November Harlequin Presents 2(170)

‘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 someone 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.