Once Upon Stilettos

Page 73

I’d been on some spectacularly weird dates in my lifetime—most of them in the past couple of months—but none of them had been quite this weird in quite this way. The mixed messages were enough to make my head explode. He’d invited me out for lunch by making plans ahead of time, he’d made a reservation, and he’d brought me to a fairly nice place that certainly wasn’t cheap. That all made it a real date instead of a casual “hey, let’s go grab some lunch” thing.
But he didn’t act like he was on a date. He was nowhere near as affectionate or enthusiastic as he’d been any other time he’d been around me. I realized he hadn’t kissed me at all, not even after we left the office building. And he hadn’t responded to my feeble attempts to flirt. I might as well have been one of his clients. It was like at any moment he was going to pull out some documents for me to read and sign. Maybe that was it. He was in lawyer mode and having a hard time breaking out of it.
I might be able to do something about that. I slid my foot up the inside of his leg, from ankle to knee. His eyes widened and he jumped. Then he looked relieved. “Whew. That was you. There’s not a lot of legroom under these tables, is there?”
What red-blooded American male would react that way to a woman playing footsie under the table? With all the cat-and-mouse games I was dealing with at work, I didn’t have the mental or emotional energy to play games in my social life. “Is something wrong?” I asked.
With the impeccable timing that had to be bred into waiters (the same timing that enabled them to always show up and ask how everything was the moment you put a bite of food in your mouth), the waiter arrived then with our lunches. “See, I told you they were quick,” Ethan said, entirely ignoring my question as he began eating.
There was definitely something wrong, then, and he wanted to avoid dealing with it until after he’d eaten. If he’d been so eager to see me after not having a real date over the weekend that he couldn’t wait until the next weekend, the conversation would have gone totally differently. He’d shown no signs of bashfulness or hesitation when it came to asking me out, so I couldn’t imagine that his behavior came from nervousness about inviting me to go to his place for an evening (and maybe morning) in that weekend. His jumpiness was more appropriate for someone gearing up to propose, and we were nowhere near that point in our relationship.
I remembered something Gemma had once said about how men always seem to break up with you in restaurants. I’d argued that maybe it was a classy maneuver, better than doing it over the phone. Marcia thought it was because they wanted to avoid a big scene with crying and hurling of breakables. In a public place, a woman would feel compelled to react quietly and swallow her tears. She might fall apart later, but he wouldn’t have to watch it.
“This is good,” I commented after taking a bite of chicken. I was glad it had come with mashed potatoes. I suspected I’d need the starchy comfort food.
“Yeah, that’s why I like this place. Good, simple food that nearly everyone seems to enjoy.”
Wow, was this conversation scintillating, or what? I tried to decide what the breakup risk was on a midweek lunch date. I’d hate to think he’d be cruel enough to do anything at lunch that would make it difficult for me to go back to work. The midweek part, though, seemed like he wanted to clear the way in time for him to have moved on before the weekend.
My appetite totally gone, I shoved my plate away and asked again, “Is there something wrong?”
He looked across the table at me, but didn’t quite meet my eyes. “Wrong?” he asked.
Yeah, there was definitely something going on, and I didn’t need magical immunity to see through his illusion. “You’re acting weird,” I said.
“Weird how?”
“Well, you’re not talking to me. You’re not even looking at me. And you’ve sidestepped every effort I’ve made to flirt with you. You have to admit that’s a very weird way to act when you invite someone to lunch. I could see it if I roped you into it or invited myself along, but you called me. Is there something wrong at work that’s distracting you? Because if there is, you should know I wouldn’t have minded if you’d canceled or postponed our lunch.” I made one last attempt at flirting. “That is, as long as you made it up to me later.”
That attempt, like all the others, sailed right over his head. “No, nothing wrong at work,” he said, sounding vague and distant.
“Then do you have a problem at MSI that you want my help with?” I felt like I was grasping at straws, eliminating all the best-case scenarios until only the one reason I hoped to avoid was left.