One-Click Buy: November Harlequin Presents

by Susan Stephens

  ‘If it’s all right, I’ll just call a taxi,’ she whispered, fishing in the bag for her mobile phone.

  ‘No need for that. I’ll give you a lift back. Like I said, no hard feelings.’ He even managed a smile and for Francesca that was worse because it was so very impersonal.

  He drove her back to her house in unbroken silence. The temptation to tell him what was going on was overpowering, but hard on the heels of temptation came the icy blast of reality—the position she would be putting him in, the consequences he would be forced to deal with.

  The silent drive finally came to an end and he turned to her. ‘Good luck with your catering business, Francesca. I’ll make sure to put in a good word for you.’

  ‘There’s no need…’

  ‘Call it for services rendered.’ It was a cheap shot but the tip of the iceberg when it came to what he was feeling. Yes, he had been the one to do the discarding and, no, it felt no better now than it had three years ago when the shoe had been on the other foot. He could see from her face that the dart had hit bull’s-eye and loathed himself for delivering it. Too late now, and he wasn’t going to apologise anyway.

  ‘That’s…below the belt.’

  ‘It’s the unvarnished truth.’ He shrugged.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She took a deep breath and weathered the shuttered, dark face impassively staring back at her. ‘I didn’t think that it would end this way.’

  ‘Apologies accepted, although we both enjoyed the ride so none are due.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll be staying on in London.’ She gave a high, brittle laugh.

  ‘No?’ He sounded mildly, but only mildly, interested. ‘Don’t feel obliged to leave on account of me.’

  Francesca nodded. Conversation had dried up. Angelo was making no attempt to extend himself beyond the formalities of answering her questions. There was the faintest semblance of boredom on his beautiful face.

  Her notions about passion fizzling out conveniently, leaving her cleansed and free to move on with her life, had been a terrible illusion, and her selfishness in agreeing to sleep with him for the gratification it gave her now seemed a terminally grave misjudgement.

  Angelo watched as she walked up towards her front door. He didn’t wait to see her go in. By the time Francesca had reached her sitting room and collapsed into one of the sofas, he was already three blocks away from her house and heading out of London. At this time of night the roads were empty. Once on the motorway, he revved the powerful car and ate up the miles to nowhere.

  Not that the purposeless three-hour drive managed to do much for his state of mind.

  Nor, for that matter, did the ensuing two weeks of working like a beast. He buried himself in work, pushing himself to the limits, knowing that people were looking at him oddly and wondering what the hell was going on. He had no desire to fill any of them in. In fact, there was a certain amount of perverse satisfaction to be had from noting the way his staff scurried out of his way when they saw him coming. They sensed his black mood and made sure to avoid it whenever they could. Just as well. It was as he was preparing to leave on the Friday that his mobile rang. Without any identifying name popping up for him to ascertain who the caller was, he very nearly let it ring. He had plans for the evening which included too much whisky for his own good, but in the end curiosity got the better of him.

  He recognised the voice before the caller identified himself and he felt every nerve in his body tense.

  ‘What do you want?’ He steamrollered his way through the opening apologetic platitudes, getting straight to the point. He flicked back his wrist and wondered what Jack was doing calling him after ten on a Friday. If the man thought that he could scramble a few favours from him on the back of Francesca’s affair then he could think again.

  ‘I know you’re a very busy man, Mr Falcone…’

  ‘Yes. I am. So you’ll excuse me when I tell you to get to the point.’

  ‘Could we meet, mate?’

  ‘What for?’ Silence greeted his direct question. ‘Has Francesca put you up to this? Because if she thinks that I’m going to be a soft touch for money because we happened to sleep together, then you can run along and tell her from me that she’s barking up the wrong tree.’

  ‘Els doesn’t know that I’m calling you. In fact, I think there’s a good chance she’d kill me if she did.’

  Against his will, Angelo was intrigued. It was weak but what harm was there in meeting the man? If money was the root of the phone call, whatever the packaging, then wasn’t it best to make it perfectly clear from the word go that none would be forthcoming?

  ‘I can see you tonight. Take it or leave it.’ Intrigued but not so intrigued that he was going to make any spaces in his diary. He named a bar in Kensington. ‘I’ll be there in half an hour. I intend to stay for one drink and I won’t wait.’

  He pressed the end button on his phone, cutting off any attempt at negotiation.

  He’d spent the past two weeks itching for a fight, he thought grimly. Maybe now he was about to get one.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘YOU did what?’ Francesca’s eyes widened in horror. To be greeted at eight in the morning with a bombshell was like strolling along an open field only to find that you’d stepped off the edge of a cliff. No, been pushed off the edge of a cliff. And the perpetrator of the crime was standing in her hall, looking for all the world as though his casual announcement was on the same level as imparting some trivial bit of information about the price of shellfish.

  Jack braced himself to weather the storm.

  ‘Told him about the pregnancy.’

