The Baby Scandal

‘My car’s just outside,’ he said, as they walked down the staircase, ‘and please, try not to wear that fraught expression on your face. It makes me feel like a sick old man who takes advantage of innocent young girls.’ There was lazy amusement in his voice when he said this, and she didn’t have to cast her eyes in his direction to know that he was laughing at her.

His car was a silver Jaguar. He opened the door for her, waited till she had shuffled inside, then strode to the driver’s seat. As soon as the door was shut, he turned to her and said, ‘Now, what do you fancy eating?’

‘Anything!’ Ruth said quickly. The darkness of the car made his presence even more stifling, and she cursed herself for having been railroaded into accepting his invitation. Yes, so he might well be the owner of the company she worked for, but that didn’t mean that he was trustworthy where the opposite sex was concerned.

She wryly recognised the outdated prudery of her logic and smiled weakly to herself. As an only child, and a girl on top of it, she had been cherished and protected by her parents from day one.

‘A girl without pretensions,’ he murmured to himself, starting the engine, ‘very refreshing. Don’t care what you eat. Do you like Italian?’

‘Fine. Yes.’

She could feel her heart pounding like a steam engine inside her as the car pulled smoothly away from the curb.

‘So, where do you fit into the scheme of things at Issues?’

‘If you own the magazine, how is it that you’ve never made an appearance there?’ Ruth blurted out curiously. She was pressed against the car door and was looking at him warily with her wide grey eyes.

‘The magazine is a very, very minor company of mine.’ He glanced in her direction. ‘Have I mentioned to you that I don’t bite? I’m not infectious either, so there’s no need to fall out of the car in your desperation to put a few more inches between us.’ He looked back to the road and Ruth shuffled herself into a more normal position. ‘I bought it because I thought it could be turned around and because I viewed it as a sort of hobby.’

‘A sort of hobby?’ Ruth asked incredulously. ‘You bought a magazine as a hobby?’ The thought of such extravagance was almost beyond comprehension. ‘What sort of life do you lead? I always thought that hobbies involved doing things like playing tennis, or squash or bird-watching…or collecting model railways…Your hobby is buying small companies just for the fun of it?”

‘There’s no need to sound quite so shocked,’ he said irritably, frowning as he stared ahead and manoeuvred the honeycomb of narrow streets.

‘Well, I am shocked,’ Ruth informed him, forgetting to be intimidated.

‘Why?’

‘Because, Mr Leoni…’

‘You can call me Franco. I’ve never been a great believer in surnames.’

‘Because,’ she continued, skipping over his interruption, ‘it seems obscene to have so much money that you can buy a company just for the heck of it!’

‘My little gesture,’ he pointed out evenly, although a dark flush had spread across his neck, ‘happens to have created jobs, and in accordance with the package I’ve agreed with all my employees, including yourself, you all stand to gain if the company succeeds.’

Ruth didn’t say anything, and eventually, he said abruptly, ‘Well? What have you got to say to that?’

‘I…nothing…’

He clicked his tongue in annoyance. ‘I…nothing…’ he mimicked. ‘What does that mean? Does it mean that you have an opinion on the subject? You had one a minute ago…’

‘It means that you’re my employer, Mr Leoni…

‘Franco!’

‘Yes, well…’

‘Say it!’ he said grimly.

‘Say what?’

‘My name!’

‘It means that you’re my employer, Franco…’ She went hot as she said that, and hurriedly moved on. ‘And discretion is the better part of valour.’ That was one of her father’s favourite sayings. He spent so much time listening to his parishioners that he had always lectured to her on the importance of hearing without judging, and taking the wise course rather than the impulsive, thoughtless one.

‘Hang discretion!’

Ruth looked at him curiously. Was he getting hot under the collar? He hadn’t struck her as the sort of man who ever got hot under the collar.

‘Okay,’ she said soothingly, ‘I take your point that you’ve created jobs, and if it succeeds then we all succeed. It just seems to me that buying a company as a bit of fun is the sort of thing…’ She took a deep breath here and then said in a rush, ‘That someone does because they have too much money and might be…bored…’

‘Bored?’ he spluttered furiously, swerving the car into a space by the pavement as though only suddenly remembering the purpose of the trip in the first place had been to get them to a restaurant, which he appeared to have overshot. He killed the engine and turned his full attention on her.

Ruth reverted to her original position against the car door. Her shoulder-length vanilla-blonde hair brushed the sides of her face and her mouth was parted in anticipation of some horrendous verbal attack, full frontal, no holds barred. He certainly looked in the mood for it.

He inhaled deeply, raked his fingers through his hair and then shook his head in wonderment. ‘How long is it since I met you?’ He glanced at his watch while Ruth helplessly wondered where this was going. ‘Forty-five minutes? Forty-five minutes and you’ve managed to prod me in more wrong places than most people can accomplish in a lifetime.’

‘I’m—I’m sorry…’ Ruth stammered.

‘Quite an achievement,’ he carried on, ignoring her mumbled apology.

‘I don’t consider it much of an achievement to antagonise someone,’ she said, aghast at his logic.

‘Which is probably why you’re so good at it.’ He had regained his temporarily misplaced composure and clicked open his door. ‘I’m looking forward to dinner,’ he said, before he slid out of the driver’s seat. ‘This is the first time I’ve walked down a road and not known where it was leading.’

What road? Ruth thought, as she stepped out of the car onto the pavement. What was he talking about? She hoped that he didn’t expect her to be some kind of cabaret for him, because she had no intentions of fulfilling his expectations, employer or not.

The Italian restaurant was small and crowded and smelled richly of garlic and herbs and good food. It was also familiar to the man at her side, because he was greeted warmly by the door and launched into fluent Italian, leaving her a chance to look around her while her mind churned with questions about him.

‘You speak fluent Italian,’ she said politely, as they were shown to their table. ‘Have you lived in England long?’

They sat down and he stared at her thoughtfully. ‘You look much younger than twenty-two. Where are you from?’

Ruth had spent her life being told that she looked much younger than she was. She supposed that by the time she hit fifty she would be glad for the compliment, but right now, sitting opposite a man who bristled with worldly-wise sophistication, it didn’t strike her as much of a compliment.

‘A very small town in Shropshire,’ she said, staring at the menu which had been handed to her. ‘You wouldn’t have heard of it.’

‘Try me.’

So she did, and when he admitted that he had never heard of the place she gave her shy, soft laugh and said, ‘Told you so.’

‘So you came here to London…for excitement?’

She shrugged. ‘I fancied a change of scenery,’ she said vaguely, not wanting to admit that the search for a bit of excitement had contributed more than a little to her reasons for leaving.

‘And what were you doing before you moved here?’ He hadn’t bothered to look at the menu, and when the waiter came to take their orders, she realised that he already knew what he wanted. Halibut, grilled. Her choice of chicken in a wine and cream sauce seemed immoderate in comparison, but a lack of appetite was not something she had ever suffered from, despite her slight build. She had eaten her way through twenty-two years of her mother’s wonderful home cooking, including puddings that ignored advice on cholesterol levels, and had never put on any excess weight.

‘Secretarial work,’ she answered. ‘Plus I helped Mum and Dad a lot at home. Doing typing for Dad, going to see his parishioners…’