Best Laid Plans (6 page)

He called her just before she took a lunch break, or what would have to be a sandwich at her desk. “Good afternoon, Francesca. How are you?”

“Feeling silly. How are you?”

“Looking forward to seeing you. Can I pick you up from work tonight?”

Oh no, he was going to have her shopping again! “Where are we going? Can’t I meet you?”
At a time where I can get ready in a leisurely manner and more than prepared for several hours of ravishment?

“The city. There’s a dress code.”

“Oh there is?” She rolled her eyes, at the same time unashamedly pleased that he was going through the effort for her.

“1940s.”

“Right, if I do this then I get to pick where we go tomorrow. I mean whenever we can go out next.”

She could hear the smile in his voice. “You’re making plans for us. I like that, a lot. All right, that’s a deal. Are you sure I can’t pick you up? I’m going to drive.”

“Why do I picture you with a motorbike?”

“That would be because I left my bike in Naples and my friend Angelo is looking after it. He says looking after, I say he’s nicked it.”

Frankie burst out laughing. “Can you say nicked again?”

He did as she bid, making her laugh even harder.

“What?”

“You can’t be saying colloquialisms in that accent. It’s too funny. I’ve never heard nicked with so many ‘es’ before.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the way I said it.”

“Ho-kay, then. I won’t tease you anymore.” She collected her bag and jacket, waving to Kate and Pardeep as she left. They both gave her “what the hell” looks, but she’d tell them later. To be fair, she really did need to buy Kate something for giving Luca her number.

“You can, I’ll only get you back for it later.”

“Oh governor, it’s on.”

He laughed, a sound that heated her all over. “Good.”

She quickly bought some essential items and returned to the unit. Pardeep and Kate were looking at her expectantly.

“What?”

“Whatcha doin’?” Kate asked.

Frankie could feel her face was on fire. “Er, going out with that chef bloke. Nothing major.”

Pardeep snatched her bag and waved the packaged stockings under her nose. “What’s this then?”

Kate clapped. “Oh, he’s getting the Frankie special.” She began to shimmy, pretending to do a striptease while Pardeep sang the tune.

Frankie snatched back the stockings. “I was going to show you the earrings I’d bought you both to say thank you, but after that, I’m keeping them.”

Pardeep and Kate closed their mouths. “Baby, I’m sorry.” Pardeep fluttered her eyelashes.

“Baby, I love you,” Kate added, looking even more pathetic, which inevitably tickled Frankie’s forgiving bone. She gave them the neatly wrapped boxes from a quirky store they all loved. Kate opened hers with glee.

“You’ve got great taste.”

“Ooh, pretty!” Pardeep gasped at hers. “Now do you want us to run a police check on this dude? Because we’re ready.”

“You don’t even know his surname!” Frankie fumed. “Don’t you dare. I don’t want any sabotage. At least let me bang the man first, then you can rain on my post-coital parade.”

Her colleagues pouted. “Spoilsport.”

Frankie left unashamedly early to go home and make full use of her purchases. This is why she didn’t date—it always ended up being expensive.

Worth it though
, her body zinged in agreement. Luca better kiss her tonight. He was behaving far too well, and it was making her wonder if he was just being nice or if he actually wanted to do something about her. The stockings hopefully would sort that out. By the time she reached Barbican station, Luca was already waiting for her.

He looked devastating in a dark grey suit, holding a fedora between both hands. Frankie had been ruthless and gone through her boxed-up clothes that she hadn’t touched since she’d left her flat, and she’d found a shift dress that would definitely pass for forties fashion. To complete the outfit, she’d added some Mary Janes with a pathetically low heel she borrowed from her mother and tugged on the much-teased hold-up seamed stockings. She hadn’t batted an eyelid about having to go up her normal size in tights so the hold-ups wouldn’t dig into her thighs and leave marks. It was all for a good cause: tempting Luca.

Luca held out his elbow to her and she took it. Her eyes traced over his mouth, and it took a while for his words to process in her brain. “You want to kiss me? That look on your face says yes.”

“It occurred to me, a little.” She shrugged, looking somewhere else rather than at Luca. He chuckled beside her.

