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She stopped her rambling before she confessed that she was still homesick for moments like that, when love had been as simple as warm pie, cold milk, and the sun streaming through the windows of their old farmhouse kitchen.
“So that’s the story.” She looked up again.
He was watching her, his expression inscrutable but his eyes oddly penetrating, as if he were trying to figure something out.
A tense, hot feeling tightened in her belly. Anxiety, of course. Good-looking men had a tendency to make her nervous, mostly because she never knew how to act around them. She’d always dealt with that problem by avoiding them altogether.
Unless, apparently, they offered her the last piece of rhubarb pie.
“You both doing okay over here?” Nancy came back with the coffee-pot. “More milk, hon?”
“I’m good, thanks.”
The waitress assessed their pie progress and gave a satisfied nod before returning to her duties.
They ate in silence for a few minutes. Grace savored every bite, barely managing not to lick all the juices off her fork. She cast her companion a few covert glances.
Something about his face—maybe his sculptured cheekbones or the line of his jaw—inspired a faint sense of familiarity, but she chalked the feeling up to fatigue or her lowered defenses. There was no way she’d seen this man before. She’d have remembered him.
As he reached for his coffee, the sleeve of his shirt rode up to reveal an expensive silver watch strapped to his strong wrist. Maybe a Rolex or an Armani, or whatever fancy watches were called. Either that or it was a super good imitation of one.
Not that Grace would know the difference, even up close. She understood all the nuances of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and she could tell just bysmellwhen a vendor had been trying to sell her father an inferior mixture of citrus pulp for the cows, but darned if she could tell a real diamond from a cubic zirconia.
“So, what about you?” She pushed her fork into the pie again, sopping up the juices with a ridge of crust. “Why did you order rhubarb over apple or cherry?”
His forehead creased. “I have no idea.”
“You don’t know why you ordered rhubarb pie?”
He shook his head and speared a piece of rhubarb with his fork. “I don’t even eat pie, really. Guess I was just killing time.”
She wondered what it would be like to actually have time to kill. “To postpone doing something you don’t want to do?”
He looked up so sharply that Grace’s heart bumped against her ribs. For an instant, their eyes held. The light flickered.
He set his fork on the edge of his plate and sat back. His shoulders flexed beneath his gray, button-down shirt. He skimmed his gaze over the Shakespeare book sitting near her elbow.
“Would you like anything else?” he asked.
“No, thank you. This was really nice of you.”
He edged out of the booth. “I’ll get the bill taken care of.”
Grace polished off the last crumbs of the buttery crust and drained the glass of milk. She eyed Handsome (and Nice) Devil as he approached the register.
His shirt stretched over his broad chest and impressively wide shoulders, and he wore black trousers that looked as if they’d been tailor-made to fit his long, muscular legs. Even his leather belt, ending in a shiny silver buckle, encircled his waist like it couldn’t imagine being anywhere else in the world. He was also taller than she’d first noticed, well over six feet, and he had the straight, self-assured posture of a man of privilege.
Not unlike Fitzwilliam Darcy.
And clearly if Grace was comparing a handsome stranger with Mr. Darcy, she was more exhausted than she’d realized. She’d always kept a firm line drawn between fiction and reality. No need to blur that line now.
Turning away, she slipped the book back into her bag and took out a few bills. After tucking them underneath the salt shaker, she stood and waved at Nancy.
“It was delicious,” she said.
“Good to know, hon.” Nancy handed the man his credit card as he signed the receipt. “Come back again, both of you.”
Grace started toward the door. The rain had stopped, leaving the night air fresh and cool. He fell into step beside her as they walked to the parking lot. Normally she’d be uneasy about walking out alone with a stranger, but she’d parked right beside the diner windows, and several people were pumping gas at the gas station.