  ‘How could you, Jack? How could you go and betray me like that?’ She spun around and went into the sitting room where she could collapse into one of the chairs and bury her head in her arms. She was aware that he had followed her in but she just wished he would go. Her heart was pounding as she tried to grapple with the fallout from this revelation. What would Angelo do? He would be furious. No, furious wouldn’t even begin to describe how he would feel. She groaned.

  ‘I never betrayed you.’

  ‘No?’ Francesca looked at him. ‘And what would you call sneaking around behind my back and spilling the beans to Angelo? When you knew that I’d decided not to say anything. Not yet, anyway. Would you call it an act of love?’

  ‘I’d call it looking out for you, actually.’

  ‘And your notion of looking out for me means that I’m going to have to leave—’

  ‘You mean run away?’ Jack sat on one of the chairs, hunkered over. ‘Tried that one already, haven’t you?’

  Francesca shot him a baleful look. ‘What else did you tell him?’

  ‘Nothing. Just that you were pregnant. He needs to know.’

  ‘He needs to know just like he needs a hole in the head.’

  Jack ignored the outburst. ‘You were going to tell him, Els. You know you were.’

  ‘And he made it clear that he didn’t want me to tell him anything! He wanted me to walk away, so I did!’

  ‘But it wasn’t what you intended,’ he persisted in the face of her glowering self-justification. ‘It’s wrong and you know it. You can’t keep him in the dark about something as important as that.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be the first to keep a man in the dark when the situation is hopeless.’

  ‘Which doesn’t make it right. Okay, maybe if…if you feared for your safety, then fair enough, but it’s not like that.’

  ‘How do you know what it’s like, Jack? If you think there’s anything sentimental between us then you’re living in cloud cuckoo land. Angelo offered me a proposition. Sleep with him or else walk away.’

  ‘I know. And you chose to have a relationship…’

  ‘I chose to have sex with him,’ Francesca said tightly, reducing it to the most basic terms possible. She had to keep thinking straight. It was the only way to extricate herself from the mess. She didn’t want Jack to start harping on about her feelings for Angelo. For someo
ne who had structured his life around non-involvement, he had a very healthy set of romantic notions, and one of them was that because she loved Angelo then everything would surely be all right. In her more generous moments she had found this trait endearing. Now she just found it insufferable and a breach of her privacy.

  ‘And now that this has happened, well, it’s my problem and I’m going to deal with it and if that means running away then, yes, I’m going to run away, and if I can’t trust you not to betray me again, then I’m going to have to leave without a forwarding address.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. How are you going to do that? You own a house, you own a catering business…’

  Francesca’s mind feverishly took off down the road of practicalities. Where exactly would she go? And if Angelo wanted to find her, then he would. It would be easy. She would have to sell the house, sell off all the kitchen equipment and, even if she handed it over to a lawyer to do, he would still be able to trace her through that route. She couldn’t bear to look at Jack. It was the first time since they had been kids that any major disagreement had arisen between them.

  While she was still grappling with the enormity of what lay ahead, Jack was again speaking, his voice oddly firm and controlled.

  ‘You can’t run away. You’ve run away too many times and now you’ve got to stop. I wouldn’t have gone to see him if I thought that you were happy with your decision…’

  ‘I have been very happy with my decision!’ Francesca said hotly.

  Jack’s voice was as calm as hers had been vehement. ‘No, you haven’t. You’ve been miserable and now it’s affecting the pregnancy. You know what the doctor said. Much more stress and you run the risk of miscarrying. Is that what you want?’

  No, it wasn’t. She might not have expected or wanted to be pregnant with Angelo’s child but, now that she was, she felt intensely happy about it. It was about the only thing she did feel happy about. It was selfish, but there was a strong sense of wanting this bit of him for ever.

  ‘Well, thank you very much for introducing yet more stress for me to cope with.’

  ‘You need to start being honest.’ He stood up and brushed himself down. It had been a late night. When he thought back to Angelo’s reaction to what he had said—the disbelief followed swiftly by cold, angry shut-down—he could understand why she now felt inclined to take off. The man was, frankly, intimidating, but taking off was not the answer and he was convinced that the guilt she blithely dismissed would eat away at her until she ended up in hospital. If she had never intended to fill him in then he might have remained silent but she had meant to and had chickened out at the last moment, and had then wrapped up her cowardice in lots of flowery packaging of being mature and thinking of the impact it would have on his life and wanting to spare him the unfair anguish of having to deal with a mistake she had made, as though she had been solely responsible for the situation.

  After he had met Angelo he had headed back to his local pub and drowned any niggling doubts he had had in a few pints of lager. Lord only knew how the pair of them were going to get it together to do justice to the job they had for later that evening. Give it another week and the kids they used would be rising up in arms and staging a mutiny.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Francesca demanded, standing up and then sitting back down when she was overcome by a wave of nausea and dizziness.

  At once Jack was by her side. ‘I’ll stay if you want, Els.’

  ‘Was he very angry?’ she asked in a small voice and the slight hesitation provided her with an answer. ‘God,’ she moaned, curling into him, forgetting the fact that he had become the bad guy.

