Australian Affairs: Seduced: The Accidental Romeo. Carol Marinelli

you die, I don’t want to go on living. Do you hear me, Rico?” She leaned forward, her head resting against the strong muscles of his forearm. “Please, don’t die,” she pleaded as tears once again bathed her skin and his.

      She was dozing when a familiar voice repeating her name woke her up.

      “Gianna? Wake up, piccola mia.”

      She lifted her head from its resting place by Rico’s thigh. Sometime in the last five hours, she had lowered the bedrail and settled her head beside him. She needed the physical contact as a reminder that Rico was still alive.

      Her eyes slowly focused as she blinked in the subdued lighting of the ICU cubicle. “Andre, where are your parents?”

      He grimaced. “They left only two days ago on a cruise aboard a friend’s yacht to celebrate their anniversary. Papa insisted on complete privacy and secrecy. They won’t be back for another month and I know of no way to contact them. Rico was the only one with that information.”

      He left unsaid the obvious. Rico was in no condition to share his knowledge with them. Her insides twisted when she thought of the reaction Rico’s parents would have to the news of their son’s accident and Andre’s inability to reach them.

      “If he dies…” Andre’s emotion-filled voice trailed off.

      She glared at the younger version of Rico. “He won’t die. I won’t let him,” she said fiercely.

      Andre reached out and squeezed her shoulder, but said nothing. He didn’t need to. They both knew she could not will Rico to live, but that wouldn’t stop her from trying.

      “The doctor said there has been no change in his condition since it stabilized after he was brought in.”

      “Yes.” She’d been there for every blood pressure check, every time a nurse came in and read his monitors, marking the stats down on his chart.

      “When did you arrive?” he asked.

      She shrugged. “A couple of hours after you called.”

      “The drive is longer than that.”

      She just looked at him and he sighed. “It’s a good thing you didn’t get a ticket. Rico would have blasted you for it.”

      “When he comes out of his coma he can lecture me all he likes about my driving.”

      Andre nodded. “I know.” Then his gaze skirted the room as if looking for something. “Where’s Chiara? I thought she was supposed to be with him on this trip. She’s modeling in some show while Rico attends the banking conference.”

      She told him what the doctor had said and Andre cursed eloquently in Italian, then switched to Arabic when he saw the way her face turned red. “I’m sorry. She’s just such a bitch and my brother’s too smitten to see it.”

      The image of a love-struck Rico was both painful and funny. “I can’t quite imagine Rico’s judgment completely obliterated by a pretty face, Andre. I’m sure there are things about Chiara that he genuinely admires. He’s marrying her after all. He must love her.” Even saying the words hurt, but she gritted her teeth against the pain of acknowledging Rico’s desire for another woman.

      Andre snorted. “More likely he’s sexually obsessed with her. She knows how to use her body to its best advantage.”

      If her face had been red before, now it was flaming. “I…”

      Andre sighed. “You are so innocent, piccola.”

      She didn’t want to dwell on her twenty-three-year-old virginal status. She’d never wanted any man but Rico and he’d never seen her as anything other than a younger sister.

      “How was your flight?”

      Andre shook his head. “I don’t know. I spent the entire time praying and worrying.”

      She reached out and gripped his hand, never letting go of her connection with the man in the bed. “He’ll be all right, Andre. He has to.”

      “Have you eaten since you got here?”

      “I haven’t been hungry.”

      “It’s hours past breakfast,” he admonished her.

      And 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