Blind-Date Baby (7 page)

It was impossible to hold his mask of composure in the face of such genuine mortification. He smiled and Grace exhaled visibly.

She looked quite different from the night before—no dress, no heels, no clipped-up hairdo. Just jeans, a cute little wrap-around jumper in soft, soft blue and her hair swinging loose around her shoulders. She didn’t look at all like the polished woman he’d imagined he’d end up with when he’d signed up to Blinddatebrides.com. She did, however, look completely adorable.

Grace stood up and hurriedly gathered the left-over bits of stalks and leaves into the tissue and cellophane on the table and threw them in a bin somewhere behind the counter. When she returned, she flicked her hair forward to cover her eyes.

‘I sent you an email,’ she said, twisting her thumb in the grip of her other hand.

‘I know. I read it.’

Confusion clouded her features. ‘Then why are you here? What do you want?’

Another one of those hunches slammed into him. If he pushed the issue now, she’d never agree to a second date. He knew that as certainly as he’d known the answer to three down on the crossword this morning. If he was going to find his perfect wife, he would have to plan this like one of his plots, set things up. He would need to be patient. Just as well he was very good at being patient when he’d set his mind on something.

‘What I really want,’ he said, watching her eyes widen, ‘is an espresso and a piece of that divine-looking chocolate torte.’

‘Erm…okay.’ Grace forgot entirely that she wasn’t actually rostered to work that morning and skipped behind the counter to get Noah’s coffee and cake. Caz was suspiciously silent and
Grace felt her beady eyes on her as she carefully levered a slice of her famous torte onto a clean plate. She shoved the cake in his direction, holding the plate at arm’s length.

‘There you go. Take a seat.’ She nodded at the half-empty café. ‘I’ll bring your coffee over when it’s ready.’

She messed around at the coffee machine far longer than necessary. Why was he here? Didn’t he believe her when she said she wasn’t going to see him again? And how dared he look all sleek in his black jeans, his dark hair all wind-blown and sexy? It just wasn’t fair that a man of his age should be twice as good-looking in the daylight.

When she’d done absolutely everything she could think of to delay giving Noah his coffee—save drinking it herself—she took a deep breath and walked over to where he was sitting. He’d chosen a slightly dilapidated floral armchair and, although she suspected that leather and clean lines were more his style, he looked totally at home in the higgledy-piggledy coffee shop.

‘Here.’ She placed the cup on the table to avoid accidentally brushing fingers with him, then slumped into an adjacent chair.

‘Well, that’s me sorted,’ he said, wrapping his long fingers around the little cup. ‘Now, Grace Marlowe, what is it that you want?’

Grace had no idea.

But she did know what she
didn’t
want. She didn’t want to be sitting here noticing his fingers, because that led to noticing his wrists and the muscular forearms that were just visible where he’d pushed his sleeves up. How did a man have beautiful wrists? Just looking at them made her fizz inside. And fizzing led to something else she didn’t want—doubting her decision to say no to a second date.

Slowly, she became aware that the ridge of her thumbnail was between her teeth and she pulled it away. Bad habit. She hooked the offending digit in the loop of her jeans and took a sudden interest in the glass display case on the other side of the room.

What did she want?

Better focus on that, because getting up and wandering off to choose something to eat would give her an excuse to avoid this awkward silence. She sneaked a look at Noah. He didn’t seem to be finding it awkward at all. The torte was half-finished and he was sipping his coffee. If only she could match his serenity.

A croissant would be nice.

Something plain to settle her stomach. She pushed her weight down onto her feet and began to stand but, before she got fully vertical, a plate holding a pain au chocolat appeared before her.

‘Thought you might need this,’ Caz said and plonked a large black coffee down too. And then she sauntered off, looking as innocent as the day she was born. Grace knew better.

What Grace had
wanted
was to get away from Noah for a few moments, to allow her heart rate to return to normal, to get far enough away to block her view of his wrists. She definitely hadn’t
needed
Caz’s pain au chocolat—or her so-called help. Just as she hadn’t needed to feel all heart-fluttery about Noah last night. It was a conspiracy.

‘Grace? What do you want?’ he said softly.

Grace poked her finger into her pastry, scooped up a chunk of brittle, bitter dark chocolate and sucked it off her finger. ‘This’ll do.’

Noah didn’t display his fine teeth again, but she saw a glint of humour in his eyes. ‘Not for breakfast. What do you want out of life?’

She pulled a face. ‘That’s a bit deep and philosophical for a Sunday morning, isn’t it?’

