“In the end, of course, it’s a lot more science fiction than fantasy. You’ve seen Felix.”
“Felix?”
She flushed. “My steno machine.”
Martin took that in stride. “I’ve seen him, but I don’t understand him. How do those things work with so few keys?”
Tiffani explained the process to him, how the keys represented sounds rather than letters. Was this the one and only time she’d ever been able to be the person who had something to teach?
Martin, adorably, seemed to find this not only interesting but genuinely exciting.
“I never would have thought of that,” he said. “That means you could probably even take down languages you didn’t understand, at least if the sounds were similar enough.”
“Well, if the courtroom suddenly breaks into a flood of untranslated Latin, maybe you could help me piece some of it together from the steno rolls afterwards.”
“Felix—as a name—comes from Latin,” he said. “So Felix might manage some of the translation on his own.”
“I didn’t know that! What does ‘Felix’ mean in Latin?”
“Lucky,” Martin said softly. “Which works. Anyone who winds up with you is lucky. Even a steno machine.”
Their food arrived to distract them both from how bowled over she was by that.
Tiffani had ordered a pasta dish with fig and prosciutto, thinking she would stay with this Italian fantasy as long as she could. Martin had fluffy, savory gnocchi with chicken, finely-chopped bacon, and something called chicken veloute. So far as Tiffani could tell without actually looking it up, veloute was some kind of fancy gravy.
She had always loved these kinds of restaurants, ones where the menus rotated with the seasons and you could never anticipate ahead of time exactly how something would taste. She figured she wouldn’t be able to afford too many of them on her new salary. But for one dinner, it probably still fell on the right side of the line of decadence.
And the pasta was delicious. The key, she discovered, was to make sure each bite was made up of a little bit of everything on the plate: the salt and cured intensity of the prosciutto cut through and enhanced the sweetn
ess of the figs while the smooth, delicately-oiled pasta provided a background for it all to play out. Maybe she should rebuild her life a third time to judge cooking shows. She would probably even get the chance to learn what veloute was.
“This is incredible,” she said, chasing a stray bit of fig around her plate. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a meal this good. How is yours?”
“Also incredible... but I think the edge on the finest meal of my life might still go to this little seafood place I went to out in the Florida Keys.”
“Tell me,” Tiffani said. “I’m very interested in food porn lately.”
“I’ll save it for another date, if you’ll give me one. You can’t talk about fish while you’re eating chicken, I don’t think. It’s one of those dinner rules.”
“Like holding red wine glasses by the bowl and white wine glasses by the stem.” She demonstrated, aware as she did so that her charm bracelet—hokey, Gordon had always said dismissively—was sliding down her wrist, drawing attention to itself. She resolutely ignored it. “To good first meetings, even if they come with sirens?”
Martin met her toast with a quiet clink from his own glass. “I think you would have brought the sirens no matter what.”
Chapter Eight: Tiffani
Talk about sirens: Martin asked if he could take her home with him that night. He said it almost shyly, as if he were asking her to dance.
She hated to inconvenience him when he’d been nothing but a perfect gentleman—the last thing she wanted was to make herself into a hassle—but she had to keep up at least a little routine.
“Could you come home with me instead? I’ve just been trying to get in half an hour of extra steno practice a night so it all becomes as automatic as I can get it. I know it’s not exactly the most alluring thing in the world to hop out of bed and start recording the lyrics to ‘Hey Jude’ or that night’s episode of Scandal, but...”
“Of course we can go to your place,” Martin said. “We can go anywhere you want.”
Tiffani wanted dessert, but not nearly as much as she wanted to get between the sheets with him right then. His eyes were as rich and sweet as anything the restaurant could have offered her anyway.
She led him to her place in their little procession of two cars. Being alone suddenly felt both strange and exciting—there was a real electric charge to being by herself when she knew she would soon be with someone else, someone who would give her his full attention.
She felt sensitive to everything around her: the smooth cool leather of the car interior, the scent of the little floral air freshener she had plugged into one of the A/C vents, the homey mess of the cupholder where she tended to deposit all her spare change.