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He had intended going home to do some work on a wood-fired oven he was building in his tiny courtyard, but he had to eat.
And Grace Sutherland, for all her blunt questions, intrigued him…
‘Oh, do come, Theo.’ Now she added her entreaty, and though he had the strangest—and strongest—feeling he was being manipulated, he agreed.
Out of curiosity, he told himself, and in part that was the truth, because there was something about Grace Sutherland that didn’t quite ring true—some mystery inside the beautiful packaging.
That she was physically attractive to him was a secondary matter, or so he assured himself. He didn’t get involved with work colleagues so the physical attraction would never be explored, but the intrigue? It wouldn’t hurt to investigate that, surely…
The group walked in a straggle of twos and threes down the road that ran alongside the park towards the restaurant. Grace walked in the lead with Phil, Theo behind them with Maggie and Aaron, and though he was listening to the conversation about titration rates of drugs during open-heart surgery in very small infants, he wasn’t taking in as much of it as he usually did.
She walked with a peculiar grace—what a stupid thing to be thinking about a woman called Grace!—but the way she strode along, her pace matching Phil’s, suggested an athleticism that wasn’t often seen in specialists of either gender, most of whom were too busy to get to the gym with any regularity or to work out in other ways.
The staff at Scoozi, seeing the mob from the hospital arrive, pushed together a number of tables, but was it chance that Grace sat next to Theo, who had taken the chair at one end?
‘You didn’t answer my question,’ she said, answering his own query—the seating arrangement had not been chance.
‘Question?’ he parried, although he knew full well what she’d asked. But now, rather than consider the woman’s grace, he was considering her lack of it. And her lack of good manners! It was none of her business why he’d switched from surgery to perfusion.
‘Why aren’t you married?’
He’d forgotten that one! He stared at her, aware his disbelief was probably written on his face. It must have been for she looked embarrassed, but only for a moment, recovering her composure beautifully and smiling an apology.
‘I know that’s personal, but I’m only here for six months and if I want to get to know everyone in the team, then I have to ask questions.’
That kind of made sense—or did it?
‘Do you really want to get to know everyone in the team? After all, as you say, you’re only here six months, after which you’ll go back to South Africa, send emails for a few months, Christmas cards for a few years, then forget the lot of us.’
‘Probably not Christmas cards, I’m not good with them.’ She looked embarrassed, as if he’d been spot on in the reading of her character. Not that she was going to let him get away with it. She shifted slightly in her chair then continued, ‘But professionally it’s good to keep in touch with people, especially those with more experience, because you never know when something comes up you haven’t personally experienced before, and you can always ask.’
She hadn’t answered his question, but her comments made him wonder even more about this woman. In his life, women were the ones who kept the strands of friendship sewn together, his mother and aunts keeping in touch with the family’s friends, while his ex-wife had been forever on the net, talking to one friend or another, and had turned the sending out of Christmas cards into a kind of ‘who gets the most’ contest. But, then, Lena was like that…
‘You’re thinking about some woman now,’ the exasperating South African said, her clipped accent seeming to turn the remark into a rebuke.
‘You can’t know that!’ Theo growled. ‘And if there’s one thing I hate, it’s someone—usually a woman—telling me what I’m thinking.’
‘Well, you were scowling,’ Grace replied, totally unabashed. ‘The kind of scowl that suggests bad thoughts, and as you’re hardly likely to be thinking bad thoughts about your bypass machine, or the menu that’s in your hands, I guessed it must have had something to do with my question.’
He scowled some more and began to read the menu, although he knew it by heart and always ordered the Creole pizza and out of sheer politeness should have passed it to Grace, had she not annoyed him so much.
‘I’ll have the Creole pizza,’ she announced, Jasmine, on her other side, having handed her a menu. ‘Chicken, banana, sweet chilli sauce and sour cream—Italian purists must be turning over in their graves but it sounds delicious.’
Now what was he going to order? If he ordered the Creole she’d think he was copying her and probably read something into it—like he might be interested in her.
Which he was in the way a scientist was interested in a new specimen that appeared under his microscope, but no more than that, for all the unexpected tugs of attraction he was feeling.
Heaven forbid!
He ordered a steak and a glass of the pinot grigio the restaurateur, Anna, imported from Italy. Someone further down the table had ordered a plate of garlic bread and another of brushetta before anyone was seated, and these arrived as the orders were taken, the plates of bread being passed around.
