course, had sneakily peeked in on. She hadn’t seriously thought about what it must be like to be in a real war, to have people firing at you not for fun but because they wanted to kill you.
Someone had shot Felipe with the intention of killing him.
He must have noticed her horror for his expression hardened. ‘I apologise if my wound disgusts you.’
‘No.’ She shook her head, trying to clear it, trying to refocus her eyes. ‘Don’t think that. I don’t think that. Felipe...’ She shook her head some more.
Now the limp she’d often noticed made sense.
As if to distract her attention from his wound, Felipe slid into the makeshift bed he’d made for himself on the floor, thumped the top pillow and lay on his back, gazing at the ceiling with his arm crooked above his head.
Francesca turned the corner light off so the only illumination in the suite came from her bedside light.
She felt chilled to her core. If whoever had shot at him had had a better aim the vital, intense man who lay in a nest of bedding at her door would not be here. He would be gone from this earth like Pieta, nothing but a memory. But not a memory to her because she never would have met him.
She remembered Daniele—or was it Matteo?—saying Felipe had been discharged from the army on medical grounds.
‘Was that the reason you left the army?’
Even with the limited light she saw his grimace. ‘Yes. The wound meant I was no longer an effective soldier. It’s standard procedure. It wasn’t personal.’
‘Would you have stayed if you could?’
‘I would have stayed for as long as they’d had me. I loved the life.’
‘You loved going into war zones?’
He let out a low rumble of laughter. ‘Believe it or not, yes. I thrived on the danger. We all did. I loved everything about army life. Passing selection for the Special Forces was the best day of my life. Receiving my discharge was the worst.’
Felipe had known as soon as the bullet had hit him that it was the end of his army career and the end of everything he’d held dear. The bullet had splintered in his leg, shrapnel lodging in the bones. There had been talk of amputation.
The long months spent in rehabilitation, working into a sweat just to walk again, dealing with the pain of his wound and the darkness of what he’d lost...it had all brought home to him that he was meant to be alone.
When it was just you in the world the only threat of pain was the physical kind. He’d proven he could deal with that. Physical pain was mind over matter. Determination. It hurt but didn’t leave you bereft and empty inside.
For once Francesca was silent. He knew it wouldn’t be for long. He was right.
‘Is that why you went into protection? So you could still get the adrenaline buzz?’
‘The world is full of dangers and people still need to visit those danger zones. I knew I could provide the protection they needed and that there were many other soldiers like me who were fit and ready for the next challenge.’ But not Sergio. The first bullet that had hit him had gone straight into his heart.
‘Do you get the same fulfilment you got from the army?’
‘It’s a different kind of fulfilment.’ Even though he’d thrown all his energy into it, he could never have guessed how successful his business would be. He had more money than he could spend in a thousand lifetimes, was on the speed dial of the world’s most powerful people, but knew that given the choice of swapping his riches for a return to his army days he would discard his worldly goods without a second thought.
‘Don’t you ever wish for a normal life?’ she whispered in the silence.
‘What’s your definition of a normal life?’
‘One that’s not completely nomadic.’
‘No.’ Yet as he spoke his rebuttal he found his mind meandering for the first time ever to a real home with an ebony-haired beauty...
He pushed the thought away. A normal, regular life was not for him.
‘That’s enough talk. We’ve an early start. Get some sleep.’
‘But—’
‘I mean it. No more
