The Baby Scandal(13)

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.