‘What’s wrong with crazy some of the time?’ Crazy? It didn’t feel crazy to him. It felt like the sanest thing he had done in a while. Georgina, he mused, would have been very hard pressed to agree with his self-diagnosis. She, too, had called him crazy when he had spoken to her three days before. A lot else, as well. In fact, crazy had been one of her more gentle remarks.
‘You can’t do this,’ she had told him, over her spritzer in his apartment. ‘You can’t just break off this engagement, not when everything’s been planned and invitations have been sent out!’
But after the tears and the pleading had come the inevitable rage. And, at that stage, crazy had been one of her less flamboyant descriptions of him.
Angelo had gritted his teeth and sat through the tirade. He had felt sorry for her, in a curiously detached way, but had been implacable in his decision and he knew that his implacability had fuelled her anger, as had his observation that she would find someone far more suitable as a husband in time.
He had been relieved when she had finally stormed out of his apartment, after informing him that she would be keeping the vastly expensive diamond engagement ring and that he could cover the costs of every single thing that could not be returned. It had seemed a very small price to pay, in his opinion.
The only thing he had kept from her had been the reason why he had decided not to go through with the marriage. That would have been honesty stretched to the point of needless cruelty, so he had mentioned nothing of his previous relationship with their caterer and had greeted accusations of infidelity in complete silence.
‘Do you mean,’ Francesca was saying as she struggled to divest herself of the idea that they were on a date and focus on the notion that he might just want to prove to himself that she could cook, ‘that you’re testing my skills? For the big day? Just in case I secretly use cook-in sauces in my recipes? I don’t, as it happens.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. So you won’t mind proving it to me. My car’s just there so we’ll drive to the nearest supermarket. Where is it?’
‘I usually get my fresh meat and fish directly from source,’ Francesca said with a touch of pride. ‘And the meat is always organic.’
‘Well, I think that just for tonight we will do away with the fish and meat markets and just take what we can get at the supermarket counters. I can take or leave the organic business.’
‘That’s not a very twenty-first century response,’ Francesca said, slipping into the passenger seat and watching her house disappear with a certain amount of foreboding.
‘Well, maybe I am not a very twenty-first century man.’ He shifted down a gear at the traffic lights and glanced sideways at her. She was making a point of not looking at him but she would look at him eventually. There was no rush. He felt the same warm satisfaction spread through him as he had felt earlier on in the week, when he had made the decision to break off his engagement and to do what his gut instincts had been telling him he needed to do from the very first time he had set eyes on her in that restaurant in Covent Garden. He was no twenty-first century man.
Telling himself that he was civilised enough to restrict his responses to a casual shrug over an unfortunate episode in his past had been a vast misjudgement of his own character. His relationship with her had never, for him, been casual enough to warrant such indifference.
Revenge was an ugly notion, and no, he was not out to get revenge. He needed to remove her from his system and the only way he could achieve that, he had realised in one of his brutally honest moments, would be to have her once again. The fact that she was involved with someone else was an irritating technicality. As far as he was concerned, she and Jack were a ridiculous and improbable match and he would be doing her a favour by divesting her of that particular relationship.
The thought that Jack might once have been a rival on the side would make it all the sweeter.
He would have her and then, when it suited him and suit him it would, he would dismiss her but at least she would cease to haunt him. He would not consider her feelings because, as she would be the first to agree, surely, wasn’t all fair in love and war?
The wheel, at last, would turn full circle and it would be a thoroughly enjoyable process. Better still, he would be the one steering it.
‘What sort of meal do you have in mind?’ Francesca asked, breaking into his pleasurable train of thought, and he shot her a brief glance.
‘Something interesting involving fish and chicken,’ he said. ‘You’re the expert. What would you advise?’
Francesca looked at him suspiciously. He seemed in remarkably high spirits considering she was the one in the passenger seat.