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It would help no one if he crumbled.
The whole family was on the edge, grasping on to fragile threads of hope extended by grim-faced doctors. His was the strength that they used. The rock that they leaned on. If he caved in, gave in to the desire to howl like a baby, then the morale of the whole family would disintegrate. The game they were playing—the game of hope—would be ended.
So instead he stared in brooding silence at the bruised, immobile body of his sister, willing her to wake up, and he was still staring when the door opened again, this time to admit the doctor who was in charge of his sister's case together with several more junior doctors.
Ignoring the minions and the immediate response of his own security team to this latest intrusion, Rico's attention zeroed in on the man in charge, sensing from his manner that he had news to impart. Suddenly he was almost afraid to ask the question that needed to be asked.
'Any change?' His voice was hoarse with strain, lack of sleep and something much worse. The fear of prompting bad news. 'Has there been any change?'
'Some.' The doctor cleared his throat, clearly more than a little intimidated by the formidable status of the man standing in front of him. 'Her vital signs have improved slightly and she regained consciousness briefly,' he announced quietly. 'She spoke.'
'She spoke?' Relief flooded through him and for the first time in days he felt lighter. 'She said something?'
The doctor nodded. 'She was very difficult to understand, but one of the nurses thinks that it was a name.' He hesitated and looked at them questioningly. 'Stasia? It sounded like Stasia. Could that be right?'
Stasia?
Rico froze, momentarily stunned into shocked silence, while behind him his mother gave a strangled gasp of horror and his grandmother gave another wail.
Rico gritted his teeth and tried to shut out the sound. He would have done anything to banish his well-meaning family to the privacy of his estate but he knew that, for the time being, that option was out of the question. They needed to be here with Chiara. It was just unfortunate that their hysterical display of emotion was making his job harder, not easier.
And now that Stasia had been mentioned the situation was about to deteriorate rapidly.
The mere sound of her name was enough to detonate an explosion within his family.
And as for his own feelings—
He closed his eyes briefly and rubbed long fingers over his bronzed forehead. With his sister righting for her life, he didn't need to be thinking about Stasia. It seemed that fate was determined to make further efforts to crush him.
The doctor cleared his throat. 'Well, whoever she is—could she be brought to the hospital?'
Ignoring his mother's moan of denial, Rico forced himself to focus on the main issue. His sister's recovery. Somehow he voiced the words. 'Would it make a difference?'
'It might.' The doctor shrugged. 'Difficult to say, but anything is worth a try. Can she be contacted?'
Not without considerable emotional sacrifice.
His mother rose to her feet, her face contorting with anger and pain. 'No! I won't have her here! She—'
'Enough!' Rico felt the ripple of curiosity spread through the medical team and silenced his mother with one cool, quelling flash of his unusually expressive black eyes.
It was bad enough that the world's press was camped on their doorstep, tracking every moment of their darkest hour, without supplying them with further fodder for gossip.
Stasia.
How ironic that this should happen now, he reflected, when the connection between them was about to be severed permanently. He had thought that there was no circumstance that would ever require him to lay eyes on his wife again. For the past few months he'd had a team of lawyers working overtime to draw up a divorce settlement that he thought was fair.
Enough to buy her out of his life and leave him with a clear conscience to marry again. This time to a gentle, compliant Italian girl who understood what it meant to be the wife of a traditional Italian male.
Not a fiery English redhead who was all heat and spark and knew nothing about compliance.
He sucked in a breath as a clear vision of Stasia— wild, beautiful Stasia —flared in his mind and he felt the immediate throb of raw sexual heat pulse through his body. It had been a year since their final, blistering encounter and despite the distasteful circumstances of their parting, his body still craved her with almost indecent desperation. And he didn't trust himself to see her again. She affected his judgement in ways that he didn't want to admit, even to himself.
Despite everything she'd done, Stasia was as addictive as any drug and seeing her again was not a sensible move. In the past year he'd learned to hate her, had learned to see her for what she was.
A mistake.
Rico paced back to the window and studied his sister in brooding silence, an ominous expression on his handsome face as he reviewed his options. They were de-pressingly limited. Reaching the unpalatable conclusion that his own needs and wishes had to be secondary to the issue of his sister's recovery, he forced himself to accept that he was going to have to see Stasia again.
