‘Goodbye, Mia.’ He looked into her face for a long second, then leapt up the steps and disappeared through the door.
CHAPTER FIVE
LOTTE’S EYEBROWS ARCHED. ‘You mean the handsome guy...the one who didn’t want to be photographed?’
Mia nodded slowly. ‘Yeah.’
‘Wow! Even I’d make an exception for him.’ She ripped open a sugar sachet and emptied the contents into her coffee. ‘And you’re having second thoughts because...?’
Mia ran a finger around the rim of her cup. So many reasons... Because she didn’t know how Ash would react. Because she already liked Theo too much, risked liking him even more if she went to lunch with him, and that scared her because a casual lunch was exactly how things had started with Hal.
She met Lotte’s clear, blue gaze. ‘I don’t know... Maybe it’s just the thought of starting all over again. Once bitten and all that.’
‘Stop projecting!’
Lotte was stirring her coffee and biting into her hagelslag sandwich, talking with her mouth full because she was pressed for time. She had a shoot across town, some sort of fashion thing.
‘He hasn’t asked you to marry him. It’s only lunch.’
Only lunch!
That was the problem: there was no ‘only’ where Theo Molenaar was concerned, but Lotte didn’t know that, because Mia hadn’t kept her in the loop. She hadn’t told Lotte about cycling home from the fundraiser or about Cleuso in the canal. It wasn’t that she was being secretive on purpose. It was just that Theo was so private, and Lotte was, well, Lotte was Lotte.
She lifted her cup to her lips. ‘So you think I should go?’
Lotte shot her an incredulous look. ‘Hell yeah! You’ve lived here for eighteen months and you haven’t been out with a single person in all that time. Of course you should go!’ She dabbed a finger around her plate, picking up the stray chocolate sprinkles. ‘Anyway, I thought you were a fatalist—what’s meant for you won’t pass you by, remember?’ She daintily licked the sprinkles off her finger. ‘If you look at it that way, there’s nothing to decide. You can just let everything unfold because the future’s set!’
Mia sighed. She’d hoped for something else from Lotte—some unbridled cynicism, some consensus about what a bad idea it would be to have lunch with Theo.
Lotte was frowning at her watch. ‘I’m sorry but I’ve got to go.’ She shimmied out of her seat, hoisting her camera bag onto her shoulder. When she looked down again her gaze was soft, full of warmth. ‘Lighten up, Mia. Just have fun. Theo seemed really nice to me.’ She bent down, kissed Mia’s cheek quickly and then she was weaving her way through the tables, disappearing through the door.
Mia sipped her coffee, let out another little sigh. She’d learned to her cost that ‘seeming’ wasn’t the same thing as ‘being’. If only you could see a person’s true colours without having to weather a rainstorm. The rain had washed Hal’s colours away, had left her with nothing but grey. A shiver hovered at the base of her spine. Could she bear to go through all that again?
Stop projecting!
Her eyes drifted to a young couple two tables away. She could see the invisible bubble around them. They were in the thick of love, oblivious to the clatter of cups, deaf to the screech and burble of the coffee machine, to the funky jazz playing over the sound system.
Theo at the canal, scratched and smiling... She’d risen up onto her toes to kiss his cheek, had been startled by the sound of clapping from the crowd, because for that moment she’d been in a bubble of her own.
Dangerous!
She turned to look through the window. People were going by with chins down, braced against the breeze. The trees were swaying, wind tugging at branches and leaves, tussling with the flowers in the café’s hanging baskets. He’d saved her cat... No! He’d saved a cat. On their way back to the barge, he’d said that he hadn’t known it was Cleuso until she’d emerged through the crowd with him in her arms. So he was a man who saved random cats. A man who couldn’t bear to see suffering. Surely that was a real thing; a vibrant, shining thing about him? A true colour!
She put her cup down and twisted it back and forth on the saucer. Everything about Theo drew her in. She was right on the edge of that bubble, could feel it closing around her every time she looked in his eyes.
‘I thought you were a fatalist.’
It wasn’t what she’d wanted to hear from Lotte, because if fate was playing a hand in all this then there was no arguing with the facts. She’d literally bumped into Theo at that fundraiser then, of all the cats in Amsterdam, it had been her cat he’d rescued, just as she’d been cycling by. Serendipity might well be making a fool of her, but there was only one way to find out. She’d have to keep that lunch date.
Theo hiked up his coat collar, scanning the street for Mia’s bright-orange bicycle, but there were no bikes to be seen, just people scurrying along with umbrellas. He’d offered to pick her up in his car but for some reason she’d been adamant about meeting him at the restaurant. Maintaining independence was understandable, he supposed, but cycling in this squall had to be a nightmare, and it wasn’t as if this was a blind date that she might want to escape from. They’d spent time together. Enough to have weighed each other up a little bit.
He touched the scratch at the side of his eye, felt a smile coming. There’d been more than a little weighing up going on when she’d been bathing his battle scars. Every look she’d given him had made his heart pump faster. The way she’d trailed the cotton pad over his skin; the bite of the antiseptic; the tingle lingering on...pain and desire burning through him with every long, slow,