“It’s better I don’t kiss you in public. Not that you wouldn’t look beautiful beneath me, but I don’t want anyone else seeing you naked.”

A shudder skated over her spine at his words. She cleared her throat, thickened by pure lust. “Good point.”

He settled the fedora on his head and caught her hand in his. “This is where we act silly.”

It was a bit like children playing dress up, but with adults, sometimes that was the sole appeal of nights like this. They stepped through a dodgy-looking warehouse door and into a doorway to the past. The warehouse had been transformed into part piano bar and part American restaurant. There were people dressed as nurses and soldiers, but most were dressed as Frankie and Luca were.

“Need transport to England?” asked a man with a pencilled-in moustache and his fedora pulled low over his eyes. He held out two paper passports. “Cheap.”

“What do you need for them?” Luca asked, immediately settling into the game.

“You need to find a guy called Ugarte. He’s got some papers for me. You get them to me, you get the passports.”

Frankie and Luca gazed at each other, laughter brimming in their eyes. She loved that she had to look up at him. “Casablanca!” they said together. Frankie turned back to the dealer. “Where do we find you when we get the papers from Ugarte?”

“Tell him Clipper sent you. When he asks about the weather, say to him that it’s cooler in Paris this time of year. He’ll give you what you want.”

Frankie and Luca spent the next hour running around the warehouse hand in hand on the hunt for Ugarte. They stopped for drinks, Frankie indulging in a dirty martini and Luca sticking to soda water. Once they got the letters from the elusive Ugarte, they were able to sit down in one of the Moroccan cafes and eat lamb tagine deli wraps with mint yoghurt.

Frankie’s face ached with laughter. It was the silliest thing she’d done in a long time—dressed up like a 1940s moll, pretended to be a spy, run around with a gorgeous man, and enjoyed what was the best martini she’d ever had. A sparkly-dressed woman was singing “As Time Goes By” at the piano bar.

“Look!” Luca pointed to the other side of the warehouse. “If we get the passports, we can get a pilot to fly us to England.”

“We didn’t get the cash from the other guy, the captain nearly sprung us.”

“You walked away without even a glance back at me.”

Frankie shrugged, trying not to laugh. “We ran past that prison, so I didn’t fancy getting sent there.”

Something passed over Luca’s face. “Me neither.”

What’s that about?
“I did go to a few prisons as part of my training,” Frankie ventured. “They’re not the holiday parks newspapers would have us believe.”

“Training for?” Luca trailed off. She stared at him for a moment, wondering if he’d googled her.

“The police.”

“What made you want to do that?”

She shrugged. “My mum was in the police. She had me, never got back to work, and has never forgiven me for it. I thought I could make it up to her.”

Luca sighed. “How did that work out for you?”

“Not so well.” Who needed to talk about thirty-odd years of disappointing her mother? “Sounds like you’ve had personal experience.”

“My family is full of police officers. We’re known for it in Italy. You’re not a true Caristo unless you’re in the force.”

“Let me guess, you’re doing a woman’s job?”

He gave a single nod. “Being a disappointment to a parent is something I’ve stopped caring about. I won’t be able to please them with everything I do, and I can’t live my life for them. Are you happy with your work?”

“Some days,” she admitted, picking up Luca’s soda water and taking a sip. “Other days I feel like I’m doing more harm than good. That I can’t change the men that I’ve caught, that I can’t save the women that I’ve talked to. Then there are the days when I feel like Wonder Woman, and that can’t be bad for employment. What is it with you and food then?”

“I’m an Italian—food is
everything
. It brings us all together, we talk over it, we fight over it. No one will ever admit that their food isn’t as good as their neighbour’s or that they haven’t made it with as much love as their grandmother. You have to be careful, follow directions, understand flavours and combinations. In this wrap, there is cumin, tarragon and honey in the sauce. The meat is lamb but it’s shank, not leg.”

“There’s honey in this?” Frankie laughed. “You say it like that, not so girly.” She watched the natural flush on his cheekbones deepen.

“It’s one of the few things I’m good at.”

“I doubt that,” Frankie said without thinking. Before he could even begin to tease her about that thoughtlessness, she added, “I know what you and I should do tomorrow.”

