56
As darkness fell, she went to find Matt.
‘OK, wasn’t it?’ he said to her, arms folded, surveying the thinning hordes with satisfaction. ‘We made a metric ton for the charity, way beyond the target, and your mum is calling her takings a ‘gold rush’. That’s good fêteing.’
Roisin slung her arm around his waist. ‘OK? Utterly amazing. Look what you did. You are a prince among men. You have shifted the paradigm.’
Whether Lorraine maintained the momentum Matt had found was yet to be seen, but he’d forever proven it could be done. He’d lifted a sixteen-year-old curse.
‘Glad to have helped,’ Matt said. ‘It’s given me an inner glow.’
‘Hope that’s not Terry’s burger relish. I saw Del Monte fruit cocktail going into it.’
She and Matt laughed like Beavis and Butthead. Roisin saw a sixty-something woman seated at a picnic table shoot them both an adoring look, obviously taking them for a couple.
Roisin beamed back. Matt saw the woman too, and glanced appraisingly at Roisin.
In a split second, she became acutely self-conscious. Her arm, chucked around Matt’s middle, demonstrating how easy she was with him, was suddenly heavy as lead. She could sense every inch of her limb making contact with his midriff, feel the heat of his skin through his shirt. What had been so thoughtlessly done was charged with electricity.
Was her arm even positioned normally? Roisin couldn’t tell. She was as stiff-jointed as a shop mannequin. Someone else had cranked her elbow hinge, curled her fingers, and she could only maintain the pose.
Matt put his hand over hers and moved her arm down to her side, and her breathing stopped. A clear indication that Roisin had overstepped, and that he felt awkward too. But … he didn’t let go of her hand? They stood looking out over the garden, their palms clasped together.
In a little invisible game of raising the stakes, Roisin adjusted her hand inside his grip, interlocking their fingers. Matt responded by squeezing her hand. She squeezed back. What was going on? She felt incredible tension in parts of her body that were not her hand.
Lorraine burst into the garden, ringing the bell for last orders like a town crier, and she and Matt sprang apart like foxes who’d had water thrown over them.
Roisin obsessed about the surreptitious handholding, and what it meant, for the rest of the shift. Probably nothing; she was out of practice at courting rituals.
In this burgeoning attraction to Matthew McKenzie, was she the world’s biggest hypocrite? She’d tried in vain to get a charge to stick with Joe, and yet, ‘heavy flirting with one of our best mates, a New York minute after we split up’, was hardly acceptable.
Joe didn’t need to know. He’d never know. Nor did Matt, for that matter. Or not explicitly.
‘Kids, I’m going to turn in, I’m beat,’ Lorraine said, once all chores were finished, towels thrown over beer taps, drip trays up-ended.
‘You do look tired,’ Roisin said, then, in case it sounded like a dig, added, ‘Very well-earned exhaustion, too. What a fête! Meatball was a star turn!’
‘Don’t pander to that grotesque beast. You’re like Neville Chamberlain with Hitler. Thank you, both of you. I’ve had compliments about how our efforts were the best of the village all day.’
‘Pleasure,’ Matt said kindly as she left them.
Roisin sensed her mother might’ve been chastened by Roisin’s outburst over Ryan, and that was no bad thing.
‘Right then, Roisin Walters,’ Matt said, picking up two glasses upside down by their stems and setting them down on the bar top. ‘Manhattan?’
‘Hell, yeah,’ she said, getting a shiver at the prospect of their being alone together.