‘Talk about what?’
‘Anything.’ Francesca shrugged. ‘What you’ve been up to. What I’ve been up to. The weather. The crisis in the Health Service. Why it always seems to rain on weekends. Anything.’
‘We know what each other has been up to. The weather is autumnal. The Health Service always seems to be in a mess, and it rains on weekends because the English climate is unpredictable, diabolical and likes to see people cancel their planned activities at the last minute. There, covered.’ He signalled for the bill and continued watching her while he waited.
‘So it is. I’m glad we got that out of the way. Now we can repair back to your place and do what we do best.’
‘Long evenings spent chatting isn’t what this is about, Francesca. I thought you understood that.’ He saw the way she flinched and was tempted to exercise a bit more compassion, but he resisted. No point in setting precedents that he would then find himself compelled to continue fulfilling. He wasn’t in the business of building a relationship with her. He had been there, done that and had the tee shirt to show for his efforts. Besides, he thought, they talked, didn’t they? How much more conversation was she looking for?
‘I do understand, Angelo. I don’t know what came over me.’ Now she was beginning to feel emotional, saying all sorts of stuff that she hadn’t intended. She certainly hadn’t intended to launch into a tirade about wanting to go back to his place and bond on some kind of spiritual, platonic level. The opposite. She had been looking forward to seeing him, to sleeping with him before she broke her news. She hadn’t planned on an emotional outburst which would leave him cold and withdrawn.
Angelo, expert as he was at second-guessing other people, recognised her wobbly smile for what it was, a plaster covering up something else, and for a fleeting second felt a chill of foreboding sweep through him before he reminded himself that there couldn’t possibly be anything substantially wrong. He had seen her two days ago and they had spent an amazing four hours together, a marathon and lazily indolent evening during which they had not managed to struggle out of his much-used king-sized bed. And, dammit, they had talked then, hadn’t they? What could have happened in the space of two days to have brought about this sudden and unwelcome shift in atmosphere?
Had Jack been talking to her? He knew that they shared some kind of bond, although the reasons behind it were beyond him, but that being the case, maybe the man had put notions in her head, notions about the wisdom of getting involved in a purely sexual relationship that wasn’t going anywhere. From what she had told him, Jack was the last person to lecture anyone on the importance of building relationships but then people who lived in glass houses were often the ones who threw the most stones. And, like it or not, she paid heed to things the man said, which was something he found irksome but was willing to put up with in view of the fact that they were just friends. He did not feel inclined to be quite so generous if the man had been putting ideas into her head. In fact, he would have to mention something to her about Jack, maybe give her a little talk on the importance of cutting apron strings.
He fulminated in silence as they stepped outside the restaurant, where the swing towards autumn was felt in the chill in the air. Francesca was making conversation, chatting about a television programme she had watched the night before. Normally, he would have teased her by adopting a viewpoint he knew would get under her skin and they would have a heated debate, even if the topic only happened to be something trivial that had taken place in one of those ridiculous reality shows she was addicted to. By the time they finished discussing the subject her cheeks would be flushed and her eyes dancing with pleasure at the sparring.
Not tonight.
He waited until there was a pause in the conversation, then inserted silkily, ‘You never told me, how is Jack? Is he between women at the moment? Or is he still dancing around the one with the kid?’
Startled by the abrupt change of conversation and the tone of his voice, Francesca glanced at Angelo’s hard profile and felt her stomach flip over. She so much wanted this evening to go well but had to concede that she had ambushed her own good intentions from the start by antagonising him with her foolish speculations about wanting to talk to him, wanting to know whether he would ever see her without sex being the primary objective. She linked her arm through his and attempted to smooth the situation back to where she wanted it to be.