entire world, Shannon was sure, whose lack of height made it possible for her to address him on an eye-to-eye level.
‘Just taking over serving, Alfredo…’ Shannon looked meaningfully at her friend who was hovering to one side like a spare part. ‘Sandy’s hurt her foot.’
‘Don’t you tell Alfredo anything about the hurt foots, missy! The foots looked just fine when she came a running over to whisper to you when it is madness here and I am not paying her to have the little cosy chats when she should be taking orders! Don’t you two little missies think that Alfredo does not have the eyes at the back of the head! I see everything!’
The hurt foot had been a good idea. It released Sandy’s barely contained lust for drama and she instantly shot into wounded mode, removing one shoe and tenderly touching her ankle as though it might explode at any minute if too much pressure was applied.
Shannon took the opportunity to scuttle through the kitchen, pausing to glance at the orders stacked on the counter, then hustled outside into the restaurant.
Yes, so what if she was sad? A sad twenty-five-year-old girl who had fled Ireland in a welter of misery and had grasped at the giggling normality of fantasising about a mysterious customer who had fired her imagination. Didn’t her imagination deserve to be fired after what she had been through? It was all a silly game but silly games had been just what her depressed soul had needed.
She walked briskly over to his table and appeared to be startled at finding him there.
If she had been Sandy, she would have been far more elaborate when it came to playing startled. Instead, she smiled with consummate politeness and said, ‘Oh! What a pleasant surprise to see you here at lunchtime, sir! Shall I take your order or are you waiting for someone?’
‘Oh! And what a pleasant surprise, seeing you at lunchtime, and, yes, you may take my order for a drink but I am waiting for someone.’
He had a deep, slow voice that had a disturbing tendency to curl around her nervous system, which was what it was doing now. He leaned back in his chair and looked at her with amusement.
‘I thought your little blonde friend was serving me.’
‘Oh, Sandy’s hurt her ankle. She’s sitting for a few minutes.’
‘In that case, I’ll have a bottle of the Sancerre. Could you make sure that there’s ice in my glass? I like my white wine very cold.’
‘Of course, sir. Will that be all?’
‘Now, there’s a leading question,’ he murmured, and Shannon’s colour rose. Was he flirting? No. Impossible. The man might be terrifyingly good-looking but he was also highly conventional. Didn’t he wear impeccably tailored suits and read the Financial Times every morning?
She cleared her throat and met his dark eyes steadily. ‘Perhaps I could bring you a little appetiser to sample while you wait for your friend? One of our chefs has prepared some delicious crab and prawn pastries.’
‘Tempting.’
‘Or you could wait until your partner arrives.’
‘My partner?’ he drawled with lazy amusement. ‘In what context would you be using the word “partner”?’
Shannon looked at him in confusion. She’d assumed that his lunch date was with a woman. Maybe even his wife, although he didn’t wear a wedding ring. Or maybe, she thought sheepishly, she had just been fishing for information.
‘You blush very easily. Has anyone ever told you that? And when you blush, you look even more like a schoolgirl, especially with those braids on either side. What sort of partner do you think I’m meeting for lunch? A female partner, perhaps?’
‘I’m very sorry, sir. I just assumed…perhaps your wife…or maybe a female friend…’
‘I don’t have a wife, actually, and a female friend…’ He let his voice linger on the description for a few seconds while he continued to watch her gravely. ‘What an extraordinarily quaint way of putting it. Alas, though, no female friend on the scene either.’
Her surprise must have registered on her face because he laughed softly and raised his eyebrows. ‘Yes, I’m one of those sad old men who is still waiting for the right woman to come along and make an honest man of him.’ Disconcertingly, the mildness in his voice seemed to encourage a response to this, but for the life of her Shannon couldn’t think of a thing to say. She got the distinct impression, in fact, that the man was trying to tease her.
‘I’m sure that’s not the case,’ she replied tartly, shoving the order pad into the pocket of her apron and doing something pointless with the cutlery on the table because she was rather enjoying the feeling of being watched by those incredible eyes.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘If that will be all, sir, I’ll just go and fetch your wine.’
‘You mean you’re leaving me in the middle of my unanswered question?’
‘I’m very busy at the moment, sir.’ She drew herself up to her full height of five feet three and looked down at the darkly amused face. ‘I’ll return with your drinks order…’
‘And some of the delicious crab and prawn pastries…’
‘What? Oh, yes. Right.’
It was the strangest conversation she’d had with him since he’d appeared through the door months earlier and she found that she was shaking when she returned to the kitchens. Let that be a lesson to her not to indulge her curiosity! She’d been bitten by the speculation bug and he’d returned the favour with panache, deliberately playing verbal games with an air of complete fake gallantry. She would be better off getting back to the work she was paid to do.
‘Your foot’s completely better,’ she informed Sandy, when she managed to eventually corner her, ‘and table four wants a bottle of Sancerre. A bucket of ice on the table as well.’
‘Oh, dear. I take it your curiosity has been satisfied?’
‘The man,’ Shannon said loftily, ‘is not quite the paragon of politeness we thought he was.’
Sandy’s eyes gleamed with sudden alertness. ‘Ooh… Tell me more… Was he rude?’
‘No.’ Shannon sat down and rustled lots of paper into a stack then she pushed a button on her computer so that the screen lit up. How was she supposed to get any work done when her desk was stuck here off the end of the kitchens without even a partition to separate one from the other? It was noisy and disorienting and she felt giddy.
‘Oh. Did he make a pass at you, then?’
Shannon’s eyes shot to her friend’s with horror. ‘He most certainly did not!’ she denied vehemently.
‘Then what did the man do?’
‘He…he… Nothing really, I suppose,’ she said lamely. ‘But you can carry on serving him, and you’d better hurry with his wine before he marches in here to find out what’s going on. Oh, and he wants some of those crabby pastry things as well.’
She
