‘Tomorrow?’
‘I’ll be in touch.’
Well, he thought as he stepped out into the bleak blackness to hail a cab, she hadn’t left him very much choice, had she?
Yes, she had given him a long speech about Mr Right, but he knew this much: Mr Right was not Mr Fiancé. She might think that safety and predictability were qualities she was after, but she was wrong. He had felt it just then in her trembling struggle to tear herself away from him.
And she hadn’t told him what he had wanted to hear, that her relationship with Ben would be off. She had skilfully danced around the subject, and he had left none the wiser as to what her intentions were. But when he thought back to their conversation, he was sickly aware that running towards him, arms outstretched, for the sake of their daughter was just not enough for her.
Riccardo, accustomed as he was to life conforming to exactly what he wanted, was afflicted by an unexpected attack of mortal fear.
So what if she’d felt a little edge of nostalgic attraction to him? What did it mean? Nothing. Because she had emerged from her disastrous, disillusioning relationship with him into something she had convinced herself she wanted to be, and the fact that he was convinced otherwise meant nothing.
He would end up being a part-time father, taking Gina out to fast-food restaurants and trying to bond with her in two-hour sessions once a week. And eventually Ben—stolid, reliable, ‘let me cook for you honey’ Ben—would get his foot in through the front door until he became the full-time dad doing homework with Gina, watching her grow up, sorting out her problems.
It wouldn’t happen at once. She would do her utmost to accommodate him, because he knew that she felt guilty, but gradually the guilt would begin to fade and then the relationship that she might have put on hold would resurface. Riccardo knew human nature, knew that good intentions had a very short life span and guilt an even shorter one.
So then he came right back to his original question—what choice had she left him?
The brilliant thing about money was the way it could buy things you couldn’t see or touch. Speed, for instance. A couple of calls and he had made all the necessary arrangements to have the paraphernalia of the home office ready to be installed the following afternoon.
He could have just made do with his laptop computer, but that would have felt like a temporary option, so he had gone the whole hog, including an extra telephone line and broadband internet access.
He telephoned her office promptly the following afternoon and told her to meet him at her house in an hour.
On the other end of the line, Charlotte overcame the jolt to her nervous system on hearing his voice and prepared to bristle, but he had already hung up, leaving her no option but to rearrange the meeting she had scheduled with two mortgage specialists and leave the office in the capable but slightly dippy hands of her second in command.
She was unprepared for what met her eyes: vans. Men in overalls. Items of equipment. And, of course, Riccardo in the midst of it all.
Charlotte dropped her briefcase and stared, open mouthed, barely aware of Riccardo walking in her direction.
‘I know,’ he said, sticking his hands into his trouser pockets. ‘Utter chaos. But once everyone’s inside we can leave them to get on with things, and by the time we get back, hey presto, you’ll never know they’ve been!’ Riccardo looked at her warily. Yes, of course he had everything under control, but the woman, as he was finding out, was feisty, unpredictable and not of a disposition to take things lying down.
‘Riccardo, what’s going on?’