Plastering on a smile, she picked up her notepad and went out into the fray.
He’d done it.
Amazing.
OK, theirs had been a brief affair, and nine years would have blurred the memories, but even so he was surprised he’d got away with it.
He shouldn’t have been. It was no surprise, really. The young Frenchman she’d loved was dead. She wouldn’t be looking for him in an Englishman, especially one who looked so different. When he’d caught her studying him, the look on her face had caught him on the raw. There was no way there’d been recognition in her eyes, just curiosity, and maybe a little fascination. He didn’t want her to be fascinated—at least, not like that, but he couldn’t blame her. He was no oil painting.
Apart from the nerve damage that had taken away the spontaneous little movements of his lips, contorting his smile, the structure had been so damaged that, even if she’d known, she would have struggled to recognise him. Hell, he sometimes had a shock even now when he caught sight of himself in a mirror. Not to mention the fact that it had aged him more than he cared to admit. He sure as hell didn’t look like a man of thirty-eight.
Of course his stupid masculine pride had hoped she’d recognise him right away, and there’d been that moment of panic when she’d first seen him. He’d got away with it, though, brazened it out, and the bit of him that still had any common sense knew it was just as well.
What he wanted—no, needed—was time to build a relationship with her as the people they were now.
No strings. No past. Just the present.
And hopefully the future…
And this place would give him all the time he needed. Whistling softly under his breath, he found a screwdriver and set about dismantling the cupboards.
He hadn’t been exaggerating about using her as a kitchen.
He came down for coffee at eleven-thirty, then reappeared at one looking scruffy and harassed and short of caffeine.
‘I could do with some lunch,’ he said gruffly.
‘Coffee first?’ she said with a smile that wouldn’t quite behave, and he gave her that lopsided grin that creased his eyes and turned her insides out, and nodded.
‘You’d better believe it—a huge one—and something substantial to blot it up following not far behind. I’m starving.’
‘A pasta bake with roasted vegetables and a side salad?’
‘Chuck in a good big lump of bread and you’re on.’
She suppressed the smile, but it wouldn’t quite go. ‘Bad day?’
‘The kitchen’s fighting back,’ he said drily, showing her his hand, and she tutted and cleaned up the scuff on his knuckle with a damp paper napkin and stuck a plaster on it.
‘Thanks,’ he murmured, then added cheekily, ‘I’ll get out of your way now—I’d hate to hold up my lunch,’ and looked around for a table.
She felt her eyebrows shoot up and a smile tugged at her lips. ‘Pushing your luck, aren’t you? We’re a bit busy—sit by the window with the others. It’s my regulars’ table—I think you probably qualify already and it’s all you deserve after that remark, so I’m throwing you to the piranhas!’
‘Are they that bad?’
She laughed. ‘You don’t know the half of it.’
He chuckled and went over, introducing himself to them and settling his lean, rangy body on the only spare chair. By the time she’d poured his coffee and put the pasta bake in the microwave to heat, he was already entrenched in their conversation about parking on the market square, the current hot topic in the village.
She pulled up the little stool she used for reaching the top of the fridge-freezer and joined them for a few moments, content just to sit there and watch them all wrangling over the insoluble problem of conservation versus trade.
Michael wasn’t having that, though. He turned to her and said, ‘So what’s your opinion?’ and dragged her into the conversation.
She laughed and threw up her hands. ‘I don’t have one. Well, to be exact, I have two, so I don’t count. When I’m here, I want people to be able to park. When I’m at home, which is there—’ she pointed out her house to him through the window ‘—I don’t want to look at cars. So I’m keeping out of it, not that it will make the slightest difference, because the council will do what they think fit and ignore us all as usual—’
Grace chipped in with her ferociously held views on conservation, Chris complained that there was never anywhere to park close enough to leave a sleeping baby in the vehicle for a few minutes to grab a sanity-restoring coffee amongst friends, and Michael cradled his coffee in his big battered hands and sat back and smiled at her over the pandemonium.
Good grief. How intimate that smile seemed in the crowded room. And how curious that his smile should have become so important to her in such a ridiculously short space of time! The microwave beeped, rescuing her from mental paralysis and any further dangerous speculation, and she leapt up and went back into her little kitchen area and made his salad and sliced him a couple of big chunks of corn bread, her whole body humming with the awareness of his eyes on her for the entire time.
She set the plate down in front of him, warned him that the pasta bake would be hot, and went back behind her counter to deal with a customer who was leaving and wanted to pay the bill.
Then another couple came in and dithered about and changed their order half a dozen times, sat down, glanced across at Michael’s meal and changed their minds again.
By the time she’d dealt with them, cleared a couple of tables and loaded the dishwasher, her regulars were drifting out and Michael was left at the table on his own. He wandered over, coming into the kitchen area that was strictly off limits to customers, and when she pointed that out to him he told her calmly that he owned it and anyway, even if he didn’t, she wasn’t clearing up after him.
And he put his plate in the dishwasher, refilled his coffee mug and looked round at her crowded little workspace with a pleated brow. ‘Poky, isn’t it?’
‘It’s efficient.’
‘No, it isn’t. It’s outdated and cramped.’
‘It was the best we could afford,’ she said, beginning to bristle and wondering what had happened to that smile that melted her insides, when he suddenly produced it.
‘And you’ve done wonders with it, and you’re clearly hugely popular, but that’s not a surprise,’ he said softly in the low, gravelly voice that finished what the smile had started. ‘That pasta bake was delicious. Thank you.’
He sighed and raked his fingers through his hair, the smile rueful now. ‘Unfortunately the kitchen’s still waiting for me upstairs, so I suppose I ought to go and tackle it before I start rearranging yours. Come and sit and have a drink with me for a minute first, though,’ he said, and all the reasons why she shouldn’t suddenly went out of the window.
She sat down, pushed the regulars’ wreckage out of the way for a moment, and buried her nose in a much-needed cup of coffee. ‘Oh, bliss,’ she murmured.
‘Hectic morning?’
‘I haven’t stopped,’ she confessed. ‘It’s been bedlam. I was going to have a look through a few recipe books for some new soups, but I haven’t had a chance.’
‘You do soup?’
She