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Even though it was a Tuesday night, the Italian restaurant had a buzz about it.
Candles were lit at every table, with wax spilling down the side of the wine bottles they were perched in. Pulling at the melting wax was almost addictive.
Christmas lights were strung up in the windows and a small lopsided Christmas tree was propped up in the corner.
Rocco, the owner, smiled at their table as he automatically filled up their wine glasses. “My son decorated it.” He shrugged. “I don’t have the heart to try and straighten it up.”
He had that dopey kind of smile that only a parent could have.
Why did that make him uncomfortable?
Emma was looking over the menu. She gave a little sigh and closed it again, handing it back to Rocco. “I can’t make up my mind. I’ll take whatever you recommend.”
He raised his eyebrows and winked at Mitch. “Now here’s a woman I like. Any allergies, anything you won’t eat.”
“Kangaroo and shark.” She smiled.
“Then you’re safe.” Rocco beamed. He turned back to Mitch. “What about you?”
Mitch handed the menu back, too. At some point in the last few years, he’d eaten every single thing that was on the menu and had never been disappointed. “I’ll go with what the lady has.”
Rocco practically clapped his hands with glee. “Leave it with me. You won’t be disappointed.” He disappeared into the back kitchen.
Mitch leaned back in his chair. The flickering candlelight did wonderful things for Emma. She done an extra shift at The Graff today and had been running late. Her auburn hair was pulled back in a clip with little tendrils escaping and she was wearing a pair of apparently ‘old’ jeans, black boots, and a dark green top. In his eyes, she looked like a million dollars.
She took a sip of the red wine and gave a little sigh. “Well, if the food’s as good as the wine I’ll be a happy girl.” She set the glass down and looked over at him. “How was school?”
He shrugged. “Same as usual. Good days and bad. Being a teenager these days is tough. So much pressure. Not a lot of ways of coping.”
“Why do you do the counseling then? Wouldn’t it be easier just to do the football and athletics?”
He toyed with the stem of the glass. “Of course it would. But then I don’t get to see the whole person. I only get to see the person who runs track or plays the game. More than fifty percent of everything is attitude, and, I learned as a coach, I need to understand why some of my kids act the way they do and why some of them have a bad day. Ultimately, I want to get the best performance out of them that I can – and to do that, I need to understand them, and I need to be able to manage their behavior.”
She gave him a smile that sent little zaps down his spine. It was almost as if she could see right into him. Right into the parts of his brain he kept secret.
“Whoa. I can see why the kids love you so much. You don’t take the easy way. You really stick your neck out for them.”
He gave a little laugh. “Just as long as you understand it doesn’t always work. There’ve been a few occasions when a kid’s tried to throw a punch.”
Her eyes widened. “What did you do?”
“I caught it with my hand. It’s just frustration. They just have to learn other ways to handle it.”
“Well, you obviously have a lot more patience than me.”
He gave a little nod. He’d spent quite a bit of time around Emma, and he liked everything that he’d discovered. But she hadn’t really let him get beneath the surface.
“How’s things at The Graff?”
“They’re good actually. The job is fine. The guests have all been pleasant. And Troy Sheenan is a good boss. I can have extra shifts if I want them. If I don’t, then that’s fine, too. Elliot, the chef, is a little temperamental. But yesterday he made me some scrambled eggs and sausage because he heard I hadn’t had breakfast. That’s what the staff there is like. They look out for each other.”
Mitch stopped himself from saying anything he shouldn’t. He wasn’t sure he liked Elliot looking out for her.
“You never told me, what brought you here from Scotland.”
She rolled her eyes. “Bryce, actually. I met him in Ibiza. He asked me to come back with him. My mother’s friend stayed in the US and I could use her address and house as a base if things didn’t work out. I decided to give it a go. That was three years ago.”
Bryce. The disaster groom. She still hadn’t told him what had really happened between them. And he didn’t feel as if he could pry.
“And now?”
She picked up her fork and twisted it in the candlelight. “Now, I need to take a bit of time and work things out.”
It was an evasive answer. And he wasn’t exactly sure how he felt about it.
“Do you have any plans? Is there anything you’d like to do?”
She twisted the fork again and met his gaze. “I guess I’d like to see how things work out here. Marietta seems like a nice kind of town.” She gave him a little smile. “I’ve met some nice people. I’m just not sure what to think about things.”
His breath hitched. He could interpret that a million ways. But somehow, he knew exactly what he wanted to think.
