Hope handed her menu back to the waiter, and wondered why he’d brought her somewhere so cold and pretentious. To impress her? If so it was a shame, because it didn’t.
Though his words did. ‘Wow. I didn’t know you were a writer as well.’
He widened his eyes. ‘Didn’t you? I can see I’ve made a spectacular impression on you all round. You don’t follow the sports pages in the Echo, then?’
‘I don’t, I’m sorry. Is that what you do then? Write for the Echo?’
‘Among other things. I do all sorts of freelance. Though in this case, more for love than money, it has to be said. I cover the junior leagues.’
‘Football?’
He put his palms up and pulled a face. ‘Oh, dear. Guilty as charged. Yes. I’m afraid so.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ said Hope, meaning it. ‘I like football.’
‘You do?’
‘Well, OK, only up to a point.’ He looked disappointed. ‘But my son plays.’
He looked pleased again. ‘Who for?’
‘Well, it used to be the Cefn Melin Greens, but they’ve split into three teams this season, or something. It’s hard to keep track. You know, I’m not actually sure what they’re called any more.’
‘Well, if it is the Greens, then you should read the Echo. I gave them an excellent write-up last week. I run the Cougars.’
‘Really?’ she said politely. She hadn’t heard of them. Football was Iain’s thing, not hers. But it could be… Oh, God. Job in hand. Job in hand.
‘Absolutely. And we’re going to win the league. Remember, Hope, you heard it here first.’
He leaned back as the waiter reappeared to splash a dribble of wine into Jack’s glass. ‘Oh, go on,’ he said, flapping his hand. ‘You look like an honest enough kind of guy.’ The waiter looked mortified, but did as he was told. Even so, Hope decided she really didn’t like him. Or this kind of restaurant. Too full of itself. Too altogether snooty. She looked around and wished she’d worn something else. Was someone else. The someone else she’d been way back before she’d met Iain, who’d never worried about such rubbish. Where was she now she was needed so badly?
Jack raised his glass, so Hope did likewise.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Here’s to us.’
‘And the fun run,’ she added.
‘Oh, go on then, if we must,’ he answered. ‘To the fun run. Though I was thinking more along the lines of a toast to our divorces.’ His eyes twinkled fetchingly. Must be the light, Hope decided. Or the wine. Or… well, something.
‘Seems a funny thing to be toasting.’
‘You had a party, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, but that was then. This is, well, now.’
‘Now it’s sunk in, you mean? But you’re wrong. We should toast,’ he said, clinking glasses with her again. ‘You’re here, aren’t you?’
Oh, dear, thought Hope. How did she respond to that?
‘We’re both here,’ he said quickly, as if reading her reticence. ‘Weary fellow travellers along life’s rocky road. So tell me,’ he asked her. ‘How was it for you?’
Hope had never expected to find herself talking about her divorce in those terms, least of all with a man she knew so little about. Though she did know, because he’d told her, that his wife had left him, and not the other way round. Perhaps that was it. Here was someone who knew how it felt. Hope knew no one, she realised, who knew how it felt.
‘I don’t know,’ she said now. ‘It’s difficult to say without a yardstick. Same as it is for everyone, I suppose. Grim.’
‘Was it messy?’
She shook her head. ‘Remarkably uncomplicated, actually. Straightforward infidelity. He had previous. Lots of it.’
‘Well, that’s something. I mean not that he had previous, of course. But that it wasn’t too messy.’
‘No. It wasn’t.’ She frowned. ‘Lots of other awful things but not messy. You?’
He considered for a moment. ‘Um. Let’s see. Let me grope for a word here. Sort of expected. Which is three, I know. But not messy. Let me think. Sad. Sad, mainly. Yes, sad about does it.’
‘It is sad, isn’t it?’
He frowned. ‘Very. They don’t tell you, do they?’
‘They don’t. But, well, I guess we live and we learn.’
He looked serious suddenly. ‘And tell me, what have you learned?’
Hope shrugged. ‘Nothing good, really.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Oh, dear. Not to trust, I suppose. I wish I hadn’t. Had to learn that, I mean. It makes you feel so vulnerable. So, well, fragile. You know?’
