it.’
He laughed. ‘If you had a café-standard espresso machine at home, I’d be a bit surprised.’
‘And my flat’s very small.’
‘Stop apologising. It doesn’t matter how big your home is—only how big your welcome is.’
It was her turn to laugh. ‘Why is it I can hear Nonna’s voice saying that?’
‘Probably because it’s one of her favourite phrases,’ he admitted.
Fran’s ground-floor studio flat was very neat and tidy, as he’d expected. The sofa obviously converted to a bed; there was enough room for a few shelves stacked with books and scattered with framed photographs, a small TV and a micro stereo, and a tiny kitchen in one corner with a bistro table and two chairs next to it. There was a small dragon tree in a white pot on the table.
‘It’s very nice,’ he said.
‘But it’s still very small,’ she said ruefully. ‘It was either sharing a house or renting a studio flat.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘And I wanted my own space. So I chose this.’
Fran didn’t like sharing her space? Given the way she’d fitted in so well with the Mazettis this afternoon, that surprised him. Or maybe not—like him, she was part of a large family where having your own space was a luxury. This would be a bolthole for her. Just like his flat was, for him.
He walked over to the window. ‘Nice gardens.’
She nodded. ‘I’m really lucky that I’m this side of the building and not on the street side. The gardens are communal so the landlord deals with it all—the nearest I have to a garden of my own is my dracena.’
He noticed that she used the Latin name—so, was Fran a gardener at heart? Did she have a secret yearning for a house with a garden of her own?
But if he asked her she’d simply deflect the question. He’d already noticed she was very good at that; she rarely gave anything away about herself. He knew next to nothing about her family, other than that she had twin brothers and a sister and they were all academic.
‘Go and sit down.’ She motioned towards the sofa. ‘I’ll make the coffee.’
He sat down and watched her as she switched the kettle on and began shaking grounds into a cafétière. Every moment was efficient, economical. Beautiful to watch. But what shocked him was how much he wanted to go and stand behind her, slide his arms round her waist, hold her close and bury his face in the curve of her neck.
This wasn’t supposed to happen.
If he wasn’t careful, he’d end up believing their relationship was for real instead of a fiction to keep his family happy.
To stop himself thinking about touching her, he twisted round to look at the shelves behind the sofa. There were several framed photographs propped against the books. ‘These are your family?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
There was one of them all together, very similar in style to the one he had on his computer screen at work—but he noticed immediately that Fran wasn’t in it. ‘Where were you?’he asked.
‘Behind the camera. Which is where I prefer to be.’
‘You’re worried about posing for a photograph?’ Without giving her the chance to answer, he pulled his mobile phone from his pocket, flicked it into camera mode and took a snap of her. He looked at the screen critically. ‘It’s perfectly OK. You don’t take a bad photograph.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t have a phobia about having my picture taken, Gio. I just prefer being behind the lens, not in front of it.’
On the outside, looking in? Or was he reading too much into it? He changed tack. ‘Is that what you thought about doing when you were a kid? Being a photographer?’
‘No, I’m not that arty.’ She shrugged. ‘I take reasonable snaps, but I’m not under any illusions that I’m the next David Bailey.’
‘So what did you want to do, when you were at school?’
‘Can’t remember.’
Her back was to him so he couldn’t read her expression. He had the feeling that she was fibbing, but he didn’t want to push her too hard, so he let it go. Instead, he picked up the group photograph and settled back against the sofa to study it more carefully. ‘You’ve met my family. They’re going to grill me about yours—and if I say I don’t know, they’ll smell a rat. Come and tell me about them,’ he invited.
‘There’s not that much to tell.’ She brought the coffee over and handed him a mug. ‘Obviously that’s my mum and dad—Dad’s head of the local middle school and Mum’s a geography teacher at the local high school.’
Again, he noticed, she’d given him the least information she could get away with. ‘Honestly, getting details out of you is like pulling teeth! I ought to take lessons from Nonna. What are their names?’ Gio prompted.
‘Carol and Warren.’
They looked pleasant enough. Physically, they were nothing like Fran; they were both tall, and, although Warren’s hair was graying, he’d clearly been fair, as had Carol. Her siblings were tall and fair, too. So he could see why Fran, being little and dark-haired, felt the differences so keenly.
‘Did you take this in your parents’ back garden?’
‘Yes.’
It was incredibly neat and tidy; clearly someone in the family loved gardening and took pride in the flowers. Something Fran had had in common with them? But he couldn’t think of a way to ask without risking her clamming up on him.
‘Tell me about the others,’ he invited.
She put her mug on the floor, then pointed to the younger woman in the photograph. ‘This is Suzy—she’s the baby of the family. She’s training to be a dentist.’
Again, the bare minimum of detail. What was Suzy like as a person? If anyone had asked him to describe Marcie, the baby in their family, he would’ve said she was little and funny and noisy and arty—she worked in a gallery and, although she could barely draw a straight line with a ruler, she had a real eye for colour and detail, and the pieces she bought for herself were already worth at least three times what she’d paid for them.
‘Does she get more information out of you than anyone else?’ he asked.
She frowned. ‘How?’
‘By pulling…’ He stopped. ‘Never mind.’ It was a poor joke, and he didn’t want to annoy her so that she clammed up again. ‘What about the twins?’ he asked. They were definitely identical; he couldn’t tell them apart.
‘This is Ted and this is Dominic.’ She pointed them out in turn. ‘Ted’s a forensic scientist and Dominic’s doing a PhD in history—he’ll probably go on to teach at uni because he runs a few tutorials and lectures already.’
Again, very little detail. But one thing he had
