Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [205]
It was a big effort to regain control of herself.
‘I used to see you on telly in Briar’s Way when I went home to Ireland on holiday.’ She forced an arch smile. ‘You were just like yourself.’
‘Hahaha.’ Lorcan’s character in Briar’s Way had been a duplicitous womanizer. ‘Hey, we do what we can.’
‘You’re not in it any more, though?’
‘Nah, I outgrew it,’ Lorcan wondered nervously if she knew how deep into the doldrums his career had fallen in recent years.
‘You outgrow a lot of things.’ She gave a sarky smirk. ‘What happened to your wife?’
‘We went our separate ways.’ Around the time he’d started to earn decent money, but no need to mention that.
‘Why?’
‘Hey. C’est la vie. You win some, you lose some.’
‘But why? Why did you go your separate ways?’
Lorcan shuffled in his seat. He wished she’d shut up. Even after all this time he remembered how tenacious Katherine was. Once she got the bit between her teeth it was hard to wrest it from her. ‘We’d outgrown each other,’ he tried again.
‘What a shame you couldn’t have outgrown each other when you got me pregnant,’ she said snippily.
‘So it goes. But listen,’ he said hastily, ‘can I just tell you that you’ve really blossomed? You were always cute, but you’ve turned out gorgeous.’
She was just about to ask about his girlfriend when he stretched over and put his hand on her face. The touch of his fingertips on her skin was like a bolt of electricity. Every nerve end in her body began humming and singing, and rational thought was shunted way off course.
‘You’ve grown up into a beautiful woman,’ he said huskily. He moved his palm along her cheek and up into her hairline while she sat like a statue, her eyes closed. She knew she was passing up a perfectly good opportunity of acting out version two of her fantasies where she gave him a sharp elbow in the chops for his presumption. But she couldn’t move, overwhelmed by the intensity of travelling back through time.
‘Sit next to me. He thumped the couch beside him.
She shook her head.
‘Go on.’ He smiled wolfishly. His back was hurting from leaning over to her. In fact, his back had been giving him gyp lately, he must get it looked at…
He hadn’t known how much resistance he’d get from Katherine. On Saturday night she’d have run away with him there and then, he felt. But, in the meantime, she’d remembered her anger, so it was time to send in the heavy guns. ‘Do you know something, Katherine with a K?’ he said, looking straight into her soul. ‘I never, ever forgot you.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘It’s true.’
She shook her head again.
‘I swear to God it’s true,’ he repeated. ‘You were very special to me and if I hadn’t been married…’ The sincerity in his gaze began to trickle light and healing into her heart. ‘Would you ever come on over here beside me?’ he urged softly.
And she just couldn’t help herself. Like an automaton, she jerkily left her seat and sat next to him. She didn’t know what was motivating her. Her mind was a snarled mess where desire for revenge was wound tightly around other emotions – the sexual attraction she’d felt when she was nineteen and the need to correct the course of her personal history.
As soon as she sat down, Lorcan clasped her little face in his big, confident hands, as if he was about to kiss her. She knew she should dig him in the kidneys or swipe him across the face, but all of her pre-planned scenarios were strewn on the cutting-room floor. Her anger and desire for vengeance were fatally blunted. Instead the thought that he still wanted her laid balm on her old wound.
But there was something she wanted to know… What was it?
Then she remembered. ‘What about your girlfriend?’
‘Don’t mind her.’ Lorcan chuckled, giving his you’re-the-most-special-woman-in-the-world