Cory suddenly found she was ravenously hungry and more happy than she would have dreamt herself being an hour ago. She filled her plate with scrambled egg, bacon, mushrooms and crisp hash browns, sitting down and beginning to eat with gusto.
Nick had done the same although his plate was filled with twice as much. She had just put a particularly succulent mushroom in her mouth when she sensed his gaze on her. She looked up. ‘What?’
‘I’m so glad you’re not one of those women who push the food round on their plate for half an hour, or sit with a nice juicy something on their fork while they talk on and on,’ he said appreciatively. ‘The times I’ve wanted to lean across and tell a woman to get on with her food.’
She frowned at him. ‘How rude.’
He chuckled softly. ‘I’ve never claimed that patience is one of my virtues.’
And yet he had been terribly patient with her in the last couple of months since they’d met.
Her face must have betrayed something because now it was Nick who said interestedly, ‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ She wasn’t about to give him any accolades after last night. He might be right in essence about William but she hadn’t quite forgiven him for pointing it out so brutally. And she definitely didn’t agree with the victim bit.
It was a new experience for Cory to go shopping with a man and she found she loved it, probably because the man in question was Nick, she admitted to herself ruefully. It was nice shopping too—not trundling around a busy supermarket or anything like that.
She purchased a fairly generic card for Nick’s mother, and then watched with concealed amazement as he scanned all the different verses in the ‘son to mother’ cards on display. The one he eventually chose was surprisingly sentimental.
‘She places a lot of importance on the words,’ he said somewhat defensively as they walked out of the shop. ‘She always maintains the best ones were the cards we made ourselves when we were children. She’s kept them all.’
Cory smiled and said something appropriate but his words had hurt her. She would have given anything for a mother like that.
She hadn’t let Nick call his mother and ask her what she wanted that morning before they had left the house. ‘She would love a surprise,’ she’d told him firmly. ‘All women do. And not anything practical. OK?’
And so here they were after just an hour, with Nick having bought an elegant Louis XVI-style chair and matching footstool made from kiln-cured beech, the fabric being cream linen with velvet leaf appliqué. Nick had assured her his mother would go ape for the chair and had paid a hefty charge for it to be immediately delivered. ‘She’s been looking for something like this for her bedroom for years,’ he said with a great deal of satisfaction. ‘She’ll love it. Trust me.’
Cory’s comfort was rooted in the fact that the chair and footstool would at least be a surprise.
She had opted for a pair of exquisitely fashioned silver earrings from a small jeweller’s in the heart of Barnstaple. The tear-shaped drops were inset with onyx, the semiprecious agate used to dramatic effect against the precious metal.
Nick had approved of her choice with reservations, as she had with his.
Later that afternoon he dropped the bombshell that they were in fact expected to attend a family party in honour of his mother’s sixtieth birthday. They were sitting enjoying a relaxing cup of coffee in an enchanting little patisserie at the time. ‘Nothing formal,’ he assured her when her countenance changed dramatically. ‘Just a casual get-together this evening.’
‘How casual?’ she demanded, her brain immediately doing an inventory of the clothes she had brought with her.
‘Nibbles, drinks, dancing.’
‘Where?’
‘At a local hotel.’
She wondered if the owners of the little patisserie had ever had a man strangled in their establishment.
The next hour was spent in a frantic search which yielded a black and silver asymmetric dress in silk linen, which went perfectly with the black ankle-strap sandals she had thrown into her case at the last moment.
They arrived back at the house at s
ix-thirty and were due at the hotel for drinks with the immediate family before the other guests started arriving at seven-forty-five.
Cory tore up to her room like a mad thing, clutching the bag with the dress in it. She had less than an hour to transform herself into an elegant creature of the kind usually seen on Nick’s arm.
She was back downstairs at seven-fifteen; made-up, coiffured and feeling a lot more confident in the black and silver silk linen than she would have done in the smartcasual dress she had brought with her for evenings.
She found she had to take a deep breath at the sight of Nick. He had dressed up in black dinner jacket and tie. He had been sitting waiting for her in the hall, one leg crossed over the other knee, and now he stood up at her approach. The blue eyes stroked over her in a way that made her hot.
‘You look good enough to eat,’ he said softly. ‘But the taxi’s arrived so I’ll have to restrain myself.’