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, why don’t we lock up here and find ourselves something to eat?’ He was now so close to her that the hairs on the back of her neck were standing on end. Up close, he was even more disconcerting than he was with a bit of distance between them. Underneath the well-tailored clothes, every inch of his body spoke of well-toned, highly muscled power, and the impression was completed by his swarthy olive colouring, at odds with the strikingly light eyes.
She cautiously edged away and snatched her jacket from the hook on the wall and slipped it on.
‘Good girl.’ He opened the door for her and then watched as she nervously locked it behind her and shoved the jangling keyring into her bag.
‘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
