In the silvery light of the car he caught the wicked self-ironic expression on her face and they grinned at one another, momentarily delighted to have found themselves so perfectly attuned on the same wavelength.
Ruth was the first to look away. For some reason her heart had begun to beat wildly, and maintaining his even, teasingly amused gaze had proved impossible.
"What are your parents like?" she asked, licking her lips and struggling not to wilt under eyes that were suddenly strangely disconcerting.
"Were," Franco corrected. "My father died eight years ago and my mother died three years ago this December."
"I'm so sorry," Ruth said impulsively. "Still, how proud they must have been of you! You've done so much! Built businesses and companies and empires! The lot!"
"Actually," he said dryly, "my father had done very well for himself on similar lines, so my accumulation of money was not as impressive a feat as it might have been. Not," he added swiftly, "that they weren't proud of me. Of course they were … "
"They were mildly disappointed, though, that I never did the expected thing and married and produced a horde of children. My mother had always longed for a big family, but there were problems and, as it turned out, she was lucky to have had me. But you can imagine the combination of Italian and Irish." He sighed with heartfelt regret. "Yes, they would have liked to have seen their only son settled."
Ruth had a sudden, intriguing image of a settled Franco Leoni, married with lots of miniature Franco Leonis running about. Franco Leoni and babies.
Babies and Franco Leoni. Her mouth became dry and her erratic heartbeat did a few flips and carried on at a slightly more accelerated rate.
"Shall I tell you something?" he said, in a faintly surprised voice. "I've never come close to telling anyone what I've just told you."
"Why? Are you ashamed of the fact that your parents would have wanted you to settle down and raise a family?" Personally, she couldn't think of anything more pleasurable than settling down with the man you loved and having a family. A nice, large family in a rambling, cozy house where there was always the sound of laughter and music and chatting, where problems were aired and where everyone lent a helping hand to everyone else. She gave a little sigh and half smiled.
"Where are you?" he asked curiously, and she snapped back to the present with a small start.
"I beg your pardon?" she asked, blinking away the pleasant daydream.
"For a minute there I lost you. You just suddenly vanished into a world of your own."
What he didn't voice was the depth of his frustration as her expression had grown wistful and she had dreamily succumbed to some magical picture in her mind. What he could barely admit to himself was the sharp stab of jealousy as he had sourly surmised that the one thing most likely to put that goofy, happy expression on her face was the thought of some man.
Was there someone hovering in the background?
Someone perhaps, whom she was not technically dating but who still had the power to render her doe-eyed merely at the thought of him?
"Oh, just thinking." She gave him one of those bland, vague smiles and he frowned at her.
"What about?"
"Nothing in particular." Her shrug was the physical equivalent to the vague smile and his frown deepened.
"How is it that you never settled down?" Ruth asked, in her soft, direct voice.
With a jolt of awareness he realised that, for all her blushing and ultra-feminine appeal, she was not in the slightest intimidated by him. He was one of the most eligible bachelors in London, if not the most eligible, and was respected in every comer of the business community and feared in quite a few. Women flocked around him without encouragement and he had become accustomed to dismissing them with little more than a glance if he so desired. People, he knew, tiptoed around him because of the power and status he wielded. No one, but m one, had ever asked him why he was still unmarried.
"I mean," she continued slowly, "there must be women who find you appealing."
"Yes, I suppose out there, somewhere, there lurks one or two who don't run screaming from my presence," he said in an amused, wondering voice.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean...I just meant that...well, you're...successful, self-employed... and...and..."
"And...?" he encouraged silkily, enjoying this delicious moment, praying that the taxi would linger so as not to spoil it by arriving at their destination with unwanted haste.
"And not ugly," she said in a rush. "But really it's absolutely none of my business."
"Does the classification of not ugly count as a compliment?" he asked, with a crooked smile, and Ruth could have groaned aloud in sheer despair.
She had never been the most verbal, gregarious person on the face of the earth, but neither had she ever been quite so stultifyingly gauche as she was in the presence of this man. He had the mysterious power of rendering her almost completely speechless.
"I'm s...sorry..." she stammered. Again. But was thankfully spared a lengthy examination of her clumsy vocabulary by the arrival of the taxi at their destination.
She had expected a house. Out in the country it was a general rule of thumb that the bigger and grander the house and the larger and more impressive the plot of land, the wealthier the inhabitants.
Instead, she found herself peering out at a dubiously large Victorian building which had clearly been sectioned off into apartments. The street itself was divinely quiet, and carried the unmistakable smell of the privacy only vast money could purchase in the heart of London, but she was still surprised at Franco Leoni living in a flat.
"I own a rather grand collection of bricks and mortar out in the wilds of Dorset," he said into her ear, reading her mind. She heard the smile in his voice and realised that yet again her every passing thought had been displayed on her face.
"How does your hand feel?" she asked, slipping out of the taxi and ignoring the taxi driver's curious examination of her attire in the light of where he was depositing them.
Franco very nearly confessed that he had forgotten all about his so-called injury; then he remembered that the only reason she was here with him now was because of his hand. The prospect of her vanishing blithely away in the taxi if he informed her that it felt as right as rain was a possibility he refused to consider.
"Still a bit tender," he murmured, without a twinge of guilt. He bent over, paid the taxi driver, who was voluble in his gratitude for what had clearly been an over-the-top tip, and then nodded at the block of flats.
"Home sweet home."
"You mean, home sweet home, mark one."
"Mark three, actually," he said, extracting a key from his pocket and slotting it neatly into the door. "I also own another place in Italy."
"Of course," Ruth said with gentle sarcasm, turning to look at him fully. "I'm now beginning to understand how it is that you could buy a company for fun..."
She smiled and then turned away to inspect her surroundings.
If, Franco thought wryly, his enthralling personality had taken a back seat to a minuscule bruise on his hand, then it was clear that he had been completely forgotten, lock, stock and barrel, in her absorption with her surroundings.
She audibly gasped as they entered the spacious, heavily modernized hall, which was really presided over by a uniformed porter.
While George, the porter, handed over mail, and pleasantries were exchanged with the comfortable familiarity of two people who see one another daily and go back some way, Ruth stared around her with openmouthed fascination.
Far from being dark, poky and irremediably Victorian, which had been her expectation, the interior of the grand, renovated house was light and spacious.
The cream carpet was thick piled and the paintings on the walls were tasteful and modem. On one wall, stretching all the way up the winding stairwell and breathtaking in its sheer size, was a complex mural that appeared to depict a series of interconnecting mythical creatures. Chandeliers shed a mellow glow and plants were decorously placed here and there so that the overall impression was of space and grandeur.