Lost Among the Living(20)

“I realize I’ve gone about it the wrong way,” he said. “But I had no chance to speak with you. There’s an Italian place just across the square here, and I thought—”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’ll have dinner with you.”

He smiled at that, and I found myself smiling back at him, something inside me melting like wax. He lifted his elbow to me.

“Very well, Jo Christopher,” he said. “Follow me.”





CHAPTER NINE



He knew everything about everything. We talked about politics—I read the news every day, devouring Casparov’s many newspapers when I took my luncheon—and we talked about art, and we talked about novels. Without Mother to care for, I’d found myself with time alone for the first time in my life, and I’d spent my leisure hours in galleries, museums, and lending libraries. It was a wealth of riches, but I’d had no one to talk to about the things I’d seen.

The Italian restaurant was small and intimate, with perhaps twenty tables, its light dim against the evening darkness of early spring. The food was delicious, and Alex ordered first one bottle of wine and then another. He knew exactly which wines to choose from the list, of course. He simply knew.

In the absence of the cloth cap, his hair was light brown, burnished in the light, with perhaps a hint of russet—in the candlelight it was hard to tell. He wore it short, combed back from his forehead and his temples. Beneath the jacket he wore a white shirt, tailored perfectly to the lines of his body, the top button open at the throat and the cuffs rolled back to just above the wrists. It was incredibly, unthinkably casual; I had never in my life seen a man dress so. I could have devoured him whole.

He had the same thought about me, I could tell. Even as he talked his gaze wandered my throat, my jaw, the line of my ear, the slope of my nose before he’d come back to his senses and look away. I was completely unused to such close attention, and it both embarrassed me and made my head spin.

“You seem to be a very capable typist,” he said when the conversation turned personal.

I took a sip of my wine, which rolled wonderfully past my tongue. “How would you know?” I asked.

He frowned, caught out. “Well, there was a lot of . . . clacking.” He saw the amusement on my face and said, “Very well, then. You seem to be a rapid typist.”

“Thank you,” I said politely. I was giddy with the wine and the good food and the tiny little restaurant; the evening seemed otherworldly, as if it belonged to someone else’s life. “And you seem to be a very capable . . .” I raised an eyebrow.

“Layabout,” Alex Manders supplied. “I’ve just been traveling, and now I’m at loose ends.”

It must be nice to be wealthy enough to be at loose ends, I thought, but I couldn’t help saying, “You don’t look particularly happy about it.”

He shrugged, the movement graceful in the dim light. “I’m happy enough, I suppose. I’m twenty-two, and I have what I want.”

The words hung in the air, crackling between us. They seemed to affect even him, because he dropped his gaze to his wineglass and ran a finger around the rim as I watched, hypnotized.

“That must be nice,” I said softly.

“Don’t you have what you want?” Alex asked, looking up at me again. “An independent woman in London, with a job and her own money, spending her time at museums and in intellectual pursuits. I think there are a lot of girls who would envy you.”

I stared at him, caught between feeling aghast and breaking out in laughter. My life was hardly one any woman would envy. But he did not know about Mother, of course—that was why he had such an absurd impression of me. “It isn’t quite that simple,” I said.

“Why not?” he asked me. “I want to know.”

“I don’t think it’s possible to explain.”

He took a drink of his own wine. “You don’t think I can understand, do you?” He gave me a half smile that made my toes curl beneath the table and shrugged. “Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps we’re not meant to see eye to eye, you and I. Perhaps you’ll always be a mystery to me.”

I had to laugh at that. “I’m not a mystery,” I said. “I’m just a typist. And of course there are things you don’t know about me. You’ve only known me an hour.”

He did not answer that. Instead, his gaze drifted over me softly this time, taking in my features with an expression I could not read until it came to rest on the center notch of my collar, which rested demurely on my clavicle. I felt my skin flush. “We can talk about Serbia again, if you like,” he said.

I cleared my throat. “We talked about Serbia enough, I think. And about arms races with Germany and your strange idea that there will be some kind of war.”

He shrugged, his gaze still soft on my clavicle, as if it fascinated him. “It’s inevitable.”

“It’s impossible.”

Again he smiled a little, almost to himself. He was trying to impress me, I thought, with his worldly opinions. “Let’s talk about something else, then. There’s something that makes me curious.”

“What is it?”

Alex raised his gaze to me. His expression had eased a little, lost some of its dreamy seriousness. “How is it that you’re certain your fellow typist’s niece is actually her daughter?”