He nodded sympathetically, and she felt suddenly self-conscious. And as if she’d been hoodwinked into saying too much. Why had she said that? It had sounded so pathetic. It was true, but it was so not how she wanted to come across. The victim. The cuckold. The one who got dumped. The one who was sitting in a restaurant at this moment, palpitating in such a juvenile fashion about being out socially with a man, for God’s sake. She’d no idea it would be such a terrifying business. That she’d feel so overwhelmed with apprehension.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do. But you can unlearn it, you know.’
Hope picked up her glass. Yes, she thought. She should. She just didn’t feel equal to the task yet. ‘What about you?’ she said. ‘What have you learned, then?’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Thought you’d be coming to that. Um. Let me see. That I married too young, that I married the wrong person… that I was the wrong person… ’ He grinned. ‘But mainly that I’m forty, I’m free, and I have one hell of a lot of lost time to make up for.’
‘I wish I felt like that.’
‘You should try it on for size.’
God, she envied him his confidence. Why didn’t he feel as she did? It didn’t seem fair. ‘Your ex-wife – sorry. I don’t mean to pry. But what –’
‘Oh, pry away. Same as you. Infidelity was the one we plumped for in the end. But that was just detail. Just for the sake of speed, really. If there’d been a “sorry, Jack, just got fed up with you” option, I think it might well have been her first choice. She’s dumped him already, of course.’
He said this without a trace of self-pity. A grin, even. Hope, who had laboured under a similar cloud for so long, shook her head firmly. ‘I can’t imagine anyone getting fed up with you,’ she said, meaning it but immediately kicking herself furiously for actually having said it. He poured them both more wine and considered her as he did so.
‘Know what, Hope Shepherd? I rather like you,’ he said.
Oh dear, thought Hope. Damn. So much for plans. Hers seemed to have been sidelined now. Utterly. Somewhere between the main course and the dessert she realised that despite her absolute conviction that she wasn’t going to get involved with any man at any time in the foreseeable future (or indeed the unforeseeable one, just for good measure), she was beginning to find herself more than a little taken with Jack Valentine. There was the way he looked. He was so achingly good-looking. With his dense ochre hair and his big turquoise eyes. Then there was the way he looked at her. He was looking at her now, as he threaded his way through the tables to rejoin her after visiting the men’s room. It was a speculative kind of looking, an appreciative kind of looking. Not lascivious exactly, but definitely the kind of look that made her feel she wouldn’t mind in the least if it was. And there was the feeling. It had been so long since Hope had felt that simmering excitement in the pit of her stomach that it quite took her breath away.
She didn’t know what to say to him when he sat back down again. She felt suddenly, unaccountably, debilitatingly self-conscious again. She should talk. About him. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Tell me about your football team.’
‘Absolutely not,’ he said, smiling in a perfectly relaxed and happy way. ‘I’d kind of like to have you awake for the evening. How about you tell me all about you instead?’
Oh, God. ‘Me?’
‘Yes, you. I was just thinking. I might write a feature about you.’
/>
‘Me?’
He stirred in his seat. ‘Oh, and Heartbeat, of course. Nice human interest story. They like those at the Echo. And very good publicity for you, of course.’
This was better. Back on track. ‘Oh. Yes. Yes, I suppose it would be, wouldn’t it?’
‘Indisputably.’ He laced his fingers together and propped his chin on them. ‘So, go on then. Shoot.’
‘Oh dear. That’s the only trouble. I’m not sure there’s much to tell.’
He shook his head. ‘There’s always lots to tell. How d’you come to be there for instance? Doing what you do?’
‘That’s easy enough. I used to help out in the shop. We have a nearly-new shop, and I used to work there a couple of days a week when the children were smaller. But then, well, you know, with the divorce and everything, I had to get a proper job again and Madeleine asked me if I’d like to work for them full-time. Her husband had died and she’d taken on the running of the whole charity, and she needed someone to take on her old role.’
‘The fundraising.’
‘Exactly. And, well, I said yes.’ She shrugged. ‘Not much of a story there.’
‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘I think that’s a nice story. But what about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘Hopes? Dreams? What d’you do when you’re not busy extorting money out of people?’