He shook his head and loaded his fork with more torte. ‘I’d say it was a perfect Sunday morning type of question.’ She watched him in silence as he ate his cake, having no choice but to notice his fingers, his lips. He had very nice lips. And didn’t she know how nice those lips could feel!

She deleted that thought. She couldn’t feel that way again. Shouldn’t be able to. That part of her soul had been a one-shot deal and she’d used it up on Rob.

‘Okay then. Tell me about your daughter.’

That was easy. She knew what Daisy wanted. ‘She’s backpacking for a year before starting university up north. In fact, she’s probably eating a very similar breakfast to mine in Paris, right this very second.’

Grace stared hard at her pain au chocolat, wishing it had magical powers and could transport her to a city with the best, most ostentatious patisseries in the world. What she wouldn’t give to gaze in wonder upon shelves stacked high with gorgeous rainbow-coloured macaroons, tartes and choux buns.

‘I wish I was in Paris too,’ she whispered to herself, just for a moment forgetting the hunk of charm and cool sitting next to her.

‘Well, that’s an answer. Grace wants to travel.’

‘Huh?’ She looked up to find he had leaned in a little closer. What was he doing? Compiling a list?

‘Now your nest is empty, you want to see the world?’

She nodded. ‘That would be lovely, but I have to be content to just do it in my dreams. I’m…er…not really in a position to just jet off to some far-flung place on a whim.’

She took in the cut of Noah’s coat, his effortless style. Everything about him screamed money. He obviously didn’t have to worry about university fees or saving for his own little shop one day.

‘This cake is fabulous,’ he said before finishing the last mouthful.

There wasn’t a smudge of chocolate on him. Not even a crumb had dared to land on his charcoal pullover. Grace licked a spot of stickiness off her fingers, then wiped them on her jeans.

‘Who’s your supplier?’

For a moment, Grace couldn’t work out what he was
asking. Then she blushed. The way she’d blushed at fourteen years old when she’d walked past The Coffee Bean and Rob had winked at her. The heat started in her neck and just kept on climbing.

‘I am. I mean…I made it.’

For the first time since she’d met him—less than twenty-four hours ago, but it seemed a lot longer—Noah looked something other than cool. ‘You did?’

She nodded, blushing hard enough now to match the icing on the finger buns in the display case.

‘You have a real talent. Where did you learn to bake like this?’

Coming from Noah, a man who seemed to be a connoisseur of virtually everything, that meant something.

‘I was at the end of a catering course at Westminster College when I had Daisy,’ she said, looking at the crumbs on Noah’s plate and wondering if you could read the patterns in the same way that gypsies read tea leaves. ‘I had an idea I’d like to become a pastry chef.’

But long hours, early starts, the sheer hard graft that went along with working in a professional kitchen, had not been compatible with motherhood—especially single motherhood.

After Rob had died she’d been desperate. Twenty-year-old newlyweds didn’t think about saving and life insurance. The army pension helped, but it had still been a struggle. Thank goodness Caz had come to her rescue. It had seemed like an answer to prayer. Not only had she had a roof over her head and a job, but a whole host of coffee shop employees virtually fighting each other to babysit Daisy. And she’d been able to bake. Okay, she hadn’t finished her course, but she’d borrowed books from the library and even done a few adult education classes. At least working in The Coffee Bean had allowed her to indulge in her passion.

She bit into her pain au chocolat. The dark sweetness soothed her, as always.

‘One day, I’m going to open my own patisserie,’ she said quietly. She didn’t know when or how, she just knew she would do it. But, instead of getting closer to her goal, her dream seemed to be disappearing into the distance like the retreating tide on the river Thames. And once the tide was gone, all that was left was mud. With every step, in every direction, she found herself stuck, held fast by the dark, sticky circumstances of life.

She looked up to find Noah regarding her, his grey-green eyes strangely intense. Suddenly, she realised there was another bullet point to add to the list of things she didn’t want.

She didn’t want to sit here feeling so comfortable in his presence that she drifted off, let her guard down, spilled her secrets at his feet.

‘I have to go.’ She stood up and jammed her hands into her jeans pockets. ‘And I meant what I said, Noah. The flowers are lovely but—’

He reached up and tugged one hand out of her pocket. Just the feel of those long fingers wrapped around hers stole the words right out of her mouth. He tugged her down again and she sat with a bump.

‘Don’t look so scared, Grace,’ he said and released her hand. ‘I’m not about to stalk you, but I really enjoy spending time with you. If friendship is all you are offering, then I accept.’

