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“She stayed for about an hour, but when we informed her he was in a coma and we didn’t know how soon he’d come out of it, she decided to leave. She left a number to call when he wakes up.” There was a wealth of disgust in his words.
“She must be really upset.” Gianna looked again at Rico’s motionless countenance and had no trouble understanding his fiancée going to pieces over it. She couldn’t imagine leaving his side, but then everyone dealt with fear in their own way.
“She’ll sleep fine tonight. She insisted we prescribe her an oral sedative,” the doctor added.
Gianna nodded absently, once again focused almost entirely on Rico. She rubbed the skin of his hand with her thumb. “He’s so warm. It’s hard to believe he isn’t sleeping normally.”
The doctor made some comments about physiological differences between coma and normal sleep that she only half listened to.
“Is it all right if I stay?” she asked, knowing it would take an orderly for each arm and one for her legs to get her to move from Rico’s bedside.
Laughter rumbled in the doctor’s throat. “If I said no?”
“I’d sneak back in wearing scrubs and a mask and hide under the bed,” she admitted, amazed she could find any humor in a hospital room with Rico lying broken in the bed.
“As I thought. Are you his sister?” the doctor asked.
She felt the blood rush into her cheeks. Should she lie again? Looking at the understanding light in the doctor’s eyes, she didn’t think she would have to. “No, I’m a family friend.”
Speculation flickered briefly in his expression before he nodded. “I won’t tell if you won’t. It’s obvious you care. Your presence can’t hurt and may very well help enormously.”
Relief swirled through her bloodstream. “Thank you.”
“It’s all about what’s best for the patient.” The doctor exited the cubicle thinking it was a pity his patient wasn’t engaged to the tiny woman who obviously cared so much instead of the gorgeous Amazon with a heart like a rock.
Gianna was only vaguely aware of the doctor’s departure as memories of Rico assailed her. She picked up his hand. It was heavy and she kissed his palm before laying it back on the bed, her own covering it.
“Do you remember the year Mama died? I was five and you were thirteen. You should have hated having me tag after you. Andre called me a pest often enough, but you didn’t. You held my hand and talked to me about Mama. You took me to Duomo Cathedral, such a beautiful place, and told me I could be close to Mama there. It hurt so much and I was scared, but you comforted me.”
She suppressed the memory of how different it had been a year ago when her dad died. Rico had been dating Chiara then and the other woman had no time for Gianna and had made sure Rico didn’t, either.
“Rico, I don’t want comforting now. Do you hear me? I want you to get better. I thought nothing could hurt more than when you announced your engagement…but I was wrong. If 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 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 didn’t see her as marriage material. Rico wouldn’t mind having her in the family.
A surge of something dark and inexplicable stabbed him at the image of Andre walking down the aisle with Gianna. He tried to convince himself it was because Rico didn’t know if he would be able to walk down the aisle with Chiara when the time came. He could very well still be in a wheelchair. But something ugly had shifted in him at the thought of Gianna married.
Was he such an egoist he couldn’t stand the thought of losing her innocent adoration? The thought did not sit well.
“Caro! You mustn’t glare like that. You’ll scare the nurses off and then who will bring you your lunch?” A trill of laughter accompanied Chiara into the room.
He watched his beautiful fiancée’s entrance. Any man would be proud to claim Chiara for his own, but she belonged to Rico. “Give me a kiss and I won’t feel like frowning any more.”
She made a moue with her mouth. “Naughty man. You’re sick.”
“So kiss me and make it better,” he taunted.
Something flickered in her eyes but she came forward and offered her lips for a brief salute. He wanted to demand more, but he allowed her to step back from the bed.
“You weren’t here last night,” he said.
Her eyes filled with tears and her expression was wounded. “That brother of yours and the little paragon,” she must have meant Gianna, “they kept me out of it. They didn’t call me for hours after you woke up.”
Why hadn’t his brother called Chiara right away? “They were here. You were not.”
The tears spilled over. “That horrible girl! She’s infatuated with you. She wouldn’t leave your side. There wasn’t even room for me next to the bed. Half the staff are convinced she’s your fiancée.”
He couldn’t imagine Gianna doing something so cruel. “You’re exaggerating.”
Chiara spun away and her shoulders shook with misery. “I’m not.”
“Come here, bella.”