“All right.”

“You should cook for me.”

His smile turned her knees to water. “It would be my pleasure. But you’ll need to come to my home. I work best in my own kitchen.”

“Brilliant. What can I bring? I get the idea that you know what you’re cooking for me already.”

“Planned to the letter,” he admitted. “But you don’t need to bring anything at all.” He gave a small shrug before he caught her eye. “Maybe a toothbrush.”

“Change of underwear?”

“I wouldn’t bother.”

Frankie giggled. “You are confident, aren’t you?”

She felt the tips of his fingers stroking over her stocking-covered knee, and then dipping into the pit. It took an effort that could have lifted a Boeing jet not to let her eyes close and a moan escape her throat. “Not really. You could take your underwear off right now. Let me see.”

Her grin widened. “I would, but I’m not wearing any.”

His fingers stilled on her knee. “I’m about to break my no public kissing rule.”

She caught his hand and squeezed. “Tomorrow.”

Luca’s long lashes lowered. “I knew that’d come back to haunt me.”

“Should have taken the opportunity,” she retorted, giving his hand a dismissive pat and placing it with decorum on the table.

“It was more for your interest than my own,” he assured her. When their gazes connected, she remembered that he was going to drive her home. God help her, she was going to lose her job for indecent behaviour. He then spoke as if he’d read her mind. “Don’t worry. I’ll get you home without a wrinkle in that pretty dress.”

“It was in a box for months. It can cope with a wrinkle.”

He groaned. “Francesca, why are you making this impossible for me? I’m trying to be a gentleman.”

“That’s nice,” she said gently, “you and your mister downstairs can discuss that in the morning.”

Luca got to his feet. “I’m going to get another drink. You stay here and think about how this conversation will repeat in your head after a night with me.”

She knew he was making a good point, but she was lost in a vision of herself wrapped up in his sheets, thoroughly and very satisfyingly loved. “I’m fully intending to be an amnesiac about this conversation tomorrow. I don’t like to gloat.”

He stroked her cheek with the back of his hand as he passed her. One touch sent tremor after tremor all over her body. Okay, straight-up lies had been told. She was
not
ready for him.

The last time Luca had cooked like this, it had been for the Michelin inspectors at his old restaurant in Rome. Everything needed to be perfect and ready to either gently reheat or eat cold. With Francesca in his home, his first priority would be to prove to her just how hard he’d been holding back. Every time she touched him it was a struggle not to press her against the nearest wall and fuck them both into oblivion. But he wanted it to be special or at the very least, because he wasn’t sure just how long he could hold on for, private. He’d considered a living-room picnic and discarded the idea as soon as the vision had passed through his mind of rubbing the bitten end of a strawberry over Francesca’s nipples.

They were going too fast. He knew that. She still didn’t know what he’d done while basking in the glow of a fearsome sous chef. His family dynamic was a blur, and as for his love life? Christ, that was not going to be fun. She had given up her bitter tale with Leon Bridges, and it was only fair that he give up his.

Luca’s flat was on the south side of the Putney Bridge, close enough to Tony and far enough to not hear Lydia call him an eejit. The first six months after he arrived in London, he’d spent far too much time alone in his barely furnished flat going by a strict routine. Get up, clean up, gym, work, gym, home, eat, sleep. Get up and start all over again. Finally it dawned on him that he was in one of the best cities in the world and he should stop his voluntary confinement. While he was never going to be a man who shopped, he would always be a man who loved vehicles, food and an ice-cold sweet-ass beer. He learned to relax, to breathe, to not be on edge, waiting for La Madama to catch him with his hands in his hard-earned cash. The flat quickly filled with goods ordered via a very good company that dealt with manufacturers in Italy. He added small touches, and regardless of however many times Tony claimed his obsession with making his flat liveable as
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
, he was now happy with the results and more than happy with his kitchen.

Francesca will look very beautiful just here,
he thought, touching the granite counter with a firm hand. It was funny. Every relationship he had, he’d seen the end, natural conclusion or otherwise. Even with Dafne, he’d known it wasn’t going to end well and tried to challenge his own perception. With Francesca, he only saw endless possibilities.