in a death-like grip. She unglued her feet from the ten-inch square they had occupied since the man entered the room, and darted across to Alison’s desk for her appointment book.
‘What’s your job here?’
Ruth stopped what she was doing and took a deep breath. ‘I refuse to answer any more questions until you tell me who you are,’ she said in a bold rush. She could feel the colour redden her cheeks and, not for the first time, cursed her inability to dredge up even the remotest appearance of savoir faire. At the age of twenty-two, she should surely have left behind all this ridiculous blushing.
‘I’m Franco Leoni.’ He allowed a few seconds for his name to be absorbed, and when she continued to stare at him in bewilderment, he added, with a hint of impatience, ‘I own this place, Miss Jacobs.’
“Oh,’ Ruth said dubiously.
‘Doesn’t Alison tell you anything? Bloody awful man-management. How long have you been here? Are you a temp? Why the hell is she allowing a temp the responsibility of locking up? This is damned ridiculous.’
The rising irritation in his voice snapped her out of her zombie-like incomprehension.
‘I’m not a temp, Mr Leoni,’ she said shortly. ‘I’ve been here virtually since it was taken over, eleven months ago.’
‘Then you should know who I am. Where’s Alison?’
‘She left about an hour ago,’ Ruth admitted reluctantly. She was frantically trying to recognise his name, and failing. She knew that the magazine, which had been a small, money-losing venture, had been taken over by some conglomerate or other, but the precise names of the people involved eluded her.
‘Left for where? Get her on the line for me.’
‘It’s Friday, Mr Leoni. Miss Hawes won’t be at home. I believe she was going out with…with…with her mother to the theatre.’
The small white lie was enough to bring another telling wash of colour to her face, and she stared resolutely at the bank of windows behind him. By nature she was scrupulously honest, but the convoluted workings of her brain had jumped ahead to some obscure idea that this man, whether he owned the place or not, might not be too impressed if he knew that her boss was on a dinner date with another man.
Alison, tall, vivacious, red-haired and thoroughly irreverent, was the sort of woman who spent her life rotating men and enjoying every minute of it. The last thing Ruth felt equipped to handle at seven-thirty on a Friday evening was a rotated boyfriend. And this man looked just the sort to appeal to her boss. Tall, striking, oozing sexuality. The sort of man who would appeal to most women, she conceded grudgingly, if you liked that sort of obvious look.
And if you were the type who didn’t view basic good manners as an essential part of someone’s personality.
‘Then I suppose you’ll just have to believe me when I tell you that I’m her boss, won’t you?’ He smiled slowly, watching her face as though amused by everything he could read there. ‘And, believe it or not, I’m very glad that I bumped into you.’ A speculative look had entered his eyes which she didn’t much care for.
‘I really need to be getting home…’
‘Parents might be worried?’
‘I don’t live with my parents, actually,’ Ruth informed him coldly. After nearly a year and a quarter, the novelty of having her own place, small and nondescript though it might be, was still a source of pleasure for her. She had been the last of her friends to fly the family nest and she had only done so because part of herself knew that she needed to.
She adored her parents, and loved the vicarage where she had lived since she was a child, but some obscure part of her had realised over the years that she had to spread her wings and sample what else the big world had to offer, or else buckle down to the realisation that her life would remain neatly parcelled up in the small village where she had grown up, surrounded by her cosy circle of friends all of whose ambitions had been to get married and have big families and never mind what else there was out there.
‘No?’ He didn’t sound as though he believed that, and she glared at him.
‘No. I’m twenty-two years old and I live in a flat in Hampstead. Now, do you want to make an appointment to see Miss Hawes in the morning or not?’
‘You keep forgetting that I own this company. I’ll see her in the morning, all right, but there’s no need for me to make an appointment.’
Arrogant. That had been the word she’d been searching for to describe this man. She folded her arms and stared at him.
‘Fine. Now perhaps you could see yourself to the door…?’
‘Have you eaten?’
‘What?’
‘I said…’
‘I heard what you said, Mr Leoni. I just wondered what you meant by it.’
‘It means that I’m asking you to have dinner with me, Miss Jacobs.’
‘I beg your pardon? I’m afraid…I couldn’t possibly…I don’t usually…’
‘Accept dinner invitations from strangers?’
Yes, of course he had known what she had been thinking. She didn’t have the knack of dissembling.
‘That’s right,’ Ruth informed him, bristling. ‘I know that must seem a little unusual to you, but I…’ Where was she going with this one? A long monologue on her sheltered life? An explanation on being a vicar’s daughter? Hadn’t she come to London in the hope of gaining a bit of sophistication?
‘I don’t bite, Miss Jacobs.’ He pushed himself away from the edge of the desk and she looked at him guardedly. If he was trying to make her believe that he was as harmless as the day was long, then he was living on another planet. Innocent and naïve she might be, but born yesterday she was not.
‘You’re my employee. Call it maintaining good relations with someone who works for me. Besides…’ The assessing look was back on his face, sending little tingles of apprehension racing down her spine. ‘I’d like to find out a bit more about you. Find out what you do in the company… And in case you still don’t believe who I am…’ He sighed and withdrew his wallet from his pocket, flicked it open and produced a letter to Alison, with his name flamboyantly emblazoned in black at the bottom, and his impressive title typed underneath.
Ruth scanned the letter briefly, noting in passing that it implied, with no attempts to beat around the bush, that the magazine had not accumulated enough sales and that it was time to get to the drawing board and sort it out. Presumably the very reason he had made an appearance at the ridiculous hour of seven-thirty on a Friday evening.
‘There now,’ he said, without the slightest trace of remorse that he had allowed her to wallow in nightmarish possibilities when he could have eliminated all that by simply identifying himself from the beginning. ‘Believe me?’
‘Thank you. Yes.’
‘What do you do here?’
‘Nothing very important,’ Ruth said hastily, just in case he got it into his head that he could quiz her on the details of running a magazine. ‘I’m an odd-job man…woman…person…I do a bit of typing, take calls, fetch and carry…that’s all…’
‘Tell me all about it over dinner.’ His hand brushed hers as he retrieved his letter and rammed it back into his pocket, and she could feel something inside her shrinking away from him. She had never met anyone quite like him before. Her boyfriends, all three of them, had been from her town, and they had been nice boys, the sort who were quite happy to trundle through life with modest aspirations and no great appetite for taking life by its head and felling it.
Franco Leoni looked the sort who relished challenges of that sort, thrived on them.
‘Now,