Grace was speechless. That was what she’d said, but that wasn’t what she’d meant. Not really. But as Noah slipped his long dark coat on, said his farewells and walked out of The Coffee Bean, she couldn’t think of a single countermove. Automatically, she cleared his plate and walked over to the counter, where she handed it over to Caz. With nothing left to do in the café she opened the back door, navigated the narrow passageway there and climbed the stairs to her flat.

Down below, Caz stared hard at the dirty plate, twisting it
this way and that in the light. And, when she was satisfied she’d looked long and hard enough, she smiled to herself and brushed the crumbs into the bin.

G
RACE
smiled as she opened Noah’s latest email. Once you got through that ever-smooth façade, he could be really insightful and funny. Finding a message from him in her inbox always brightened her day. And he’d been true to his word. In the last six weeks she hadn’t felt stalked, not one little bit. She was glad of his friendship. She still missed Daisy like crazy but it was Noah, along with the girls from Blinddatebrides.com, who kept her going.

Grace smiled as she hit the ‘send’ button on her email. She’d thought she’d be horribly lonely without Daisy around but, after that day she’d stumbled into the chat room and sent out a distress call, she’d been in constant contact with Dani from San Francisco and Kangagirl, really Marissa from Sydney.

She wasn’t quite sure what had caused them to bond so firmly. They had very different jobs and lifestyles, but they just ‘got’ each other. And having two neutral ears to share her dating worries with had been a godsend.

She flipped the laptop closed and padded off to the kitchen in search of a snack. There were another two hours to kill until her scheduled chat with Marissa and Dani at midnight. A strange time of day to get sociable but, considering that Marissa was thirteen hours ahead and Dani was eight hours behind, live chats had to take place at either midnight or six
o’clock in the morning. And the girls knew how she felt about six o’clock in the morning.

It actually seemed a little bit sad that her best friends lived on different continents and she’d never met them face to face. She didn’t know how they liked their coffee or what their voices sounded like, but maybe that was a good thing. Yes, there was a lot of banter, but when that died down they weren’t afraid to be honest with each other. They’d got to know each other so much better over the Internet than if they’d met up and done small talk over coffee.

Sadder still had been the realisation that the greater part of Grace’s socialising up until now had involved Daisy and a group of friends. They were cool kids, but she doubted they wanted a forty-year—a
mature
woman hanging around now Daisy was overseas.

Grace raided the biscuit barrel and sat down with a glass of milk at the kitchen table—a great little find from a junk shop. It was pure nineteen-fifties Americana, complete with chrome legs and trim and a speckled Formica top.

As Grace munched, she began to frown. She hardly ever just sat in her kitchen and had a really good look around. There was something about it. Something she just couldn’t put her finger on. It reminded her of…

Oh, God. It reminded her of student accommodation.

Suddenly she was on her feet, walking through her flat looking at everything with unfettered eyes.

She realised with horror that her approach to decorating hadn’t changed much since she’d married Rob. Oh, the colours and the prints and the bad flat-pack furniture had changed, but the essential philosophy—cheap, bright and fun—was exactly the same. Shouldn’t there be at least one set of nesting tables in her living room? Where were the dinky ornaments, bought with a completely straight face and displayed with pride on the doily-topped mantle?

Okay, maybe she was taking this a bit too far, but Noah was her age and she’d bet he didn’t have a stick of flat-pack furniture in his house. With relief, she reckoned he probably didn’t have any doilies or nesting tables either, but she’d bet his place still looked…well…grown-up.

She turned into her bedroom and surveyed the turquoise and fuchsia Indian-inspired bedding. She loved it, loved the bright colours and sparkly embroidery, but nothing about it said ‘mature and sophisticated’. Should it? Did she want it to?

She was standing next to the end of the bed and dropped onto it, staring at herself in a long mirror on the wall. They were more lines on her face than there had been twenty years ago—was that really all that had changed? When Daisy had been at home, all this noise and colour had seemed fun, had seemed right. Now, it jarred.

She was living in a time warp.

The urge to bury her face in her hands was irresistible, so she didn’t bother to resist it. She was going to end up like Mrs Sims who came into The Coffee Bean, wasn’t she? Mrs Sims, who at eighty still wore bobby socks, white plimsolls and a skirt that was just crying out to have a poodle appliquéd onto it.

She stood up and wandered into the living room and flicked the telly on. After channel surfing for a few minutes, she stopped at one of her all-time favourite movies—an eighties high school, coming-of-age flick. It didn’t matter that she’d missed the first twenty minutes, she practically knew the lines by heart, anyway. It would fill the time nicely until her chat with Marissa and Dani and stop her thinking of poodles and figurines that were a nightmare to dust.