‘Oh, dear. Now there really isn’t anything to tell. Not right now, at any rate. I don’t know. I guess I have the same dreams as everyone else. To get through all the bad bits and move on to the good bits. God. I don’t know. What do I do? I go to work. There never seems to be much time for anything else. I run. I read books. I watch TV… er… I make cushions.’ She winced. ‘Jesus, but that sounds grim, doesn’t it? I wish I could tell you something else, but I can’t. I don’t do anything creative, like you do. I go to work, I come home from work, I do stuff with my kids. I go out running. I make cushions. There.’
She sat back in her chair while the waiter brought her dessert. Jack studied her. ‘Cushions? ’
‘Oh, I live life on the edge, me. Yes. Cushions. It’s not quite as dreary as it sounds. I make them out of leather, suede, that sort of thing. I have a bit of a fetish for skin, you see. God, that sounds worse! But, you know, out of all the old jackets and coats and stuff we get in at the shop. We get heaps of them. Even the odd fur. I don’t use the fur, of course.’ She leaned forward again. ‘Well, not officially. I do. But just for me. Don’t tell anyone that, will you? I have a big heap on my bed. So not PC. I don’t – I mean, I don’t approve, or anything. But we get these old furs, and they’re only going to be binned, and they’re so… well, anyway. Yes, I make cushions. I just got the idea, and made a couple to sell in the shop – I’ve got my mum’s old industrial sewing machine – and, well, they went like a bomb. And then I made some for the office, because Maddie liked them, and nowadays I can hardly keep up with the orders. They must be in vogue or something, because everyone seems to want them.’
‘There we are then. A one-woman cottage industry. That’s pretty creative.’
‘You think?’ said Hope, who had never really thought about it. ‘Well, I suppose. If you say so. Actually, Maddie thinks I should tout them round Liberty’s or somewhere. See if I can’t get some big deal going. But I haven’t gotten around to it. It’s just therapy, really. Something to do.’ She pushed her teaspoon into the top of her crème brûlée, and it broke with a snap. ‘God, does that make me sound sad, or what?’
‘Not at all.’ A smile played at the corner of his mouth. She lowered her eyes because his were becoming too distracting.
‘I’m prattling now. Ask me about Heartbeat. Much more interesting.’
But he didn’t.
He just sat there and smiled and watched her while she ate a mouthful of pudding. And another. And another. Still he looked at her, twiddling his glass stem and smiling. She lowered the teaspoon again. ‘What?’
His eyes were trained on hers. ‘Can I try some?’
‘Some of this?’
He nodded. ‘You seem to be enjoying it. Is it good?’
‘Yes. Yes, it is. Here… ’ She proffered the dish and the spoon.
He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You do it for me.’
So she loaded the spoon with a glistening mouthful and slid it gently between his waiting lips. She licked the spoon herself then, though she hadn’t meant to.
‘Thank you,’ he mouthed. He still hadn’t taken his eyes off her.
Holding his gaze, Hope knew something else had happened. That the man she was looking at had broached her defences. Somewhere along the line, by some glorious oversight, she had taken her eye off the ball.
Chapter 7
The taxi was somewhere between the castle and the University entrance when Jack made his mind up. Decided that what he would most like to do in all the world was to lunge at Hope Shepherd across the back seat and snog her until her teeth rattled. The thought, together with its profound inappropriateness at that moment, began to fuddle his cognitive processes. Hope was still talking thirteen to the dozen. This time about whether he thought it a good or a bad thing that the Welsh Assembly had decided to make museums free, which had followed on from what she’d been talking about while they’d been waiting for the taxi, which was how difficult it was to get any sort of government funding for little charities like hers, which followed on from what she’d been talking about while they waited for the waiter to bring his credit card back, which was, he only dimly remembered, something about how they hadn’t managed to get a lottery grant. Or something. He’d lost track. For someone so shy – and her diffidence at the start of the evening had surprised him – she had an opinion about everything. An informed opinion, to boot. That hypothetical feature article (such a devilishly clever idea) would have to become actual now. She’d half written the bloody thing for him already. He smiled to himself. He was sitting slightly angled towards her, and could see the full length of her left leg, right down to the couple of inches of black leather boot at the bottom. It made him feel horny as hell. He imagined her left leg without its trouser. He imagined her left arm (which was lying inert in her lap, while her right one batted the air in time with the points she was making), peeled free of its jumper and lying encouragingly across his own thigh. He imagined (well, what the hell) what she would look like if she were sitting in the taxi with nothing on whatsoever, how the contours of her tummy – a smallish swell beneath her breasts – would rise and fall every time she drew breath. How her dark – no, black hair…
‘Don’t you?’
