The Baby Scandal(17)

"For you," were his opening words.

He  was dressed as casually as she was, though his uniform of jeans,  which  he had adopted for their nightly meetings, had been replaced by  dark  grey cot¬ton trousers and a grey and black striped polo shirt,  just  visible beneath his jacket.

"You shouldn't have," Ruth said  automatically, tak¬ing the bottle of  wine from him and thinking,  dubi¬ously, that she was less than grateful  for the gesture, though she  knew that it stemmed from nothing more  than politeness.

"Course I  should. I've disturbed your weekend. Made you rearrange your  plans,  most probably." He paused, and then added casually. "Have I? I  hope  not."

"Oh, nothing that I can't arrange for another eve¬ning,"  she answered  vaguely, stepping aside to let him enter and then shutting  the door  behind him.

Her cagey reply, Franco thought with a  twinge of irritation, was not  exactly an auspicious start to the  evening, but he would overlook it,  skirt round the temptation to pry  further, until he elicited a response  that was more to his satisfaction.  It was just ridicu¬lously good to  see her again.

"Smells good in  here." He sniffed the air apprecia¬tively while  divesting himself of  his jacket. "You haven't put yourself to any  trouble, have you?"

No  more than I would have for anyone coming over for a meal, even if it  is  a working meal." She took his jacket, placed it on the hook on the  wall  by the front door and headed towards the bundle of pa¬perwork.

"Aren't  you going to offer me a drink?" He reached for the bottle of  wine.  "Point me in the direction of a corkscrew and I'll pour us both a   glass." He didn't wait for an answer. Instead, he spun round on his   heels, and she hurried in front of him before he could get to the   kitchen and start making himself at home, rooting through her drawers in   search of a corkscrew, peering into her cupboards in his hunt for two   wine glasses.

"Give it to me," she said breathlessly. "You can  wait in the sitting  room. In fact, you could start having a look at my  notes." If she  lingered in the kitchen long enough he should have ample  time to flick  through what she had written, which would speed the  evening up no end.

He seemed to have taken over her small flat  with his presence and her  hands were shaking as she tried to manipulate  the wretched corkscrew.  Eventually she managed to pop the cork out and  she tipped a generous  glassful into two water goblets, which were all  that she possessed that  remotely resembled wine glasses. Similar shape,  loosely speaking,  although, she noted wryly, they held considerably  more. She would have  to take her time with hers or her brain would be  further addled.

She returned to the sitting room to find him  poring over sheets of  paper. Very businesslike, very promis¬ing, very  not a social visit.                       
       
           



       

"Ah, glad you came." He patted a space next  to him on the sjfa just as  she was about to hand him his glass and  retreat to the furthest comer  of the room. "You were right about your  handwriting. Very difficult to  read. I'm afraid you're going to have to  decipher some of these  squiggles for me."

Caught on the hop, Ruth  hovered uncertainly for a few seconds, then she  handed him the wine  glass. He beamed encouragingly at her and patted  the vacant space a  little more firmly.

"What, for instance, does this say? It looks  as though something small  and eight-legged decided to go for a walk  across the page."

Ruth scuttled around the table and perched next to him, peering at the paper.

"Oh, that's a word-for-word account of the conver¬sation we had with Amanda? Do you remember Amanda?"

Short spiky hair?" Bad complexion? Fidgeted a lot?"


"Yes, that one." She rattled off what was on the page, bending slightly across him.

"And what about this?" He jabbed another page, just as she was about to pull away.

"Here,  hand me the paper," Ruth told him, suddenly aware of his clean,  crisp  masculine smell and the fact that her arm had been only an inch  or so  away from his thigh. She pulled it out of his hand towards her  and he  edged closer until their bodies were touching very lightly, then  he bent  a bit, his left hand sliding over the back of the chair behind  her  head.

He had a hot vision of her nakedness, the way her fiery  body responded  to his touch, every inch the pas¬sionate woman underneath  the gauche,  sweetly shy, dreamy girl.

He tried to focus his eyes  on the piece of paper in front of him,  knowing that he had to keep her  talking just to be near her like this.  He crossed his legs and attempted  to shove the insidiously erotic  images out of his head. The sight of  his erection pushing against his  trousers would be enough to send her  running out into the street in a  state of terror, most probably. Sorry?"

"I  said that I'll write the indecipherable bits a bit more legibly in  the  space above." She tilted her face to his and narrowed her eyes.  "Are you  listening to me?" She became aware of his arm extended behind  her and  abruptly stood up. "I'll go and see about the food. If you  could just  highlight the bits you don't understand in one color and  highlight the  bits you want transcribed in another, then we should be  able to go from  there."

"What about the bits I can't understand but might want transcribed? Use both colors? Or do we bring in color number three?"

Ruth gave him a stern, reproachful stare. "Now you're just being silly."

"Sorry," he said meekly. Saturday night levity."

"I'll  be in the kitchen." She spun round on her heels and was busily  setting  the small pine table and heating the food when she became aware  that he  was in the kitchen with her.

"Have you finished already?" she  asked, turning round to face him, her  face flushed from the heat, and  drying her hands on the striped apron  she had slung over her clothes.  She had scraped her hair away from her  face into a high ponytail. It  swung gently behind her every time she  moved her head.

"You have put yourself out," he said, beelining to the saucepan and the pots simmering gently on the stove.

"No, I haven't!"

"There's enough food here to..."

"Go away. You're...you're disturbing my concen¬tration!"

"Oh, really?"

She  felt his attention on her as she turned away and realised that her   words could easily be misconstrued. "I mean," she said, very quickly.  "I  bate people be¬ing in the kitchen when I'm cooking, peering at the  food  and..." she looked at his hand "...sticking fingers in to taste."

The  hand was immediately withdrawn and he threw her a sheepish  little-boy  look which just made him look even more alarmingly sexy.

"I'll just sit at the table," he told her. "You won't notice that I'm here. You just carry on. I'll be as quiet as a mouse."

"What about the work?" she asked, watching in dis¬may as he settled comfortably into one of the four small pine chairs.

"Work  can wait a while. I have a feeling it won't take as long as I  thought."  He gave her a charming grin. "I take it you enjoy cooking?"

Ruth stirred the pasta and then fetched the salad out of the fridge and stuck it on the table in front of him.

"Yes,  I do." Her voice softened. "Mum and I used to spend every Sunday  in the  kitchen when I was a girl. She' d let me roll pastry for pies  and knead  dough for bread, and when I got a little older I'd chop and  mix and  stir. I've always associated cooking with fun." He had brought  her glass  of wine into the kitchen and she absent-mindedly picked it up  from the  kitchen table and swallowed a mouthful.                       
       
           



       


Then she drained the  pasta and stirred in some black pepper and  parmesan cheese. She brought  it to the table with the pasta scoop stuck  in, then the prawns, thick  and creamy and a rich tomato-red.

"Just help yourself," she  instructed. She divested herself of the  apron, slung it back over the  hook, and didn't demur when he topped up  her glass with some more of the  crisp white wine.