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pizza in weeks.’
    ‘Now, that’s one number Xenia doesn’t have. She never ate anything bigger than an oyster with her hands.’ Zoe began to dial. ‘Fortunately, I have the number memorised. Pepperoni?’
    ‘With mushrooms. And it’s on me, so get an extra large.’
    ‘If it’s on you, I’ll get two.’ She dialled and ordered and put down the phone, realising she was resigned to spending the night with Nick in the apartment.
    Well, if it was inevitable she might as well enjoy it.
    Just not too much.
     
    Nick swirled the dark red liquid around his glass thoughtfully. ‘This is good wine, huh?’
    ‘Too good to go with pizza, most likely.’ Zoe took a swig from her glass and then took the last slice of pizza from the box without asking him.
    She ate more than just about any woman he’d ever known, and she didn’t preface every bite with worries about calories or vows to go on a diet the next day. She just ate it, with appreciation.
    He’d grown up with two women, his mother and his sister, and he’d always been amused by the way they and most of the other women he knew treated food, as if it were their best friend and their worst enemy at once.
    Zoe wasn’t like that. For her, food was food, and if it tasted good, she liked it. She was like a guy that way. It was refreshing.
    He took another sip of the wine Zoe had chosen from her great-aunt’s extensive collection. It was dark and delicious, and it probably was fantastically expensive. Everything else in this apartment seemed to be. Even the chain-saw in the glass case next to the couch they sat on was a top model.
    Working on and around Mount Desert Island, Maine’s summer resort for the wealthy, Nick had met plenty of rich people. Zoe didn’t fit that stereotype, either. It wasn’t just because her clothes weren’t fashionable; she was too down-to-earth for the rich type. Right now, for example, she was curled up on the end of the couch with her sock-clad feet on the cushion, licking pepperoni oil off her fingers.
    Of course, just because her great-aunt was wealthy didn’t mean Zoe had to be. She could’ve come from the poor side of the family.
    ‘Where did your great-aunt get her money from?’ he asked. In some company, it could be a rude question, but even from his short acquaintance with Zoe he knew she’d tell him to shut up if she didn’t feel like answering. He found that refreshing, too.
    She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Nobody does.’
    Nick raised his eyebrows. ‘Nobody?’
    ‘Well, she did, obviously, but I don’t know anybody else who did. She didn’t inherit it from a relative, because all of my ancestors were strictly middle-class. My parents used to speculate all the time. I think they were split between her inheriting it from an aristocratic lover, or her running a successful cathouse on the side.’
    ‘A mistress or a madam?’
    ‘My parents are often unnecessarily judgemental, they have very little imagination, and they have a hard time understanding life beyond their particular New Jersey suburb.’ She folded up the remainder of the pizza slice and bit it in half. ‘Personally I think it was something much more interesting.’
    For the first time, she seemed to notice he had nothing left to eat, and she held out the folded-up pizza to him, a moon-shaped bite taken out of the end. ‘Are you still hungry? Do you want any of this?’
    Nick smiled. That was another thing that was refreshing about her—once she’d stopped trying to kick him out, she treated him as if she’d known him for years. ‘No, thanks. What do you think she did?’
    ‘Mostly, anything she wanted. I don’t know how she got her money, but it must have been by some adventure or other. Xenia never stayed still for a minute.’
    He heard pride in her voice instead of sadness. Good girl. She’d done well, too, when the guy from the funeral parlour had turned up just after the pizza-delivery man. For a minute she’d looked so sad, confronted by his