The Baby Scandal(2)

She  adored her parents, and loved the vicarage where she had lived  since  she was a child, but some obscure part of her had realised over  the  years that she had to spread her wings and sample what else the big   world had to offer, or else buckle down to the realization that her  life  would remain neatly parceled up in the small village where she had  gown  up, surrounded by her cozy circle of friends all of whose  ambitions had  been to get married and have big families and never mind  what else  there was out there.

"No?" He didn't sound as though he believed that, and she glared at him.

"No.  I'm twenty-two years old and I live in a flat in Hampstead. Now,  do you  want to make an appointment to see Miss Hawes in the morning or  not?"

"You  keep forgetting that I own this company. I'll see her in the  morning,  all right, but there's no need for me to make an appointment."

Arrogant. That had been the word she'd been searching for to describe this man. She folded her arms and stared at him.

"Fine. Now perhaps you could see yourself to the door...?"

"Have you eaten?"

"What?"

"I said..."

"I heard what you said, Mr. Leoni. I just wondered what you meant by it."

"It means that I'm asking you to have dinner with me, Miss Jacobs."

"I beg your pardon? I'm afraid...t couldn't possibly...I don't usually..."                       
       
           



       

"Accept dinner invitations from strangers?"

Yes, of course he had known what she had been thinking. She didn't have the knack of dissembling.

"That's  right," Ruth informed him, bristling. "I know that must seem a  little  unusual to you, but I..." Where was she going with this one? A  long  monologue on her sheltered life? An explanation on being a vicar's   daughter? Hadn't she come to London in the hope of gaining a bit of   sophistication?

"I don't bite, Miss Jacobs." He pushed himself  away from the edge of  the desk and she looked at him guardedly. If he  was trying to make her  believe that he was as harmless as the day was  long, then he was living  on another planet. Innocent and naive she might  be, but born yesterday  she was not.

"You're my employee. Call it maintaining good relations with someone who works for me. Besides..."

The  assessing look was back on his face, sending little tingles of   apprehension racing down her spine. "I'd like to find out a bit more   about you. Find out what you do in the company... And in case you still   don't believe who I am..." He sighed and withdrew his wallet from his   pocket, flicked it open and produced a letter to Alison, with his name   flamboyantly emblazoned in black at the bottom, and his impressive title   typed underneath.

Ruth scanned the letter briefly, noting in  passing that it implied,  with no attempts to beat around the bush, that  the magazine had not  accumulated enough sales and that it was lime to  get to the drawing  board and sort it out. Presumably the very reason he  had made an  appearance at the ridiculous hour of seven-thirty on a  Friday evening.


"There now," he said, without the slightest  trace of remorse that he  had allowed her to wallow in nightmarish  possibilities when he could  have eliminated all that by simply  identifying himself from the  beginning.

"Believe me?"

"Thank you. Yes."

"What do you do here?"

"Nothing  very important," Ruth said hastily, just in case he got it  into his  head that he could quiz her on the details of running a  magazine. "I'm  an odd-job man...woman...person...I do a bit of typing,  take calls,  fetch and carry...that's all..."

"Tell me all about it over  dinner." His hand brushed hers as he  retrieved his letter and rammed it  back into his pocket, and she could  feel something inside her shrinking  away from him. She had never met  anyone quite like him before. Her  boyfriends, all three of them, had  been from her town, and they had been  nice boys, the sort who were  quite happy to trundle through life with  modest aspirations and no  great appetite for taking life by its head and  felling it.

Franco Leoni looked the sort who relished challenges of that sort, thrived on them.

"Now,  why don't we lock up here and find ourselves something to eat?"  He was  now so close to her that the hairs on the back of her neck were  standing  on end. Up close, he was even more disconcerting than he was  with a bit  of distance between them.

Underneath the well-tailored clothes,  every inch of his body spoke of  well-toned, highly muscled power, and  the impression was completed by  his swarthy olive coloring, at odds with  the strikingly light eyes.

She cautiously edged away and snatched her jacket from the hook on the wall and slipped it on.

"Goodgirl."  He opened the door for her and then watched as she  nervously locked it  behind her and shoved the jangling keyring into her  bag.

"My  car's just outside," he said, as they walked down the staircase,  "and  please, try not to wear that fraught expression on your face. It  makes  me feel like a sick old man who takes advantage of innocent young   girls." There was lazy amusement in his voice when he said this, and  she  didn't have to cast her eyes in his direction to know that he was   laughing at her.

His car was a silver Jaguar. He opened the door  for her, waited till  she had shuffled inside, then strode to the  driver's seat. As soon as  the door was shut, he turned to her and said.  "Now, what do you fancy  eating?"

"Anything!" Ruth said quickly.  The darkness of the car made his  presence even more stifling, and she  cursed herself for having been  railroaded into accepting his invitation.  Yes, so he might well be the  owner of the company she worked for, but  that didn't mean that he was  trustworthy where the opposite sex was  concerned.

She wryly recognised the outdated prudery of her logic  and smiled  weakly to herself. As an only child, and a girl on top of  it, she had  been cherished and protected by her parents from day one.

"A  girl without pretensions," he murmured to himself, starting the  engine,  'very refreshing. Don't care what you eat. Do you like  Italian?"                       
       
           



       

"Fine. Yes."

She could feel her heart pounding like a steam engine inside her as the car pulled smoothly away from the curb.

"So, where do you fit into the scheme of things at Issues?"

"If  you own the magazine, how is it that you've never made an  appearance  there?" Ruth blurted out curiously. She was pressed against  the car door  and was looking at him warily with her wide grey eyes.

"The  magazine is a very, very minor company of mine." He glanced in her   direction. "Have I mentioned to you that I don't bite? I'm not   infectious either, so there's no need to fall out of the car in your   desperation to put a few more inches between us." He looked back to the   road and Ruth shuffled herself into a more normal position. "I bought  it  because I thought it could be turned around and because I viewed it  as a  sort of hobby."


"A sort of hobby?" Ruth asked incredulously'  "You bought a magazine as a  hobby?" The thought of such extravagance  was almost beyond  comprehension.

"What sort of life do you lead? I  always thought that hobbies involved  doing things like playing tennis'  or squash or bird-watching...or  collecting model railways.

"Your hobby is buying small companies just for the fun of it?"

"There's  no need to sound quite so shocked," he said irritably,  frowning as he  stared ahead and maneuvered the honeycomb of narrow  streets.

"Well, I am shocked," Ruth informed him, forgetting to be intimidated.

"Why?"

"Because, Mr. Leoni..."

"You can call me Franco. I've never been a great believer in surnames."

"Because,"  she continued, skipping over his interruption, "it seems  obscene to  have so much money that you can buy a company just for the  heck of it!"

"My  little gesture," he pointed out evenly, although a dark flush had   spread across his neck, "happens to have created jobs, and in accordance   with the package I've agreed with all my employees, including  yourself,  you all stand to gain if the company succeeds."