  ‘Talk it over with him. He was pretty angry, yes, but I did tell him that you had wanted to say something. You can sort something out…at least then your conscience will be clear…’ Philosophical pearls of wisdom had never been his forte and he lapsed into silence, stroking her back until he felt she was calm enough for him to pull back.

  ‘I suppose you thought you were doing the right thing,’ Francesca said grudgingly and Jack breathed a sigh of relief at this little crumb of conciliation. Before she had any opportunity to resume her attack, he decided to take advantage of the temporary laying down of arms.

  ‘Let me get you something to eat before I go,’ he suggested. ‘I could whip something up. Some good old-fashioned eggy bread, maybe?’

  Francesca made a face. ‘I can’t stomach the thought of fried food. I’ll grab myself a few crackers when you’ve gone.’

  ‘What about this job tonight?’

  ‘I went shopping yesterday and everything’s in the fridges.’ She looked at him despairingly and he nodded.

  ‘Okay. But no running away when my back’s turned. Fair enough if he doesn’t get in touch…’

  Shying away from the thought of a vengeful Angelo, Francesca clung to this nonsense possibility like a man clinging on to a lifebelt in high seas. The thought that Angelo might decide to walk away from the horrendous situation confronting him was very appealing.

  And if he did contact her…

  She would deal with it. She could spend the rest of her life running but in the end she wouldn’t be able to hide and, even if she did succeed in disappearing, what good would it do in the long term? Sooner or later the baby would grow into a child and the child would grow into an adult who wanted answers to questions.

  It was almost a sense of relief to know that the decision had pretty much been taken out of her hands. All she had to do now was wait.

  Not long, if Angelo had his way, but he knew that he had to curb the urge to drive over to her house immediately and lay into her.

  His phone rang for the third time that morning, even though it had only just gone nine and, knowing who it was, he snatched it up and said, without bothering with formalities, ‘What do you want?’

  There had been five messages on his answering machine when he had returned the night before. All from Georgina. Then three calls this morning, all of which he let the answering machine get. He certainly didn’t feel inclined to be civil to anyone, least of all his ex-girlfriend, who had disappeared only to resurface just when he needed no distractions.

  Pregnant.

  Angelo had barely been able to take it in when Jack had launched his bombshell. In fact, it had initially crossed his mind that it might have been some kind of ruse to extract money from him, even though he knew her well enough to know that that would not be her style. The self-delusion hadn’t lasted long. The man had been utterly serious. There had been no mistaking his body language and there had been no mistaking the simple truth, which was that he had not come to see him with Francesca’s permission.

  Which meant that she had had no intention of telling him about the pregnancy. The treachery involved in her silence had rendered him speechless. He had listened to Jack stutter out one or two excuses on her behalf but he had barely heard them. He had left rather than be fed with further rubbish along those lines. Had returned home to find his answering machine blinking at him.

  ‘I wondered whether we could meet, Angelo. There’s something I have to talk to you about.’

  Meeting Georgina was the last thing he wanted to do. Nor did he care for the barely hidden smugness in her voice. Had she found out about his affair with Francesca? More than likely. London was a big place but not so big in certain circles that word might not have got round. They could have been spotted at any time and the grapevine in the city was as lush and vibrant as any grapevine anywhere else.

  And if she had known about the relationship, then it was also possible that she knew of its demise. Was she planning a comeback? Angelo’s mouth curved into a grim smile of contempt. He could barely remember that faraway time when he had been contemplating marriage to her, content to let common sense dictate his judgements. In fact, he could barely remember a time before Francesca had exploded once again into his life, bringing back all the confusion he had thought well left behind.

  ‘I have nothing to say to you, G
eorgina.’

  ‘Oh, but I have something to say to you.’ The smugness was right out in the open now and Angelo allowed his feelings to get the better of him. Damned if he was going to let her have free rein to gloat over things that were none of her business.

  ‘Do you now?’ he enquired coldly. ‘Well, I’m not interested and, in fact, I’m on my way out to see Francesca. So if you’ll excuse me…’ He hung up, almost expecting to hear the insistent ringing of the phone as she tried to reconnect, but the house was silent.

  He left before the silence could be broken and forced himself not to drive like a madman over to her house. The situation felt almost dreamlike, surreal. With the ease of habit, he began thinking about the consequences of the situation. She would have kept this baby to herself because, at the end of the day, whatever good sex they had shared, it wasn’t enough. It hadn’t been enough three years ago and it wasn’t enough now. But she was having his baby and her feelings would have to be secondary, whether she liked it or not.

  His jaw clenched in anger and he breathed in slowly and deeply, taking his time in the Saturday morning traffic.

  It was mid-morning by the time he reached her place and he almost expected to find that she had gone out, but no. He rang the doorbell and heard the sound of footsteps behind the closed door.

  Francesca took a deep breath, hand on the door knob. She had been dreading this moment, knowing it would come, and knowing, as well, that he wouldn’t give her any advance warning. No time for her to prepare herself. It wouldn’t have mattered at any rate. She was as prepared now as she would ever be.

  She opened the door and her courage failed her at the sight of his grim, implacable face.