Typical Irish Catholic guilt. She’d got away with it so far but …
She slipped her shoes off to minimise the noise on the stone floor as she snuck in the back door, closing it behind her as quietly as she could before tiptoeing past the kitchen.
‘Good morning,’ Kim’s voice sang out knowingly, and Annie winced.
Caught red-handed.
‘Hey,’ she answered airily, popping her head around the kitchen doorframe to face her friend.
‘She’s home?’ Colette called out from behind her. ‘Thank goodness.’
Annie was trying her utmost to be nonchalant. ‘So what’s for breakfast?’ she asked, breezing into the kitchen. She moved to the fridge and took out a jug of iced water, waiting for the questioning to start.
Now that it was inevitable, she’d prefer to get it over with sooner rather than later. She wanted a shower. She hadn’t intended to stay overnight and when she woke up forty-five minutes earlier in Harry’s hotel room, she’d been in too much of a hurry to get back before the others noticed she hadn’t come home to waste time on a shower.
‘Things went well with Prince Charming last night, I take it?’ Kim slid into the seat at the heavy wooden table and looked at Annie with a smirk.
‘You could say that,’ she replied, sitting down beside her and taking a long gulp of water. She was parched.
Kim chuckled. ‘I’dmorethan say that. This is the third night this week you’ve stayed out.’
Annie looked at her, surprised, and Kim winked. You couldn’t get much past her all the same. ‘Well, who’s to say it’s the same fella?’ she boldly quipped with a wink back.
Colette sat down opposite, looking mildly shocked at this, and Annie resisted the urge to pat her on the head. She really was too sweet and naïve sometimes.
‘So you’ve slept with the guy you’ve been meeting?’ she asked her timidly.
‘I wouldn’t say that we … slept much,’ Annie replied wickedly, and she and Kim guffawed as Colette turned a brilliant shade of red.
‘But you barely know him …’
Her friend’s words stuck, especially in light of what she’d discovered (or thought she had – there could easily be an alternative explanation) at the restaurant the other night.
OK, Colette was right, she barely knew Harry, but yet it felt as if they’d known each other a lifetime.
‘I know it may seem that way, especially since you guys haven’t met him yet,’ Annie conceded, ‘however, he’s different. He’s together, more mature, and I suppose a little more serious than most guys I know. Most importantly, he’s serious about me.’
‘How do you know?’ Colette asked.
‘Know what?’
‘That he’s serious?’
Annie paused to think it over. She didn’t know how to explain how she felt or where to begin. She justknew. But if she’d known she’d be asked to prove why he was different, she would’ve made a list in advance to save her tired mind the effort now.
‘Well, right from the beginning we had a connection – before you guys arrived, actually,’ she said, reminding them that she had in fact known him even longer than them. ‘Just … the stuff he does and says when we’re together, I suppose. Even when we’re out with his friends his attention is still always on me. And when he looks at me … well, no one has ever looked at me that way,’ she continued, smiling a little.
‘But what happens when he or you go home? Won’t everything come to an end?’ Colette persisted. But Annie got the sense that she wasn’t quite as concerned with Harry’s true intentions than perhaps with Luca’s.
Aha.
‘He says he doesn’t want to think about that. He just wants us to enjoy now. What?’ she asked, noticing Kim’s dubious expression.
‘Nothing,’ she replied, but Annie knew she wasn’t really buying it.
Well, she thought defensively,Kim will change her tune once she sees us together. Not that Annie needed to convince anyone. It was nobody else’s business, after all.
‘Nothing, my foot. What’s that’s look for?’
