Ruth felt her heart begin to flutter madly. Wasn't this taking the game too far? But how on earth could she complain without giving everything away?
"I can't redecorate my parents' house," she at¬tempted feebly, and he sprang onto her reply with alacrity.
In which case we could always move out. Get a cozy little flat somewhere. Or a house. Yet, flats are for the city; houses are much more what we'd want here, in the middle of this beautiful countryside. Something small and ivy-clad, perhaps a thatched roof."
"You've been looking at too many chocolate box covers," Ruth declared, with a sniff. "Houses like that don't exist in this part of the world." She found herself drifting into a very pleasant world of Franco, the baby and cozy evenings spent in front of a roaring log fire in some wonderful, fictitious thatched cottage, and metaphorically pinched herself back to the present.
"Why are you doing this?" she asked, looking at him. How could a man look so obscenely spectacular in an oversized tee shirt with a cartoon logo on the front? It wasn't fair. Little wonder she had stupidly fallen in love with him. He was the type of man who was positively lethal when it came to virginal country girls with marginal experience of men and a head full of romantic dreams.
"What's the alternative?" he asked smoothly. He had known that she would ask him that question sooner or later, and the truth was that his answer had been a little too long in coming for his liking.
He might well rage and rant and hurl accusations at her, but the facts were straightforward enough. She was pregnant and had involved him in a lie to spare her parents a small part of the truth. Well, even if it hadn't occurred to her, it had certainly occurred to him that everyone could emerge a winner from the situa¬tion.
All he had to do was go along with the lie for a while, perhaps disappear on some fictitious mission, reappearing when the baby was born and thereafter vanishing again until it became clear that his presence was not a constant and a divorce was inevitable.
Seeing the child would be no problem because he could simply persuade her to move back to London, perhaps even hand her back her job with a few more perks thrown in so that she had ample money, and visits could happily occur during the week or on week¬ends. End of complicated story.
However, this version of possible events was not what he discovered he wanted.
He didn't want to be a part-time father and a pretend husband. He wanted more than that, although when¬ever he got to that point in his head he firmly switched off rather than meander down the twisty road to its shady, unwelcome destination.
He watched her face closely in the semi-darkness and had to resist the urge to hurry the conversation along until it got to the point he wanted.
"You could always go away," she suggested timidly. "I mean, I wouldn't try and stop you from seeing the baby whenever you wanted..."
"No can do. You involved me in this and I don't intend to emerge from it looking like a cad and a bounder."
"Who would know?" Ruth asked, trying to follow his train of thought.
"Every single friend I possess, for a start. I mean, Ruth, think about it. I'm a single man one minute, and the next minute I'm visiting a baby, having abandoned the mother to her own devices. And what about your parents? Eh? Their opinion of me is hardly going to be sky-high when I vanish off the face of the earth leaving you to get on with things on your own." Why that mattered, exactly, was hard to say, but matter it did.
"You could always pay child maintenance if that makes you feel better."
"No!"
"Shh! You'll wake my parents. They're very light sleepers!"
"No." He lowered his voice but didn't alter its tone. "Doesn't it make more sense for me to go along with this and for things to taper off if needs be?"
If needs be? he thought. What does that mean? Why did his vocal cords insist on forming ridiculous sen¬tences that had nothing to do with his thought pro¬cesses?
"If needs be? What does that mean?"
"It means," he said heavily, "that I intend to be around for a while and there's nothing you can do about it." He stood up and looked down at her, chal¬lenging her to question his decision further, ready for any verbal fight she might care to indulge in, but she seemed bemused by the course of events.
"Just make sure," he said, turning to her, his hand on the doorknob, "that you get the bed."
Which was a request that she found nigh on impos¬sible to obey.
Like the devoted husband he wasn't he called her every evening for the five nights he was away, making sure, she suspected, that he called at dinner time, when he knew that her parents would be around. Why, she had no idea. If his sojourn in her life was to be tem¬porary, why go to any lengths to impress her parents, two people he would never see again?
It made no sense, and she quickly decided that she was reading meaning into something basically mean¬ingless. He called at the same time every evening be¬cause it was the most convenient time for him to call.
Which left quite a bit of free time, she thought. What did he get up to after eight in the evening? Back home to his apartment to sit in front of the telly with a pre-packaged meal for one on his lap? Hardly. But, if not, then where was he?
On the night before he was due to return, Ruth fi¬nally gave in to impulse and dialed his home number. She was so utterly convinced that he would be out, living down to her worst suspicions, that she was flab¬bergasted when the telephone was answered and she heard his dark, velvety voice down the end of the line.
"It's me," she blurted out, and then added hastily, in case he didn't recognize her voice. "Ruth."
"I know who it is. What's the matter? Is everything all right?" His voice was laced with sudden, urgent anxiety and Ruth allowed herself a moment of sheer pleasure during which she indulged in the brief but sweetly tempting fantasy that Franco actually cared about her.
"Yes! Nothing's wrong with the baby. I'm fine." There was a small, telling pause.
Then why are you calling?"
"I'm sorry," Ruth said stiffly. "Am I interrupting anything?"
"Depends..."
"Oh, I see." She saw a tall, leggy glamorous woman sitting at the rough, incredibly expensive hand-made dining table, swirling a glass of champagne in one hand, long raven-black hair falling in a mass of curls over one shoulder, smoldering Latin eyes thickly fringed, promising him who knew what antics in the bedroom later that night.
"I've just this minute got back from work, actually."
"At this hour?" Ruth heard her voice rise in suspi¬cious disbelief, and she cleared her throat and contin¬ued with ghastly formality. "You must be exhausted. I'm sorry I disturbed you."
"Forget it."
In the background she heard the clink of ice being tossed into a glass. He was on the mobile, probably in the exquisitely and rarely used high-tech kitchen. She strained her ears to see whether she could discern an¬other lot of clinking ice which would be a telltale sign that he had company, but there was nothing, and she found herself momentarily breathing a sigh of relief. "You never said what you wanted." He spoke into her ear, and for a wild moment she imagined that she could almost feel his breath against her cheek. "Nothing!"
The one telling word was out before she could take it back, and she heard a dry chuckle down the end of the line. "You mean you were just missing me?"
"I was doing no such thing!"
Then perhaps you wanted to check my where¬abouts. Could you have become seized with a sudden attack of jealousy because I wasn't around?"
His wild but accurate stab at the truth made her give a forced cackle of laughter.
"Don't be ridiculous. You have an ego the size of...the size of..."
"C'mon, Ruth, can't you think of anything else I have that's as big as my so-called ego?"
She felt her face begin to burn as her mind swerved off obligingly in the direction he had pointed to, only skidding to an abrupt halt when he said, with amuse¬ment. "You're blushing, aren't you? I can feel it down the line."