A little voice started echoing in his head. You need to tell her. You need to tell her before things go any further.
The kitchen door banged open and Rocco appeared with a huge smile on his face. He put a basket of garlic bread on the table along with two plates of steaming, hot pasta. “Mushroom and veal ravioli with spicy Napoli sauce. Enjoy!”
Emma bent her head over the plate and inhaled. “Hmmm…this smells fabulous.” She picked up her knife and fork and started attacking the ravioli.
Mitch did the same, ignoring all the screaming voices in his head and pushing them away.
Everything about this was different – and it wasn’t just the original way that they’d met. He couldn’t get her out of his thoughts. Daytime was bad enough, but every night she had invaded his dreams in ways that would color her cheeks scarlet.
He liked her. He more than liked her. In fact, it might even be more than that.
He’d never felt the urge to share before. But all of sudden it seemed fundamentally important to be honest with Emma.
He’d seen the look of hurt on her face at their first meet. He didn’t ever, ever want to be responsible for making her look like that. She deserved better than that.
For the first time in his life, he wanted to take things much further. His brain was taking him places he’d no right to go.
Crazy, unsettled, beautiful Emma was stirring things in him that no woman had before.
His biggest fear was sharing. His biggest fear was sharing and watching her walk away. That was a definite possibility. A real possibility.
And if it happened, he’d just need to suck it up. Because that was real life. That was the risk one took of revealing their secrets to someone and waiting to see if they would stay the course or walk away.
He could easily lose his appetite right now. But the pasta was delicious and the company even better.
Maybe he was getting ahead of himself. Of course he was getting ahead of himself. They’d only known each other a few weeks. She’d just left a relationship in a spectacular fashion.
It was just that last night he’d done something he’d never done. He’d taken his grandmother’s wedding ring out of his cupboard and sat and looked at it. It was rose gold and set with tiny diamonds. Her one request before she’d died of stomach cancer was that he’d give it to his bride.
He’d never considered it before. He’d never even thought about it before. But last night, he’d sat and looked at it and wondered if he could ever offer it to Emma.
“Hey, earth to Mitch. Are you okay?”
She was staring at him with her big, blue eyes.
“Sure. Sure, I am.” He caught sight of her empty glass. “Do you want more wine?” He signaled to Rocco
who bustled over straight away and refilled the glasses.
She smiled. “I was going to say I wasn’t sure. But hey, I can drink more red wine.” She took another bite of ravioli. “What do you want to do later?”
He paused. “We could go to Grey’s. Have you been there before?”
The absolute last thing he wanted to do was take her into the local hunting den. He was quite sure the first time he visited the gents he would come back to find her surrounded by the usual suspects.
She tilted her head to one side. “I don’t know if I fancy a pub. Bit too noisy.”
“You could always come back to my place.” The words were out before he thought about them. It seemed natural. They wouldn’t exactly get any privacy at Bramble House.
She paused for a second and he wondered if he’d overstepped the mark.
But she gave him a beaming smile. “Tell me you’ve got cable, or satellite TV or some kind of subscription channel. There’s none at Bramble House and I’d love to watch some Castle, some Breaking Bad or even some Friends with a beer.”
He was trying not to laugh. “Really? You’re asking me if I have a subscription channel?”
She realised what she’d said and the blood rushed into her cheeks. “Oh…no…I didn’t mean that. Of course, I didn’t mean that.” Her eyes widened and she leaned across the table, “You don’t have that, do you?”
Now he did laugh out loud. “I promise you, I’ve just got regular cable TV. But I’m sure all of those TV series will be on one of the channels. I even have about four different kinds of beer. How does that sound?”
She set down her fork and leaned back in her chair. “That sounds just perfect.”
It didn’t take long to settle the bill and walk through the snow to his house on Railway Avenue. She stared along the quiet railway track.
“What’s it like living right next to the railroad track?”
He shook his head. “After the first two days, I didn’t even notice the trains anymore. There aren’t that many. A couple of freight trains at night and just the regular trains during the day. I have triple pane windows so there isn’t much noise.”
He opened his front door and kicked the snow off his boots. Emma copied him and followed him inside.
He’d lived on Railway Avenue since he moved to Marietta and had always been happy with his home. But his stomach was in a weird kind of knot as he watched Emma’s reaction.
She took off her red wool coat and handed it to him, walking into his main room and smiling in approval at his comfortable sofa. “Your place is lovely.”