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.’