‘Angelo…’
‘You’re not scared, are you, Francesca? Because you’ll be in contact with me?’
‘No, of course not!’
‘Good. In that case, I will be in touch. I have your number.’ He smiled but his eyes remained coolly dismissive. ‘See this job as a challenge, your big opportunity to work on a slightly larger scale than you have been accustomed to in the past…’
‘Too large a scale!’ she inserted quickly.
‘You should have thought about that before you sent in your tender.’
‘I wouldn’t want to let you and your fiancée down.’
‘Believe me, I’ll make sure you don’t.’ He left her without looking back and she remained standing at the table, barely aware of the waitress coming over with the bill, taking the money and returning with change. After the initial shock of seeing him, she realised that her body had gone into automatic mode, dealing with his questions, behaving as though she wasn’t on the verge of hysteria.
Now that he had gone she felt as though she had been put through a wringer. She knew that she had never managed to exorcise his memory, but she had not been prepared for just how much he still affected her. Every part of her body was stretched to breaking-point and there would be more to come. More contact with him. More painful reminders of what she had been obliged to leave behind. There was nothing she could do about it. She didn’t need the job but she couldn’t afford to lose clients. He had caught her neatly in a trap and all she could do was get through it without too much damage being inflicted on her in the process.
CHAPTER THREE
ANGELO timed his call perfectly, as he timed all things. He waited just long enough for her to stew but not so long that she had time to think up any flimsy excuses to back out, because now that he had seen her he knew that, in the deepest recesses of his mind, she had remained unfinished business.
He pushed himself back from his desk and inclined his chair so that he could stretch out his long legs in front of him. The past couple of days had involved a delicate balancing act with Georgina who, after her initial dismay that he had decided to go with an unknown act, had been ready to move into action and take over the arrangements with her mother. Informing her that he would be personally involved in the process, he had met with a brick wall of understandable incomprehension.
‘It’s not necessary,’ Georgina had complained. ‘Mummy and I—’
‘—will, I hope, respect my wishes?’
‘But I don’t understand—’
‘What is there not to understand? You wanted my involvement and now you have it.’ Put like that, it was left to Georgina to try and quantify the level of involvement she had been expecting but, while he had listened with every show of appreciating what she was saying, he refused to budge and in the end she had been obliged to accept that he would more or less be running the show.
He reached for his mobile and rang the number on the business card that had been burning a hole in his wallet for the past three days.
Francesca answered almost immediately and, for a split second, hearing her voice down the end of the line was a brutal reminder of how they once used to talk on the phone, sometimes for hours on end, long, lazy conversations that made the physical distances between them seem less impossibly far.
‘It’s Angelo,’ he said abruptly.
‘How are you?’
‘Is your diary at hand? We can arrange a time to meet so that we can discuss these menus in detail.’
‘Angelo…I’m really not sure whether I’m equipped to cater for such a large number of people…’
‘Haven’t we covered that particular patch of ground already?’
‘But—’
‘I can meet with you and your partner tomorrow evening. Georgina will naturally want to come along as well.’ Long, sexy conversations three years ago, when talking to her had been like a physical release for him after a gruelling day at work. He could remember her soft voice catching on a laugh, the way she had lowered it whenever she’d told him how much she was missing him, missing making love to him. He wondered now whether she had been saying the same things to someone else, someone more indispensable to her than he had ever been. ‘Six-thirty at the bar in the Savoy,’ he told her curtly. ‘I’ll expect you both there.’