Marriage Material. Ally Blake

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СКАЧАТЬ And I’ve hit the point that I’m willing to let him do anything so long as his cholesterol comes down.’

      Romy set up her picnic on the small round table by the kitchen.

      ‘And did you get to meet that husband of hers?’

      ‘I did.’

      ‘And was he the stud the magazines say he is?’

      Her mind wandered to the image of him walking from office to lift. Throughout the day it had transformed into slow motion and sepia. Now her mother had unfortunately relocated that image to Sebastian walking through a stable, rake in hand, shining with sweat…She fought the urge to dislodge the looped vision from her mind with a sharp slap across the cheek.

      ‘Not that I witnessed first-hand.’

      Her mother paused and Romy hoped she did not pick up on the forced nonchalance in her voice. That was all she needed for her mother to get funny ideas in her head. Luckily her indifference seemed to fly.

      ‘Well, I guess that’s hardly something you could add to your résumé, dear, so no loss there.’

      ‘True. Is Dad there?’

      ‘He’s on the other phone, listening, dear.’

      Of course he was. ‘All’s well, Dad?’

      ‘Well as can be expected considering your mother won’t let me eat potato any more. Potato, I tell you!’

      ‘Imagine if you got on her bad side. You’d be left with bread and water.’

      ‘Bread! Ha! She made me cut out bread long before potato became the evil food of the month—’

      ‘Anyway,’ Romy’s mother cut him off, ‘we just wanted to say we saw you on TV, dear. The girls at poker will be most impressed. Goodnight, love.’

      ‘Goodnight, Mum. ’Night, Dad.’

      Romy hung up, appalled as the slow-motion, sepia, gorgeous-man-walking image was now replaced with the hazy image of Sebastian, the stud, dripping in hay and little else.

      No! She was not a woman willing to have her head turned by an enchanting smile. She was stronger than that, more focused, and with very specific plans for her future, and mooning over a man like him did not come into that equation.

      Romy was confident that like her parents she would never, ever marry unless she was sure it would be forever. Whereas this guy went through wives the way he went through baseball caps. Lucky he was Alan’s client, not hers, so it was unlikely she would run into him ever again.

      She felt very sorry for the next Mrs Sebastian Fox. Whoever she was.

      Sebastian walked into the kitchen early the next morning with his sister’s middle child Thomas slung squealing and twisting over his shoulder.

      ‘Put me down, Uncle Sebastian! You promised as soon as we got to the kitchen table!’

      ‘I promised once you finished my maths quiz. Come on, Thomas. Five times five is…’

      Thomas took a deep, uncertain breath. ‘Twenty-five?’

      ‘That’s my boy.’ Sebastian tickled his nephew until tears welled in his eyes.

      ‘Put him down, Sebastian, or I’ll never get him to school.’ Melinda mixed several eggs in the frying pan and slopped in some milk and cheese.

      ‘Yes, sis.’ Sebastian swung the boy from his shoulders and plopped him at the kitchen bench next to Chris and Delilah.

      ‘You should be cooking for me,’ Melinda said. ‘I have to get ready for work. What are you doing today?’

      ‘Don’t know.’

      ‘When are you going to get a real job, Uncle Sebastian?’ Thomas asked.

      Melinda grinned. ‘From the mouths of babes…’

      Sebastian ruffled his nephew’s hair, earning a squeal of torment for his efforts. ‘I do just fine, thank you very much.’

      ‘It’s not about doing fine. It’s about using your gifts for good.’

      He pushed Melinda aside with a bump of his hip and finished making the eggs for her. She set to getting the kids ready for school.

      ‘With my sponsorships and investments, I’m building a pretty meaty trust fund for your young tribe, sis, so I’m hardly using them for evil.’

      Melinda was unmoved. ‘You hardly use them at all. If not a job then a hobby other than babysitting or playing touch footy and marrying badly. You need a project. I can’t stand watching you atrophy before my eyes.’

      He chose to ignore Melinda’s barb. Though it had been playing on him all night. A project? Was that what he needed? He felt he was on the verge of something. As if he just needed a nudge and a truth would be revealed. He had no idea what it was but he felt invigorated, more than he had in years.

      Sebastian lifted his shirt to reveal a very healthy torso. ‘What do you reckon, kids? Still enough to keep me going for a few winters yet?’ He poked his tummy out as far as it would go and scored a giggle from his nephews.

      Melinda was about to hit him when Tom, senior, shouted out from the den. ‘That’s her!’

      ‘I’ve asked him a thousand times not to shout if he wants me, but to come and get me,’ Melinda said to Sebastian, her voice rising until it was more than a match for her husband’s. ‘He sets the kids such a bad example!’

      ‘It’s the lawyer!’ Tom shouted once more. ‘The one who took Sebastian to the cleaners yesterday.’

      That caught Sebastian’s attention. He pulled down his shirt and hotfooted it into the den, where he sat on the arm of Tom’s couch. It was a Press conference from the day before. Romy’s sea-blue suit jacket was buttoned up to the neck no less, but nothing bar a big woollen hat could hide that shock of magnificent hair.

      Tom whistled long and slow. ‘And boy, is she a babe!’

      And then some, Sebastian thought, feeling his breathing slow perceptibly at the sight of her. But now he saw the danger signs as they appeared. What he was feeling was precisely the pattern Romy had reiterated he had followed all his adult life. That for whatever reason, he fell into one set of female arms after another. So according to her theories his attraction to her would simply be because she was in the line of fire.

      ‘Who’s a babe?’ Melinda asked from the doorway.

      ‘You are, my love.’

      Tom grinned and patted his lap. Melinda rolled her eyes but followed his instructions and snuggled onto his lap anyway. Sebastian saw this interplay only from the corner of his eye as his gaze was focused on the tabloid TV show in front of him.

      ‘ That was your opposition lawyer,’ Melinda said. Then she too laughed. ‘I would have put money on the outcome to go her way. I’ll give it to Janet—despite her foibles, she is a clever, clever girl.’

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