Jack rounded himself up and fixed his eyes on her face. She lifted her left arm and coiled a liquorice lace of loose hair behind her ear.
Didn’t he what? Shit. He’d have to wing it. ‘I’m not sure.’
She turned a little herself now, the better, he assumed, to engage him in the crux of her argument. The hand came down again and sat on the seating between them, the polished nails mere centimetres from his thigh. He pondered on the possibility of moving his leg. ‘That’s exactly it, isn’t it?’ she was saying. ‘I mean, on the onehand –’
‘Which part of Cefn Melin was it you wanted, lovely?’ The cab driver jutted his head to fix his eyes into the rectangle of rear-view mirror. Hope leaned forward a little to meet them. Jack could smell her perfume every time she moved.
‘It’s the top end. Up by the park. If you head up through Roath and then on to Llanishen I’ll tell you the way after that. You really didn’t have to do this,’ she added, training her dark eyes on Jack once again. ‘Going all this way out of your way. I could easily have got a separate cab.’ Then she smiled at him coyly, as if she was pleased nevertheless.
‘It’s not that far,’ he said. ‘Only a couple of miles.’ How much could he read into that smile? Was he reading her right, period? She’d certainly revved up in the last hour or so. Did she fancy him, too? Her lips were glossy in the gloom. She must have put something on t
hem when she went to the Ladies. Would a kiss be appropriate currency with which to end the evening? A peck of some kind? A brush of his lips against her cheek? Something nearer her mouth? Onher mouth? The buzzing of every part of him south of his waistband was matched only in its intensity by the furious campaign instructions his neurones were firing at him. Would there ever be a time again when situations like this just happened? It seemed to Jack that sex (if and when he ever got some) was just one big round of manoeuvrings these days. It didn’t used to be like that, did it? You just got the hots for a girl and went for it, didn’t you? But his fond recollections of his teenage libido had been unpicked, every last one of them, since his divorce. His easy flirtatiousness with the opposite sex while he’d been married had evaporated as surely as a puddle in the sun. It was all decisions now. Imports. Consequences. Angles. He would so like to kiss her. Would so like to kiss her while taking a well-aimed palm and smoothing it over the woolly mound in her jumper that he knew outlined her right breast. And then move on to the left… Was there any way he could wangle it so that he could send the taxi away?
But her mother would be there, he remembered belatedly. Her mother was babysitting, that’s what she’d said. Though didn’t she say her mother had driven her down? In which case, wouldn’t she be driving home at some point? Why hadn’t he brought his car? He’d drunk comparatively little. If he’d brought his car there would have been so many possibilities. Carpe Diem. But now he was stuck with the bloody cab. He tried to imagine himself standing outside Hope’s house and kissing her while the taxi driver sat and waited for him. He couldn’t. But he clearly couldn’t kiss her inthe taxi. It would seem tacky. It would betacky. God, but he wanted to take her to bed.
Llanishen came and went. More directions were exchanged.
‘Oh, I am soexcited,’ said Hope suddenly, lifting her arm up again and relocating it halfway along his forearm. A different part of his anatomy rose momentarily in agreement. But then he felt the mild pressure of her squeezing his arm through his jacket. Squeezing forearms was not, to Jack’s mind, a ticket to ride. ‘I just can’t tell you. This means so much to me… what with, well, you know, everything… and I just know we’re going to raise loads of cash. And it’s so kindof everyone–’ She stopped speaking for a moment to squeeze his arm again, before patting it. As if he were an amiable terrier. ‘It’s so kind of you, Jack. God, to think I almost didn’t ring in about my trainer! Serendipity, don’t you think?’
Barefoot in the Dark Page 6