How did she explain this? It wasn’t about being fun. It went deeper than that—in ways she didn’t really understand. In lieu of precise thinking, she did the best she could:

Noah tried to doze in his first-class seat, but there was too much turbulence and, after five minutes of nodding off then being jolted awake, he gave up and asked a flight attendant for a coffee. When it arrived he wished he hadn’t bothered. It just made him homesick for cobbled streets and wild flowers in enamel jugs.

It made him think about Grace.

He seemed to be doing a lot of that recently. Especially when he was away from home. He missed going into The Coffee Bean, missed the waft of butter and cinnamon and ground coffee as he opened the glazed front door and heard the bell jangle.

He and Grace had got into a routine when he wasn’t travelling. He would turn up at the café around mid-morning, after he’d made a dent in his word count goal for the day. It was a great incentive. Suddenly, he was twice as prolific as he had previously been. Grace would just bring him an espresso and whatever cake or muffin she thought he might enjoy. They were always outstanding. He had no doubts that she could have worked at any of the top restaurants in London if she’d finished training.

While he privately lamented her missed opportunities, he also applauded her choices. She’d sacrificed all of that to bring up her daughter. There were many parents who just didn’t get that. The more he knew Grace, the more he was certain his hunch about her was right. She was an amazing woman, possessing all the qualities he could want in a wife. And if he could gift-wrap a patisserie for her and deliver it to her doorstep, he would. She deserved it.

But he was just a friend. And friends didn’t do that kind of thing.

He took another sip of the aeroplane coffee, grimaced and set
it to one side. Might as well take his mind off the rest of the journey by sorting out chapter seventeen. Somehow it had gone off course, and the pace had slowed to zero. He opened up his laptop and took a quick look at his emails before he started working. A few had arrived while he’d been sitting in the terminal in Stuttgart and he hadn’t had a chance to read them yet.

There was one from Grace, wishing him a nice time in Germany and recounting a funny Coffee Bean anecdote. He decided in that moment that, when he saw her next, he was going to pull her to one side and tell her who he really was. He trusted her completely. And she definitely wasn’t out to marry him for his money. She wasn’t out to marry him at all. What a pity.

The next email was a reminder from his agent.

Oh, hell. He’d forgotten all about that.

Next week was the British Book Awards and he’d get way too much stick if he didn’t put in an appearance, especially as his latest cold war story had been shortlisted for Best Thriller. Too much of a PR opportunity for his publishers not to nag him senseless about it.

He’d been trawling Blinddatebrides.com for a suitable ‘date-buddy’, but he’d been so busy that he hadn’t actually got past the looking-at-profiles stage. Which meant another ceremony which he would have to treat like a military operation if he was going to keep one step ahead of the glamour vixens. It was all so very tiring.

Could he schedule a date this week before the ceremony? And wasn’t it a bit fast to ask someone he’d only just met to come with him? When he was his alter ego, Noah Smith, women were pleasant and interested, but they were hardly stalker material. What if, when he revealed his secret in a big
ta-dah
moment, his date turned all bunny-boiler on him? A week just wasn’t long enough to test the waters.

His inner Rottweiler whined and barked.

Yes, yes, there was Grace. But she didn’t want a relationship. She just wanted…

He didn’t need a wife for next Thursday. He just needed a date. Someone to stand by his side, charm the socks off everyone and deflect the Mrs Frost wannabes.

Grace would be perfect. But would she do it? If he asked her nicely?

During her break, Grace took a journey next door to the book shop. She waved at the man behind the counter, who wore a home-knitted waistcoat every day of the year, even on a glorious April day like today.

‘Morning, Martin. How are things going?’

Martin shook his head. ‘What with all the posh shops opening up round here, the landlord wants to raise the rent. It’s not right—all these newcomers pricing the locals out of business. I was only just surviving competing with all those online booksellers as it was.’

‘Will you fight it?’

The old man sighed. ‘No point. The lease is up for renewal next month and I don’t have the cash for all the solicitor’s fees. If my son had wanted to take it on, I’d think about it, but it’s only me now and my wife’ll kill me if I don’t retire in two years’ time.’

A defiant look crossed Grace’s face. ‘Well, I’m spending all my book money here until you go, and I’m going to tell everyone who comes into the coffee shop to do the same. We’ll give you a good send-off and a wodge of money for your retirement.’