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