‘No, thank you,’ Grace said to both.
‘Dieting?’ Jasmine asked, and Theo watched, wondering just how Grace would respond.
‘No, I never diet,’ she said, with the supreme confidence of a woman with a great metabolism.
End of conversation, although Jasmine had obviously meant it as an opening gambit.
‘Lucky you,’ Jasmine told her, not willing to let the subject go just yet. ‘I’m always dieting. I’ve tried just about every diet ever written.’
‘Oh, but surely you don’t need to diet, Jasmine.’
Other women might have said the same reassuring words without Theo even noticing, but to him it sounded as if Grace was making an effort to be nice—as if social chatter didn’t come easily to her.
Jasmine, too, must have sensed something strange for she smiled uncertainly, conveying enough apprehension for even someone as seemingly insensitive as Grace to see.
‘I didn’t mean to sound critical of diets or people who diet,’ she added quickly. ‘But research has shown that dieting fads can do more harm than good.’
For Theo it was like watching an act in a play and he waited to see if Jasmine would be mollified.
Apparently she was, for she smiled at Grace.
‘I know,’ she said with a big sigh. ‘I’ve read that too, but I think I’m addicted to diets.’
It was said as a joke, but, sensing it would go straight over Grace’s head, Theo plunged in.
‘Like I’m addicted to good pizza,’ he said, forgetting he’d just ordered steak. ‘Which is why I’m spending all my off-duty time building a wood-fired oven in my already too small courtyard.’
‘Is the pizza no good here that you didn’t order it?’
Of course Grace had picked up on his error.
‘No, the pizzas are great, I just needed a change,’ he assured her. OK, so she’d zeroed in on him again, but at least discussing food likes and dislikes was better than discussing marriage—or his lack thereof. And Jasmine was off the hook—she’d turned to talk to Aaron on her other side, so Theo took another slice of garlic bread and relaxed.
‘So, are you in a relationship?’
Had he heard correctly? He stared at the woman he thought had asked an extremely impertinent question and she gave an embarrassed shrug.
‘I told you I asked questions—I explained why,’ she said. ‘And you didn’t answer about why you’re not married, so I wondered…’
Theo studied her a moment longer, sensing something he couldn’t quite pin down behind the brash manner.
Something uncertain?
It sounded that way, but surely not!
Given the attraction he felt towards her, he knew he had to keep his distance, not find excuses to learn more of her.
‘Why?’ he asked, cool and distant again. ‘Why are you wondering—why do you need to know? As you said, you’re here for six months. I could work with people for six months and not need to know about their personal lives. In fact, there are people at this table— No, that’s not right, the team mostly know the surface things about each other’s lives, although the fact that I am single is enough for most of them to know. No one in the eight months I’ve been here has ever asked me why.’
‘Yes, well…’
She pursed her lips—lush, full lips which, when pursed, looked extremely inviting and turned the tug into a more insistent feeling—and studied him in turn, then shook her head.
‘I’m sorry! I’ve been far too intrusive. My father was always telling me that, right from when I was a small girl, asking questions all the time and not differentiating between acceptable questions and personal ones. Although—’
She stopped, and Theo forgot he was trying to keep his distance and was intrigued enough to prompt her.
‘Although?’ he echoed, and she smiled and shook her head, the blue eyes looking…sad? Vulnerable?
Vulnerable? This super-confident woman?
Super-efficient, too, he suspected.
Vulnerable was the last word he’d use…
She’d gone too far. Again! Grace knew that, but somehow the switch that turned her off before she pushed that extra bit further had always been missing from her genetic programming. She should never have asked him about his marital state in the first place, then pushing when he didn’t answer…
Terrible!
But he’d be ideal. She’d known that from the moment she’d seen him, recalling his bio in the team info sheets she’d read. He was intelligent, well-built, good-looking—although she knew that shouldn’t be a prerequisite—and apparently available. Not that she needed available—she wasn’t intending to have an affair with him.
All she really wanted was his sperm…
She felt a blush stealing into her cheeks and was furious with herself. She might be blessed with a good metabolism so didn’t need to diet, but she’d have preferred a tendency to run to fat than this terrible blushing thing she had.
