Nate got there first. Perhaps it was gentlemanly behaviour. More likely, considering the fork incident, the guy was a quick learner. She sat on her hands as he poured her drink.
“So,” she said, after managing a drink without spilling any on herself, “is this how your blind date’s normally go? A slapstick show followed by the comparison of dead parents?”
“Not so much,” he said, his smile only going as far as his eyes, which somehow didn’t diminish the effect one jot. “Yours?”
“You’re my first.”
“Ah, a virgin.”
“Noooo. Not for a looong time.” Then, as it sank in, “An online dating first-timer? Yep.”
She wasn’t a natural blusher. Not by a long shot. But something about this guy had her blood in a spin.
“Ready to order, cara?” asked the owner, affectionately known as Mr Rita—a tall, skinny man in his sixties who sported a nifty little moustache.
Saskia shook herself upright. “Um, sorry! Haven’t even looked at the menu. Can you give us another five?”
She shoved a big plastic menu at Nate to distract him from Mr Rita’s not so subtle winking and thumbs up, then she set to studying the menu as if she didn’t know the thing off by heart.
As they put their orders in with Mr Rita a few minutes later Saskia’s phone rang. She didn’t need to glance at it to know it was Lissy, calling in case she needed a fake emergency. She quickly switched it to “Do not answer.”
“Your back-up plan?” Nate asked, motioning to a passing waiter for the wine list. “That was early.”
“My what?” she said, sliding her phone into the big bag at her feet.
His eyes slid back to her. Knowing. And blue. So very, very blue.
With a laugh, she admitted, “Spot-on, smart boy. Like you didn’t have me pick the restaurant so nobody you know would see us together.”
For the first time his eyes lost that permanent glint and he looked honestly surprised. And for the first time she felt as if she wasn’t on the back foot but leading from the front, where she much preferred to be.
“Am I wrong?” She leaned a little his way, her palms flat on the table.
“No,” he said, blinking. “And now I hear out loud how that sounds I feel like I ought to apologise.”
She shrugged, pointed out a bottle of red from the list in his hand. “If you’d taken one look at me and walked back out the door then you would have owed me an apology. It was only sensible of us both to take measures. I mean, you should see the lies the other guys on the site tell about themselves.”
“Lies?” he repeated, as if it had never occurred to him.
Saskia counted off her fingers. “Your photo might have been a fake. You might have been lying about your age, your weight, your occupation, your name, your reason for joining the site. You might have been a psycho killer.”
With each less-than-flattering “might have been” Nate’s surprise, if anything, seemed to wane. The glint was back, and he too leaned forward. She caught a hint of purely masculine spice curling above the saucy scents of herbs and garlic.
“So, if you met a man in a bar, on a train, or jogging in the park, you’d have more faith that he wasn’t a psycho killer?”
“I don’t jog.”
His mouth kicked, as if his smile surprised even him.
Her cheek twitched in response. He noticed, and the glint in his eyes changed. Deepened. Found some kind of heat. At which point his gaze dropped to her mouth, the dip at the bottom of her neck, then moved back to her eyes.
While Saskia struggled to remember how to breathe.
But while Nate Jackson Mackenzie, with his good looks, air of money and charm that could lure a siren to dry land, was probably used to having women fall all over themselves whenever he walked into a room, Saskia wasn’t most women.
Which was why, when he stretched out a leg beneath their small table, his calf connecting with hers and shooting sparks up her leg, she said, “I didn’t sign up to Dating By Numbers in an effort to find my one true love.”
The slight rise of an eyebrow gave her the impression he didn’t believe her.
Wow. Okay. So that irked. Maybe that was his great flaw: he could be irksome.
She whipped her bag onto her lap, found a business card and thrust it in his direction. “I’m a freelance statistical researcher working on an infographic about online dating for the website.”
She could have pumped a fist in the air at the surprise that coloured his eyes at that one! And then from one heartbeat to the next his brow furrowed and she saw the brain behind those dauntingly beautiful eyes whir into life. It hadn’t occurred to her that he might leave, but the longer he sat there, staring at her card, the more she wondered. And hoped that he’d stay.
He finally, finally, pocketed her card and said, “And to think you all but accused me of being a possible psycho killer.”
“I’m a mathematician,” she said. “Not exactly the same.”
“I thought the point was that people lie.”
“I—What?” Irked didn’t even touch on how that made her feel. Punctuating her words with a waggly finger, Saskia said, “I said I was looking for somebody to talk to, which is completely true.”
One eyebrow cocked. “Safer to say it was bending the truth?”
“Not even slightly. It’s not my fault if you misunderstood my meaning.”
She crossed her arms, knowing she sounded defensive. But it was hard to be all sweetness and light when he was watching her the way he was. All charm and half smiles were gone as he looked her over, as if he was sizing her up for something. Hopefully not a hole in the ground.
Then he did some surprising of his own when next he said, “My motives for dating online aren’t altogether pure either.”
Ignoring the “altogether pure” jab, Saskia attempted to raise an eyebrow right back at him. But she’d never mastered the skill, so probably ended up looking astounded. She schooled her features back to normal. “You said you were after a date for a wedding?”
“I am. But recent events have meant my needs have altered a little.”
“Do I need to call my back-up plan?”
He laughed—a deep, rumbling sound that made her knees clench together.
“The greater problem, for me, is that I have three sisters who seem to think it’s their mission in life to find me a wife. Thus, I let slip that I already have a date for the wedding, and that this date and I are…seeing one another.”
“Let
