The Italian's Pregnant Mistress(28)

Angelo watched as she walked up towards her front door. He didn't wait  to see her go in. By the time Francesca had reached her sitting room and  collapsed into one of the sofas, he was already three blocks away from  her house and heading out of London. At this time of night the roads  were empty. Once on the motorway, he revved the powerful car and ate up  the miles to nowhere.

Not that the purposeless three-hour drive managed to do much for his state of mind.

Nor, for that matter, did the ensuing two weeks of working like a beast.  He buried himself in work, pushing himself to the limits, knowing that  people were looking at him oddly and wondering what the hell was going  on. He had no desire to fill any of them in. In fact, there was a  certain amount of perverse satisfaction to be had from noting the way  his staff scurried out of his way when they saw him coming. They sensed  his black mood and made sure to avoid it whenever they could. Just as  well. It was as he was preparing to leave on the Friday that his mobile  rang. Without any identifying name popping up for him to ascertain who  the caller was, he very nearly let it ring. He had plans for the evening  which included too much whisky for his own good, but in the end  curiosity got the better of him.

He recognised the voice before the caller identified himself and he felt every nerve in his body tense.

'What do you want?' He steamrollered his way through the opening  apologetic platitudes, getting straight to the point. He flicked back  his wrist and wondered what Jack was doing calling him after ten on a  Friday. If the man thought that he could scramble a few favours from him  on the back of Francesca's affair then he could think again.

'I know you're a very busy man, Mr Falcone … '

'Yes. I am. So you'll excuse me when I tell you to get to the point.'

'Could we meet, mate?'

'What for?' Silence greeted his direct question. 'Has Francesca put you  up to this? Because if she thinks that I'm going to be a soft touch for  money because we happened to sleep together, then you can run along and  tell her from me that she's barking up the wrong tree.'

'Els doesn't know that I'm calling you. In fact, I think there's a good chance she'd kill me if she did.'

Against his will, Angelo was intrigued. It was weak but what harm was  there in meeting the man? If money was the root of the phone call,  whatever the packaging, then wasn't it best to make it perfectly clear  from the word go that none would be forthcoming?

'I can see you tonight. Take it or leave it.' Intrigued but not so  intrigued that he was going to make any spaces in his diary. He named a  bar in Kensington. 'I'll be there in half an hour. I intend to stay for  one drink and I won't wait.'

He pressed the end button on his phone, cutting off any attempt at negotiation.

He'd spent the past two weeks itching for a fight, he thought grimly. Maybe now he was about to get one.





CHAPTER NINE




'YOU did what?' Francesca's eyes widened in horror. To be greeted at  eight in the morning with a bombshell was like strolling along an open  field only to find that you'd stepped off the edge of a cliff. No, been  pushed off the edge of a cliff. And the perpetrator of the crime was  standing in her hall, looking for all the world as though his casual  announcement was on the same level as imparting some trivial bit of  information about the price of shellfish.

Jack braced himself to weather the storm.

'Told him about the pregnancy.'

'How could you, Jack? How could you go and betray me like that?' She  spun around and went into the sitting room where she could collapse into  one of the chairs and bury her head in her arms. She was aware that he  had followed her in but she just wished he would go. Her heart was  pounding as she tried to grapple with the fallout from this revelation.  What would Angelo do? He would be furious. No, furious wouldn't even  begin to describe how he would feel. She groaned.

'I never betrayed you.'

'No?' Francesca looked at him. 'And what would you call sneaking around  behind my back and spilling the beans to Angelo? When you knew that I'd  decided not to say anything. Not yet, anyway. Would you call it an act  of love?'

'I'd call it looking out for you, actually.'

'And your notion of looking out for me means that I'm going to have to leave-'                       
       
           



       

'You mean run away?' Jack sat on one of the chairs, hunkered over. 'Tried that one already, haven't you?'

Francesca shot him a baleful look. 'What else did you tell him?'

'Nothing. Just that you were pregnant. He needs to know.'

'He needs to know just like he needs a hole in the head.'

Jack ignored the outburst. 'You were going to tell him, Els. You know you were.'

'And he made it clear that he didn't want me to tell him anything! He wanted me to walk away, so I did!'

'But it wasn't what you intended,' he persisted in the face of her  glowering self-justification. 'It's wrong and you know it. You can't  keep him in the dark about something as important as that.'

'I wouldn't be the first to keep a man in the dark when the situation is hopeless.'

'Which doesn't make it right. Okay, maybe if … if you feared for your safety, then fair enough, but it's not like that.'

'How do you know what it's like, Jack? If you think there's anything  sentimental between us then you're living in cloud cuckoo land. Angelo  offered me a proposition. Sleep with him or else walk away.'

'I know. And you chose to have a relationship … '

'I chose to have sex with him,' Francesca said tightly, reducing it to  the most basic terms possible. She had to keep thinking straight. It was  the only way to extricate herself from the mess. She didn't want Jack  to start harping on about her feelings for Angelo. For someone who had  structured his life around non-involvement, he had a very healthy set of  romantic notions, and one of them was that because she loved Angelo  then everything would surely be all right. In her more generous moments  she had found this trait endearing. Now she just found it insufferable  and a breach of her privacy.

'And now that this has happened, well, it's my problem and I'm going to  deal with it and if that means running away then, yes, I'm going to run  away, and if I can't trust you not to betray me again, then I'm going to  have to leave without a forwarding address.'

'Don't be daft. How are you going to do that? You own a house, you own a catering business … '

Francesca's mind feverishly took off down the road of practicalities.  Where exactly would she go? And if Angelo wanted to find her, then he  would. It would be easy. She would have to sell the house, sell off all  the kitchen equipment and, even if she handed it over to a lawyer to do,  he would still be able to trace her through that route. She couldn't  bear to look at Jack. It was the first time since they had been kids  that any major disagreement had arisen between them.

While she was still grappling with the enormity of what lay ahead, Jack was again speaking, his voice oddly firm and controlled.

'You can't run away. You've run away too many times and now you've got  to stop. I wouldn't have gone to see him if I thought that you were  happy with your decision … '

'I have been very happy with my decision!' Francesca said hotly.

Jack's voice was as calm as hers had been vehement. 'No, you haven't.  You've been miserable and now it's affecting the pregnancy. You know  what the doctor said. Much more stress and you run the risk of  miscarrying. Is that what you want?'

No, it wasn't. She might not have expected or wanted to be pregnant with  Angelo's child but, now that she was, she felt intensely happy about  it. It was about the only thing she did feel happy about. It was  selfish, but there was a strong sense of wanting this bit of him for  ever.

'Well, thank you very much for introducing yet more stress for me to cope with.'

'You need to start being honest.' He stood up and brushed himself down.  It had been a late night. When he thought back to Angelo's reaction to  what he had said-the disbelief followed swiftly by cold, angry  shut-down-he could understand why she now felt inclined to take off. The  man was, frankly, intimidating, but taking off was not the answer and  he was convinced that the guilt she blithely dismissed would eat away at  her until she ended up in hospital. If she had never intended to fill  him in then he might have remained silent but she had meant to and had  chickened out at the last moment, and had then wrapped up her cowardice  in lots of flowery packaging of being mature and thinking of the impact  it would have on his life and wanting to spare him the unfair anguish of  having to deal with a mistake she had made, as though she had been  solely responsible for the situation.

After he had met Angelo he had headed back to his local pub and drowned  any niggling doubts he had had in a few pints of lager. Lord only knew  how the pair of them were going to get it together to do justice to the  job they had for later that evening. Give it another week and the kids  they used would be rising up in arms and staging a mutiny.