Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [55]
It was an expensive, trendy, noisy restaurant, enjoying its fifteen minutes of popularity. With its curved front wall made of glass bricks and its surfeit of blond wood, it wasn’t unlike the place Katherine had gone to on Saturday night with Tara. She didn’t even have to look at the menu to know what was on it. She’d have staked her life on mahi-mahi appearing somewhere.
Joe had taken the precaution of reserving a booth. Once they were installed the noise lessened and Katherine began to relax. To the point of ordering a glass of wine. ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she said, patronizingly. ‘I may be diligent, but I’m still human.’
‘I’m not looking at you “like that”,’ he said, with one of his sunbeam smiles. ‘If you want a glass of wine, you have a glass of wine. Have as many as you like.’
He looked at her with such warm appreciation that she said crisply, ‘Let’s get down to business. On the Noritaki account, the main areas of expenditure to date have been –’
‘Katherine,’ he interrupted gently, and the way he said her name – almost sadly – made her want to get up and leave. ‘Let’s order first.’ And suddenly, she decided to lay off herself, to give herself a break, just for an hour. She’d had three weeks of deflecting him and she was momentarily out of ammo. To hell with it, she thought. I’m only human. Why shouldn’t I let someone be nice to me? Just for an hour. And the smile that she turned on Joe was, for the first time, devoid of sarcasm or disdain.
‘What starter are you having?’ he asked, nodding at her closed menu.
‘Probably the chanterelle risotto with truffle shavings,’ she said, with a twinkle in her eye. ‘How about you?’
‘The coriander and lemongrass soup. Hey!’ he exclaimed, examining his menu. ‘But there’s no chanterelle risotto with truffle shavings.’
‘Ah, there must be.’ She smiled. ‘I mean, look at this place.’ She waved a hand at the obligatory textured lemon walls, the two-foot-square Zen gardens, the round metallic spotlights inset in the ceiling. As Joe laughed, she watched herself blossom in his eyes. But when Katherine opened her menu, she burst out, ‘There’s no coriander and lemongrass soup either.’
‘Ah, there must be,’ Joe echoed. ‘I mean, look at this place.’
Then, to Katherine’s discomfort, it was her turn to watch Joe blossom.
But she couldn’t fit him into one of the usual categories. Most men who pursued her this relentlessly had an ego the size of a continent. They had to have – if there were any chinks in their armour of self-belief, her disdain found them, and administered mortal wounds. But if he wasn’t a crazed egotist, he had to be as thick as a plank, or as naïve as Forrest Gump. And she didn’t think he was that either.
The waitress arrived. ‘Let me tell you about today’s specials,’ she said. ‘As a starter we have chanterelle risotto…’
Katherine didn’t hear the rest. She’d erupted into a huge smile at Joe, who – briefly taken aback by her warmth – returned the beam in kind. Katherine had just remembered how much fun this kind of thing could be. As she watched his long, sensitive fingers fiddling with the stem of his wine-glass, she felt an almost-forgotten plucking sensation low down in her body. Like some elastic had snapped. Oh, no!
She ordered tagliatelle. No surrender. She refused to have a manageable date-like meal that left no room for unsightly accidents. So what if the tagliatelle hung in unruly strands from the fork as she raised it to her mouth? So what if some of it swung against her chin, coating it in Cashel blue and porcini sauce? It showed she didn’t care. She’d have ordered spinach with a view to getting it caught between her teeth but, sadly, it wasn’t on the menu.
As they ate their starters conversation naturally veered towards the one big thing they had in common: work. But Joe talked easily about himself, which made Katherine suspect that he wanted