The Italian's Pregnant Mistress

‘The catering job for the Falcone wedding is off,’ she told him bluntly.

There was a long pause which she filled by getting a few things off her chest. The fact that it would have been impossible anyway, given the circumstances. The fact that she was well rid of her past, that confronting it and not walking away had been a mistake from the very beginning. Angelo Falcone, she declared vehemently, would probably never have chosen them on their merits. An unknown two-man band with zero experience of catering for huge amounts of people. He had chosen them because he had wanted to watch them both squirm in their inability to make the grade.

Jack sounded doubtful. ‘I thought you said that he was going to give us a fair stab at it.’

‘And he’s obviously had a change of heart.’

‘You mean he cancelled us? Just like that?’

‘Sort of.’

‘What does sort of mean?’

‘It means that I was put in a position where there was no option but to back out. I’m sorry, Jack. We’ll just have to build ourselves up slowly.’ She had intended to pour her heart out, to tell him of her fiasco of an evening. After all, she and Jack shared everything. But at the last minute she had a change of heart. So at the end of fifteen minutes she hung up feeling as though, somehow, it had been a wasted phone call. Certainly not a call that warranted being made at midnight on a Saturday—one of the few Saturday nights they had taken off, so that Jack could watch his beloved cricket match. And she had got nothing off her chest. She went to bed with the same conflicting thoughts running rampant in her head and woke up, groggy and tired, in the same frame of mind.

The one salvation was that by the time Jack returned to London she was calmer, more able to explain why she had turned the job down after all, blaming it on her own insecurities, saying that she’d rather it went to an outside party than deal with the suspicion that she had only landed it because of a historical affair that had bitten the dust years ago. The guilt was too much, she explained, with a convincing display of sincerity. Yes, it would have been nice but…such was life. She left him to wonder what exactly had been the catalyst behind her sudden decision and opted for expressions of genuine regret at the passing of a great opportunity. Not, of course, overplaying her hand in case he decided to pursue the unfortunate situation of his own accord.

She also spent the next two days in a state of muted terror in case Angelo kept his promise and came back to call. She would never have expected it of him, would never have expected him to play around behind his fiancée’s back, but maybe Jack was right, maybe men were all open to a bit of temptation. And she had not held back in her responses. Why not pursue the eager ex when the present fiancée was simply a business arrangement? Wouldn’t that be how he might think?

She felt like a cat on a hot tin roof, jumping every time the telephone rang, every time someone came to the door with deliveries. She was expecting him to descend on her, and so, when she heard the doorbell of her own house trill at nine in the evening, hours after she had stopped work, she knew who it was going to be. Not Jack. She also knew that she was not going to take the chain off the latch.

She was rigid with tension as she opened the door a crack. She was also well rehearsed in exactly what she was going to say and the tone of voice she was going to use. Cold, distant, firm.

But it wasn’t Angelo and her surprise took the wind out of her sails.

‘Good evening, Mrs…uh…Miss…’

‘Let me in. I want to talk to you.’ Georgina’s cut glass accent cut through her stammering like a knife through butter and Francesca found herself fumbling with the chain and pulling open the door.

She swept into the house in an elegant swirling cloud of yellow. Yellow jacket, yellow shoes, pale yellow clutch bag. She spent three seconds contemptuously taking in her surroundings before turning her full attention to Francesca.

Even though Georgina wore high heels Francesca towered over her, not that her height gave her any advantages. The only thought running through her head was that Angelo had told his fiancée about the lapse in his fidelity and Georgina, the business arrangement who wasn’t jealous, obviously wasn’t so much of a business arrangement that she hadn’t seen fit to storm round and have her say. Her very furious say, judging from the expression on her face.