time does the clinic stay open until?’
‘Eleven o’clock. But my shift ends in ten minutes. I’m on call, but only for emergencies.’ His lips twitched into a smile. ‘Do you like Chinese?
That sounded like a trick question. ‘It depends...’
‘In that case, you’ll like the place I’ve booked for dinner.’ He grinned at her discomfiture. ‘A working dinner.’
‘Oh, so you’re going to make me sing for my supper, are you?’ Almost against her will she smiled back at him.
‘Were you thinking of clocking off yet?’
No, she wasn’t. Working too many hours was a way to keep from thinking too much. And if she fell into bed exhausted every night, that just meant that she slept a bit better. She did have to eat, though.
‘Am I okay to go as I am?’ Sam looked at her cargo pants and sneakers.
‘You want to show me up?’ He placed a hand on his chest, laughing. ‘Although you can if you want. This place doesn’t have a dress code.’
It would be impossible to show Euan up. He could ruffle his hair all he liked, wear whatever leapt out of his wardrobe at him, and still look good. His broad shoulders and the show-me-more ripple of muscle under his casual shirt attested to the fact that he’d already put in all the work he needed to on his appearance.
‘I left my tiara at home. I’ll show you up next time.’
He grinned. ‘I’ll look forward to it.’
* * *
When he ushered her out of the building he seemed to take a deep breath, sloughing off the cares of the day. They strolled down to the seafront together, walking along the promenade for half a mile, until Euan turned inland towards the centre of town.
‘Do you always go via the seafront?’ Sam was still getting her bearings, but she had an inkling that they probably could have cut ten minutes from their walk by taking a more direct route.
‘Usually.’ He grinned. ‘No point in living by the sea if you don’t grab as much ozone as you can.’
Sam jerked her thumb back towards the sea. ‘That’s the English Channel out there. I didn’t know there was any ozone...’
He chuckled. ‘Probably not. I like the beach, though.’ He made a sharp left, and opened the door of a glass-fronted restaurant, motioning her through.
Inside, there was already a hum of activity. Euan was clearly a regular, and the waitress who came to their table greeted him by name and handed Sam a menu, chatting to Euan while she scrutinised it.
Perhaps he brought his girlfriends here. No one seemed much interested in her, and Sam imagined he probably turned up with a different woman on a fairly regular basis. If he had a regular partner, she would have attracted more attention, and Euan was the kind of man who was unlikely to go short of female company...
‘Decided yet?’
Sam jumped and focussed her eyes back on the menu. ‘Um... What’s the Kung Po chicken like?’
‘Good. Very good,’ the waitress replied.
‘I’ll have that, then. With some rice and...’ The waitress nodded, scribbling her order down in Chinese characters on her pad.
‘Something to drink?’
‘Water, please. Sparkling.’ Sam never drank when she was working, and although tonight fell into a grey area somewhere between work and socialising, she needed to be careful around Euan. His job involved getting people to talk about how they felt, and he was obviously good at it. It would be horrifyingly easy to tell him her darkest secrets before she’d even realised it, and she wasn’t here for that.
He didn’t seem to make such distinctions, though. His work was intimately personal to him, bound up with feeling and hope and dreams. Even his discourse on health and safety procedures seemed more intimate than it should have been. Leaning across the table so that they could hear each other in the ever-increasing din of the restaurant, lost in the compelling magic of his eyes, it almost felt like a tryst.
‘So tell me something about yourself.’ They were waiting for their coffee now.
‘Not much to tell, really.’ She grinned at him. ‘I was born. I went to school, then university...’
‘Computer sciences?’
She nodded. ‘When we were at university together, my best friend and I had an idea. After we graduated, we thought we’d lose nothing by seeing if we could make something of it. We started off working from Sally’s parents’ spare bedroom.’
Even best friend didn’t cover it. The two girls had been seven years old when Sally had asked Sam back to her house one day, after Sam’s mother had become unavoidably detained by a bottle and some bad company and it had slipped her mind that she even had a daughter. With the benefit of hindsight, Sam could see that Sal’s mother had only needed to take one look at her to divine the situation, but she’d said nothing. Just laid an extra place at the table and made sure that Sam got home safely that night. After that, Sal’s family had become hers. And the two girls had been inseparable, like the closest of sisters.
‘And you made quite a go of it.’ Euan was nodding her on, and Sam realised that she’d fallen silent.
‘Yeah. Sal was the creative one, she had the ideas, and I did the programming. We made a good team.’
‘But you sold up?’ The look in his eyes told Sam that he wasn’t falling for the sugar and spice version of the story.
‘Yeah. Things change.’
He didn’t ask. Maybe he was thinking about it, and maybe he realised that she wouldn’t answer if he did ask. He paused, as if to allow her to reconsider her decision, but she couldn’t.
A tone sounded and he pulled his phone out of his pocket, giving her a mouthed apology before answering it. ‘Yeah, Mel. What’s up?’ His face darkened as the relief doctor at the clinic spoke at the other end of the line.
‘Okay. Yeah, that’s all right. Leave it with me.’ He cut the line, shoving his phone back into his pocket. ‘I’m sorry, Sam.’
‘That’s okay. We have to go?’
‘I have to go.’ He stood, pulling some notes from his wallet and beckoning to the waitress. ‘You have coffee. Call this number...’ he put a card from a cab company in front of her ‘...and tell them to put the fare back to the flat on the Driftwood account.’
‘I’m coming with you.’ Where the hell had that come from?
‘This is not part of your job...’
‘It’s what you’re all about, though, isn’t it? Give me a chance to at least see that.’ Sam was overstepping the mark, and she knew it. But here, at last, was the whole point of the infrastructure, the policies and the software. She’d found her way down to the heart of what made Euan tick.
He
