He’d realised that a week or so after she’d left, when he still couldn’t unravel the way she’d left, as though escaping a fire that was burning her tail. She’d said she was leaving because Yaya was better but it had all happened so quickly and he got it: she felt like she was still married. Like she was having an affair. She’d turned Raf into the other man and guilt was eating her alive.
He should have understood that better, assuaged her concerns or at least addressed them head on, but he’d been dealing with his own changing perceptions, his own addiction to her growing beyond all reason. He’d become obsessed by her. What other explanation was there for the way she flooded his mind and body at all hours? For the fact he’d moved to Villa Fortune – yes to keep an eye on Yaya but also so he could see more of Lauren?
She’d bewitched him in a way that was completely unfamiliar.
He scanned the rocks for his next grip and moved up, tired now, ready for the climb to be over. His arms shook as he took the next step.
But the way they’d ended it had been all wron
g. He’d been angry, she’d been hurt. They’d argued and instead of telling her that their time had been an incredible gift he’d basically said ‘good riddance’.
He groaned; the last thing he wanted to think about was the look on her face as he’d said their relationship had ‘run its course’.
He paused, closing his eyes for a second, trapping her face in his mind and examining it, every little flicker in her eyes and on her features, burning through him now.
He cursed again.
After she’d left he’d told himself he was glad. Every day that passed, he’d thought, would bring him closer to normal. But the opposite was true. With every day that passed the more he felt as though a chasm was opening up in his chest, and he had no clue how to close it again.
He would conquer this. He would. He pushed up but just as he did so a bird flew towards him and despite knowing better, in a moment of distraction, he lifted a hand to ward it off. His foot gave way; he was falling.
Chapter Fourteen
Is this someone from the family you were with?
She read the subject line of her dad’s email with a fluttering heart, picking up the coffee cups Ashley had brought the day before and discarding them in the bin as she clicked into the attachment.
A newspaper article loaded up, and Lauren read it with a sinking feeling.
ITALIAN BILLIONAIRE IN CLIFF-FALL
There were scant details included. He’d fallen from a cliff on the family’s property in the Tuscan countryside and had been flown to a local hospital where he was in a critical condition. She read the small piece and pain spread through her chest, and all she could think was how stupid she’d been. How selfish. Raf might not love her but if anything happened to him and he hadn’t known how she’d felt, she would regret it forever. And she couldn’t – wouldn’t – let anything happen to him.
She grabbed for her keys and passport as she ran to the door, pausing only to slip shoes onto her feet then hailed a cab at the corner near her home. The flight she booked from her phone as the car drove towards Heathrow.
“Come on, come on,” she muttered under her breath as traffic snaked west. Finally she arrived at the airport. Security took forever, and once through she had only a few minutes left to run to her gate before boarding was open. There was no time to visit the bathroom, no time for anything. Somewhere during the short flight she had three spare seconds to be grateful that Ashley’s obvious shock at Lauren’s appearance had cajoled Lauren into showering for the first time in about a week, and that morning she’d actually pulled on a denim skirt and clean t-shirt. But how could she even think of such things when he was lying in a hospital bed?
“Oh, God.” She closed her eyes and remembered his powerful frame pulling himself up that damned cliff, remembered the way his body had commanded it, the way he’d laughed off her concerns. “Damn you.”
“Eh?” The woman beside Lauren asked, so she shook her head, unwilling to enter into any conversation with anyone.
Once the plane touched down she stood, willing any flight attendant to dared remind her to wait for the seatbelt sign to be switched off. There was no waiting. She needed to get to Raf.
With no luggage to collect, she fled through the airport unencumbered, bursting onto the footpath and looking left then right for the taxi rank. She cut to the front of it.
“I’m terribly sorry, it’s an emergency,” she explained, and perhaps the wild state of her hair and appearance and something in her eyes conveyed the fear she was feeling because the man nodded and waved.
“Si, si, certo.”
She pressed her hands together in a gesture of praying. “Thank you so much.”
The taxi attendant guided her to a car at the front of the rank and she slipped into it, giving the address of the hospital – the largest one in the region and where she was guessing he’d been taken. She loaded up the map on her phone so she could follow the driver’s route herself.
She prayed the entire way there. She prayed to everything and everyone, she begged and made silent deals and treaties, she begged and she fought back tears because this was a time to be strong.
They reached the hospital and she tapped her credit card, stepping out of the car with haste and scanning the entrance before she broke into a run.
“Signor Montebello,” she said at the counter, apologising to a woman who’d probably been next in line. “Please.”