CHAPTER TWO
Ten minutes later, they were seated in a private booth in a quiet restaurant. The place was nearly deserted since it was too late for lunch and too early for dinner. She seemed to relax.
“So,” she said after the waitress had ambled away, “I guess we’ve reached the introduction stage. My name’s Meg O’Rourke.”
“Meg,” he repeated, liking the way her name tasted in his mouth. “It’s nice to meet you, Meg.”
“What should I call you, other than my hero?” He shrugged, uncomfortable with the praise. He’d done what any man would do when confronted with a woman in tears. Well, okay, not exactly true. Probably most guys facing a crying woman would run like hell, stand there looking stupid, or go to the nearest roadside stand and buy her flowers.
Joe considered himself a step above the average guy when it came to how to treat women. Probably because his mama had threatened all five of her boys with a frying pan if she ever caught them being nasty to’da leedle girls—particularly their baby sister, affectionately dubbed the demon child of D’Angelo Street. “I’m Joe Santori.”
“Santori... There’s a great Italian restaurant called Santori’s not far from my neighborhood.”
He shrugged. “My parents own it.”
She gave him a genuinely delighted smile, the one he’d wanted to see earlier. It was every bit as brilliant and sunny as he’d imagined it would be. But even he couldn’t have predicted the tiny little dimple in her right cheek. That dimple grabbed the breath right out of his lungs and took a piece of his pounding heart right along with it.
Wow.
“I’ve only been there a few times, but it’s number one on my take-out list,” she continued. “The last time I was there...” She bit the corner of her lip, shaking her head as she primly crossed her hands on the table in front of her.
“What? What happened the last time?”
She countered with a question of her own. “Your mother, she runs the place, right? Is she a dark-haired woman who wears a huge pin made out of various kinds of dried pasta on the collar of her dress?”
Joe nodded warily, wondering what his infamous mother had done this time. “Uh-huh. What’d she do?”
Meg giggled. “She, uh, made me stand up straight, walked all around me, then told me it was God’s plan for me to have lots of babies and feed them the way nature intended.”
He groaned and sank down in his seat.
“I wasn’t offended. Believe me, I’ve heard it often enough from my mother and all her friends in the neighborhood.”
“I’m surprised she didn’t insist you meet one of her sons. There are six kids in my family—five of us male—and only one married. Unfortunately, I’m second in line, so I’m the one in her matchmaking crosshairs right now.”
Meg laughed, the sound deep and throaty. It wasn’t like her earlier girlish giggle. This laugh was full and rich, intoxicatingly feminine and mysterious. “Oh, she tried. Are you her boy Joey who owns dat’a construction comp’ny buildin’ the twenny story ’partment building for the millionaires?”
He shook his head. “It’s ten stories. And I’m just a contractor. Should I get up and leave now or would sinking under the table in total humiliation be sufficient?”
“I take it you’ve been embarrassed by her before?”
He shuddered. “You have no idea.”
“I might. My family’s the same way. My father fully expected me to come back to live under his roof after I finished college. When I insisted on my own apartment a few blocks away, he got all the young single cops at the local police precinct to check up on me every day. I think he was offering a dowry. Two goats and a bushel of corn maybe. He didn’t get any takers.”
Joe almost snorted. As if any man would need anything more than the woman herself.
“Some days I’m tempted to have a wild, public affair to shut them all up,” she muttered.
He raised a brow. “Oh? Any candidates in the picture?”
Say no. Say you’re single. Say you’re unattached and ready and I’ll give you the wildest, most public affair you’ve ever dreamed of.
“The only males I encounter on a daily basis are the seven-year-olds in my class, their mostly married fathers, and the hundred-and-fifty-year-old priest who runs St. Luke’s.”
“You teach?”
She nodded. “Second grade. And if you think it’s bad having your mother trying to set you up with women who come into your family restaurant, get a load of my life. The mother of one of my students informed me last week that all the boys in my class are suddenly falling and getting hurt because they want a get-better hug. It seems they’ve been discussing the softness of my pillows.”