Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [204]
The doorbell rang and they both jumped.
‘Who the…?’ Tara asked. ‘It’s ten to twelve.’
Katherine’s face flooded with colour. ‘I think it’s for me,’ she said, faintly.
‘Who is it? Is it Joe?’
It was Lorcan.
78
‘I don’t believe it,’ Tara breathed, as Katherine buzzed him in downstairs.
The cheek of him! And Katherine hadn’t been so crazy, after all.
Katherine opened the door. Her knees began to knock as soon as she saw him, in all his broad, hard masculinity. The appraising expression in his dark eyes propelled her back a dozen years. The arrogant toss of his leonine mane hadn’t changed one bit. ‘Come in.’ She tried to corral the desire for revenge before it all escaped in the face of his mesmerizing loveliness. She was nineteen again and dizzy with disbelief that he was actually there.
He lounged ahead of her into the living-room, where Tara was waiting, her face hard.
‘Hi there,’ Tara said, coolly. ‘We weren’t expecting you.’
‘I think Katherine might have been.’ Lorcan’s meaningful, regretful smile intimated to Tara that if only he wasn’t saving himself for her flatmate, he’d be making a move on her.
‘Where did you get the phone number?’ Tara asked, unimpressed. Didn’t he know she didn’t stand for nonsense from men any more?
‘Oh, I didn’t ring,’ he explained, with another my-God-you’re-one-attractive-woman smile.
‘I see.’
‘Tara, would you mind…?’ Katherine tried to be polite.
Tara stomped from the room, surprised at how angry she felt. Lorcan was a tosspot, anyone could see that. For the first time ever Tara had an inkling of how frustrating it must have been for everyone around her when she persisted with unsuitable men.
The living-room door slammed and Katherine and Lorcan sat looking at each other, he on the couch, she on a chair.
‘So,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she agreed, her lips trembling. Beneath her skull, it was lighter than air, unpleasantly insubstantial. She couldn’t take in that he was really sitting there opposite her.
‘Why are you here?’ she asked, with a tartness that required effort. In version one of the fantasies that had consoled her through the years, Lorcan would burst into passionate declarations along the lines of ‘I never forgot you, letting you go was the biggest mistake I ever made, let’s forget the last twelve and a half years, we’ve wasted too much time…’ Which would open up a lovely opportunity for her to tell him of all the ways he could stick it up his bum.
But instead he just said, with confident ease, ‘Hey, it’s great to bump into you again. We can catch up on old times.’ Then he surprised himself by adding, ‘And I’d like to know…’ He faltered, and fixed his sherry-luminous eyes on hers. ‘I suppose I’d like to know what happened to the baby.’
Like a slippery eel, her anger kept wriggling from her grasp. She should be furious that he’d waited so long to find out what had happened to his child, but instead she felt semi-comforted.
‘Tell me,’ he pressed. ‘Did you have it? Can I meet him?’
She shook her head.
‘Did you have the old Hoover job?’ he asked.
She hesitated before saying, ‘No.’
‘No?’
‘I had a miscarriage.’
‘But you’d contemplated the Hoover job?’
Shamefaced, she nodded.
So there was no child. Lorcan was relieved. He didn’t know what had prompted him to ask in the first place – he’d got slightly carried away at the thought that there was a fine son of his running about the place. But, let’s face it, who needed the responsibility?
‘So there we are.’ Lorcan was keen to move to the business in hand. This wasn’t going the way Katherine had imagined in any of her myriad scenarios. He was neither contrite nor cocky enough. She’d visualized throwing his apologies back in his face, like a handful of gravel. Or if he tried to get off with her, she’d practised so many malicious, rapier-sharp ripostes that she thought she’d be able to effortlessly