Doctor Who_ Rip Tide - Louise Cooper [27]
Nina said: 'Ah ... '
For a second or two they held each other's eyes. His, she noted on a half-conscious level, were a green-grey, like the sea in a restless mood. They were very striking, highly intelligent eyes, and something in their look told her that there was a great deal more to him than his surface flippancy suggested.
'I think,' he said, 'that it might be a good idea if we levelled with each other.'
Nina opened her mouth to say that she hadn't the least idea what he was talking about – then hesitated. Far from being angry or threatening, he had taken her spying in his stride and implied that if she were honest with him, he in turn would be honest with her. Information. Answers. Wasn't that what she wanted? And now that she was recovering from her initial shock and fright, and could take in his appearance more detachedly, she thought that he was rather handsome. All that gorgeous, curling hair ... his nose was too long, but he had a lovely smile, and those eyes ... Her sense of romance, which was never far from the surface but usually ended up being squashed by circumstance, started to uncurl in her mind, and rather to the surprise of her more cynical self she heard her own voice say, 'We-ell ...'
'Tea?' He indicated the cottage door. 'Though I say it myself, I brew a mean Assam. Or I've got a bottle of a very good Syrah, if you like red, that is. I found it in the village; that late-night store of yours has an excellent selection.'
The glow of being treated like an adult and offered wine came close to undoing Nina altogether; but just in time common sense intervened. Good-looking he might be, but he was still a completely unknown quantity, and she wasn't going to be such a fool as to take him on trust.
For the first time she managed a smile, though it was cautious. 'Thanks. But I don't think so:
He looked baffled for a moment, then comprehension dawned. 'Of
course – silly of me. I can hardly expect you to walk into my parlour, as the spider said to the fly.'
'What?'
'Never mind. It's an old rhyme, you probably don't know it. In that case, can I take you for a drink at the Huer's Arms?'
Safe enough, but Vincent was the biggest gossip in the village. Besides, Steve might well be in the pub, and he was the last person Nina wanted to run into.
She said, 'I'd rather not go there.' A hesitation, then a diffident shrug as an alternative came to her. 'There's a new bistro in the village. They stay open late, and you don't have to eat'
'The Jango? I know it. In fact I had a meal there the other day, which was very good indeed. Have you eaten?'
'No, but –'
'Neither have I. So it's dinner for two, and I'm buying. Come on, before they run out of all the best dishes!'
When her spinning mind slowed down enough to allow her to think about it, Nina honestly didn't know how it had happened that she accepted his invitation and, ten minutes later, was being escorted with disarmingly old-fashioned courtesy through the door of the Jango, at the other end of the village from the Huers' Arms. The bistro was busy, but mainly with holidaymakers; most locals couldn't afford the prices, and Nina had a pang of conscience as a young waiter, whose tan and saltbleached hair suggested that he spent all his daylight hours surfing, showed them to a corner table. Then she reminded herself that her companion was probably wealthy, and she took the chair he pulled out for her and sat down.
Her companion. He had already ordered wine and was now studying the menu, and she eyed him surreptitiously through lowered lashes. Now that her rational, sensible self had finally had time to take the upper hand again, she was starting to recall a few significant and worrying facts that had been buried under the general confusion of the past