Had Theo seen the colour in her cheeks that he lifted the bottle of cold water off the table and offered to pour her a glass? How embarrassing!
Surely this was the time to ditch the Grand Plan—to forget all about it and just get on with her life. She’d lived with the ache for a long time—she could live with it a little longer…
She thanked him and watched his concentration as he poured the water, then noticed the back of his hand as he passed her the glass—long slim fingers and a slight scattering of dark hair at the wrist—and for some strange reason the heat of embarrassment left her, and a shiver travelled up her spine.
Looking at a man’s hand couldn’t make you shiver, so maybe she was sickening for something.
Not that she ever got sick…
‘Although?’ he said again, and it took her a couple of seconds to go back far enough to pick up the prompt.
She smiled. Father had told her when she was very young that she had a beautiful smile and that you could never go wrong with a smile.
‘I can’t tell you the “although”,’ she said, wondering if this was flirting. ‘But I am interested.’
Duh! Blushing again. Who would have thought it would be this hard?
‘In me?’ Theo asked, and she felt her blush deepen so she must be scarlet-cheeked by now.
‘In everyone on the team,’ she said.
‘Oh!’ His dark brown eyes lit up to match his delighted smile. ‘So you’ll ask all of them about their relationships? Actually, I can fill you in on some of them. Jasmine’s just got engaged, Phil and Alex and Aaron—with Aldo added we have a lot of As, don’t we? Anyway those three are all happily married—’
‘Stop! You’re making me more and more embarrassed. It is none of my business.’
Theo stopped, but only because she sounded genuinely distressed, although he was pretty sure Dr Grace Sutherland didn’t often do distressed. But it was there again, that note of uncertainty in a person who gave off such positive vibes, and he was interested in spite of himself.
In a purely professional way, of course.
‘I’m not in a relationship,’ he said, under the cover of the noise as meals were delivered to the table. ‘And I was married, but my wife and I split up seven years ago.’
Wrong thing to tell her. That interested look was back in her eyes.
‘Do you know the number of weeks, days and hours as well?’ she asked, spearing a shard of red-hot pain dead-centre into his heart.
‘As a matter of fact, I do,’ he said, his voice as cold and as curt as he could make it. His meal was placed in front of him and he looked at it and shook his head, aware he’d never eat it, although, thinking now of Elena, he wouldn’t have eaten the pizza either.
He didn’t look at Grace again in case he was inveigled into thinking her vulnerable again. Vulnerable as a full-grown crocodile! So he cut his steak, and pretended to eat, shifting things around on his plate so it looked as if some of the food had disappeared.
‘I know that trick,’ his colleague said, leaning a little closer so she could speak quietly, a drift of a very feminine perfume—orange blossom?—assailing his nostrils. ‘I’ve done it myself many a time. I’m sorry if I upset you, asking about your wife. I didn’t mean to. It was just the way you said seven years—it sounded as if you’d been counting. That means it must have hurt.’
He’d been determined to ignore her, but from the very formal way she spoke he guessed apologising was rare for her, and one look into the crystalline blue eyes confirmed that she was upset.
And so was he, but for more dubious reasons! Those eyes held the same fascination as her pursed lips had earlier and he definitely didn’t do relationships with colleagues.
Although she was only here for six months—
No! He had to stop this!
Now!
‘We had a car accident, our daughter died, my wife blamed me, but it is my daughter’s death that’s imprinted on my mind, not my wife leaving me.’
Grace reared back in her seat, feeling as winded as if he’d struck her with his hand.
How did she get herself into these situations?
Because she had a one-track mind, that’s how!
Why couldn’t she do normal chit-chat, like other women?
Theo had pushed his plate away and was standing up, and much as she’d have liked to stand up with him, to follow him wherever he was going so she could apologise, she knew he’d revealed his pain to a virtual stranger for one reason and one reason only—to repel her.
She watched him, aware everyone at the table must be wondering what the South African woman had done to upset him.
‘Eat your pizza, act normal—that’s if you know how to!’ he muttered to her as he bent to push his chair back into place. Then he straightened and faced the rest of the gathering. ‘Sorry, folks, not feeling the best.’
He walked away, stopping to talk to the waitress who’d served them, money changing hands.
‘He must have been feeling a bit off all along,’ Jasmine said. ‘Ordering steak when he always orders the Creole pizza.’
