He seemed to have become very talented at abrupt conversations because he didn’t give her time to voice any more objections. In fact, he barely gave her time to brush her hair and stick on some make-up and then the doorbell was ringing and there he was. Cool, casual and impossibly good-looking. And on her doorstep. And yes, she was horrified to see him standing there. But she was also…shamefully excited.
‘I’ve already brought the wine.’ He handed her two bottles of very expensive stuff which she dumped on the table in the hallway before grabbing her bag.
‘This is just crazy.’ Her heart was thumping madly as she looked at him. He was wearing a casual pair of cream trousers and an open-necked designer polo shirt. Against it, his skin was bronzed and vitally attractive and she didn’t want to stare so she focused on the logo on his shirt instead.
‘What’s wrong with crazy some of the time?’ Crazy? It didn’t feel crazy to him. It felt like the sanest thing he had done in a while. Georgina, he mused, would have been very hard pressed to agree with his self-diagnosis. She, too, had called him crazy when he had spoken to her three days before. A lot else, as well. In fact, crazy had been one of her more gentle remarks.
‘You can’t do this,’ she had told him, over her spritzer in his apartment. ‘You can’t just break off this engagement, not when everything’s been planned and invitations have been sent out!’
But after the tears and the pleading had come the inevitable rage. And, at that stage, crazy had been one of her less flamboyant descriptions of him.
Angelo had gritted his teeth and sat through the tirade. He had felt sorry for her, in a curiously detached way, but had been implacable in his decision and he knew that his implacability had fuelled her anger, as had his observation that she would find someone far more suitable as a husband in time.
He had been relieved when she had finally stormed out of his apartment, after informing him that she would be keeping the vastly expensive diamond engagement ring and that he could cover the costs of every single thing that could not be returned. It had seemed a very small price to pay, in his opinion.
The only thing he had kept from her had been the reason why he had decided not to go through with the marriage. That would have been honesty stretched to the point of needless cruelty, so he had mentioned nothing of his previous relationship with their caterer and had greeted accusations of infidelity in complete silence.
‘Do you mean,’ Francesca was saying as she struggled to divest herself of the idea that they were on a date and focus on the notion that he might just want to prove to himself that she could cook, ‘that you’re testing my skills? For the big day? Just in case I secretly use cook-in sauces in my recipes? I don’t, as it happens.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. So you won’t mind proving it to me. My car’s just there so we’ll drive to the nearest supermarket. Where is it?’
‘I usually get my fresh meat and fish directly from source,’ Francesca said with a touch of pride. ‘And the meat is always organic.’
‘Well, I think that just for tonight we will do away with the fish and meat markets and just take what we can get at the supermarket counters. I can take or leave the organic business.’
‘That’s not a very twenty-first century response,’ Francesca said, slipping into the passenger seat and watching her house disappear with a certain amount of foreboding.
‘Well, maybe I am not a very twenty-first century man.’ He shifted down a gear at the traffic lights and glanced sideways at her. She was making a point of not looking at him but she would look at him eventually. There was no rush. He felt the same warm satisfaction spread through him as he had felt earlier on in the week, when he had made the decision to break off his engagement and to do what his gut instincts had been telling him he needed to do from the very first time he had set eyes on her in that restaurant in Covent Garden. He was no twenty-first century man.
Telling himself that he was civilised enough to restrict his responses to a casual shrug over an unfortunate episode in his past had been a vast misjudgement of his own character. His relationship with her had never, for him, been casual enough to warrant such indifference.