Sushi for Beginners - Marian Keyes [52]
‘He said something about the boiler playing up. I’ll just take a quick look.’ Half-disappearing into a cupboard, Jack rolled up his sleeves, displaying brown forearms, with planes of muscles which shifted with the movements of his hands.
‘Pass me the spanner from that drawer there, will you?’ Jack indicated with his head. Lisa wondered if he was putting on a special macho display in her honour, then she remembered Trix saying he was handy with machinery, and felt her sap rising. She’d always had a weakness for men who were good with their hands, who got smeared in oil and came home at the end of a hard day’s fixing things, slowly unzipped their overalls and said meaningfully, ‘I bin thinkin’ ‘bout ya all day, baby.’ She also had a weakness for men with six-figure salaries and the power to promote her when she didn’t really deserve it. How nice would it be to combine the two?
Jack banged and twiddled with things for a short time longer before saying, ‘It looks like the timer is gone. You can get hot water, but you can’t pre-set it. I’ll sort it out for you. Let’s see the bathroom.’
To her surprise the bathroom passed the test. Washing herself needn’t necessarily be a lightning raid, with a loofah in one hand and a stopwatch in the other.
‘Nice bath,’ she admitted.
‘Handy little shelf there beside it,’ Jack agreed.
‘Just big enough for two glasses of wine and a scented candle.’ Lisa’s swift glance was meaningful. And wasted. To her frustration Jack had marched onwards to the next room.
‘Bedroom,’ he announced.
It was bigger and brighter than the other rooms, though it was still afflicted with a country-cottage feel. Sprigging on the white curtains, echoed by sprigging on the duvet cover and way too much pine. Pine headboard, big pine wardrobe, pine chest of drawers.
Even the mattress is probably made of pine, Lisa thought scornfully.
‘It overlooks the garden.’ Jack pointed out the window at a smallish square of grass, bordered by shrubs and blooms. Lisa’s heart sank. She’d never had a garden before and she didn’t want one. She liked flowers as much as the next woman, but only when they came in a big, cellophane bouquet, with an enormous satin ribbon and a card of congratulation. She’d rather die than take up gardening, the accessories were gruesome – elastic-waisted trousers, ridiculous floppy hats, silly baskets and mad Michael Jackson gloves. It was Not A Good Look.
And though she’d told Femme readers last July that gardening was the new sex, she hadn’t meant a word of it. Sex was sex. Perennially. She missed it.
‘He said something about having a herb garden,’ Jack said. ‘Will we check it out?’
He shot the bolt on the back door, and again had to duck his head on the way out. She followed his straight-backed progress across the little lawn, wryly amused by her own admiration. The birds chattered in the benign evening light, the air was pungent with grass and earth and for a second she didn’t hate everything.
‘Over here.’ He waved her towards a bed and folded his long legs into a crouch. To show willing, Lisa half-heartedly hunkered beside him.
‘Mind your suit.’ He extended his arm protectively. ‘Don’t get muck on it.’
‘What about yours?’
‘I couldn’t give a feck about mine.’ He turned and gave her an unexpectedly mischievous smile.
Up close she saw he had a tiny chip from one of his front teeth. It added to his maverick air. ‘If I get enough grass-stains on it, it’ll have to go to the cleaner’s and I won’t be able to wear it tomorrow… And wouldn’t that be terrible?’ he asked drily.
Lisa laughed and, just for the hell of it, moved her head closer to his. She watched his pupils narrow and dilate through several expressions – confusion to interest to extreme interest back to confusion and then blankness. It took far less than a second. Then he turned away and asked, ‘Is that coriander or parsley?’
One of his