that was how the next four days went. Rico was moved to a private room, per Andre’s instructions. Gianna took the opportunity to shower. Other than that, she refused to leave Rico’s room. She spent every moment, waking and dozing, by Rico’s bedside. Andre bullied her into eating and drinking only by bringing the food and beverages into Rico’s room.
Chiara came to see Rico once a day and stayed for five minutes each time. She looked at Gianna with a mixture of scorn and pity. “Do you really think this incessant vigil will make the least difference? He’ll wake up when he wakes up and then he will want me by his side.”
Gianna didn’t bother to argue. No doubt Chiara was right, but it didn’t matter.
It was three in the morning on the fifth day. The hospital halls were quiet, the nurse had taken Rico’s vitals at midnight and no staff had come to disturb the silence of his room since. Andre was asleep on a reclining chair in the corner. Gianna couldn’t doze, so she was talking again and touching Rico.
She brushed his arm and looked lovingly into his still face. “I love you, Rico. More than my own life. Please wake up. I don’t care if it’s to marry Chiara and give her all the babies I want to have. I don’t care if you kick me out of your life after hearing what a besotted fool I’ve been the last five days. Just wake up.”
She said the last on a note of desperation and was hoping so fiercely for him to make some sign he’d heard that when he moved, she thought she’d imagined it. The muscles of his arms spasmed and his head jerked from side to side.
She pressed the call button while shouting to Andre. “He’s coming out of it! Andre, wake up!”
Andre came out of the chair fully alert. After that, everything was a blur. The nurse came running in. Soon she was followed by a doctor and then another nurse. Andre and Gianna were shooed out of the room. Then came the waiting. Gianna paced while Andre first sat and then stood, then paced, then sat again. Finally, the doctor came into the waiting room.
It was the same one who’d been on call the night Rico had been brought in. He smiled at Andre and Gianna. “He’s awake, but he’s a little disoriented. You can see him for five minutes one at a time.”
Andre went first. He came back to the waiting room, his expression troubled.
She was desperate to see Rico and would have brushed by Andre without a word, but his hand snaked out and grabbed her. “Wait, cara. There is something I must tell you.”
“What is it?”
Andre swallowed convulsively and then met her gaze head-on. The look of anguish in his eyes terrified her.
“What’s wrong? He hasn’t gone back into a coma, has he?”
“No. He…” Andre took a deep breath and let it out. “He can’t move his legs.”
CHAPTER TWO
RICO’S eyes were fixed on the doorway when Gianna walked in. She couldn’t miss the expression of disappointment that clouded his expression briefly before he masked it.
“Hello, piccola mia. Did Andre ask you to come and keep him company waiting for me to wake up?”
The endearment did things to her heart when Rico said it that didn’t happen when Andre called her his little one. She smiled, her relief that he was talking so acute, she couldn’t get a word past the blockage in her throat for several seconds. She stopped beside the bed, noticing someone had raised the guardrail.
“I couldn’t have been kept away,” she said with more honesty than was probably wise.
One corner of his mouth tipped up. “Always the nurturer. I still remember the cat…”
His words trailed off. He looked tired. Exhausted, really. “He turned out to be a lovely pet.”
“So Mama thought. She gave him the run of the place until he died,” he replied, speaking of a tabby cat she had rescued from the road after it had been injured when she was ten.
“Pamela was furious with me and wanted to call the animal people to come take it away,” she said, speaking of her stepmother. Gianna smiled. “You wouldn’t let her.”
“What kind of cat do you have now?”
She’d always had pets, usually strays picked up from somewhere, but once there had been a puppy her parents had given her when she was four. He’d been a wonderful friend and she’d cried buckets when he died. “I don’t have any animals.”
His face registered surprise. “That’s not like you.”
It wasn’t by choice. She lived in campus housing and pets weren’t allowed. She had no intention of burdening Rico with her problems, however. So she just smiled again and shrugged.
“You haven’t asked how I’m feeling.”
She gripped the bedrail to stop herself from touching him. She’d gotten so used to the freedom over the past five days. “You look like you’ve been pummeled on the playground by the school bully. I don’t imagine you feel much better.”
That made him chuckle and she rejoiced in the sound. Then he sobered. “My legs don’t move.” His expression and voice had gone blank.
She couldn’t resist the urge to take his hand. “They will. You’ve got to be patient. You’ve had a terrible experience. Your body is still in shock.”
His eyes remained unreadable, but his hand returned her grip with betraying fierceness. “Where is Chiara?”
Oh, Heavens. Gianna had forgotten to call the other woman. She felt guilty color stain her cheeks. “I was so excited you’d come out of coma, I forgot to call.” She reluctantly pulled her hand from his. “I’ll do it right away.”
“Tell her to come round in the morning.” His eyes closed. “I’ll be more myself then.”
“All right.” She moved toward the door. “Sleep well, caro,” she whispered. The endearment was so common it was like saying hey you, but she said it with a surfeit of emotion she prayed he could not hear.
He didn’t reply.
Rico waited impatiently for Chiara to come. Andre and Gianna had both been in to see him again this morning and stayed until he had tired. Gianna looked exhausted and thinner than he remembered. He wondered if her job as an assistant professor was taking too much out of her. He’d have to talk to his mother about it.
But even exhausted, Gianna exuded an innocent sensuality that he’d never been completely able to ignore. At times it had made him feel guilty because his body reacted even though his mind saw her as more sister than woman. Regardless of his body’s baffling response, he’d never once considered pursuing it. He didn’t bed virgins and until recently, marriage had held no appeal.
His damn legs still wouldn’t move and the doctors could not tell him if the paralysis was permanent or not. Gianna was convinced it was temporary and had said so again that morning. She was such a sweet little thing. He was surprised she wasn’t married yet. She’d be twenty-four next year, but then American women married later, he thought. It was too bad Andre
