A Brighter Spark (Xcite Romance) Read Online Free PDF

turned out to be two babies, and, well …’ She shrugged. ‘Here we all are.’
    ‘I wish I had that kind of relationship with my ex-wife. You’re very lucky,’ Daniel said.
    ‘Yeah,’ Suzy agreed, smiling. ‘I guess I am.’
    She was surprised by how much she genuinely enjoyed the experience of going a proper grown-up date to an art gallery, then out to dinner at a restaurant (she suspected, however, that actual grown-ups probably didn’t use the term “grown-up”; they probably said “sophisticated” or something like that). It was very different from standing at a bar or a nightclub table and having a quick drink with someone before an equally quick and mostly anonymous bout of sex, barely two dozen words exchanged between them through the entire proceedings.
    They had proper honest-to-God champagne, not just the sparkling wine that Suzy had always thought was a near-exact substitute for the real stuff. The waiter brought the bottle out and poured a tiny amount for Daniel to test, to ensure it met his standards, and Daniel sampled the champagne and gave the waiter a decisive nod. Being trusted with a responsibility like that looked perfectly natural when he did it, as if there was nothing daunting or disheartening about assuming the mantle of adulthood.
    The bubbles in the champagne made Suzy feel as if she was fizzing too. Happiness was like a golden froth inside her, welling up in her heart and making her smile a permanent fixture on her lips as they ate and chatted and told each other small, amusing stories from their lives.
    ‘When I was younger, I used to have an addiction to terrible fashion magazines,’ Suzy admitted. ‘Everyone always told me what trash they were and how I shouldn’t read them, and I always protested that they were harmless fun and nothing to worry about. I mean, of course they’re toxic and stupid and all those things, but I always figured, what’s the harm?
    ‘But when my kids were still toddlers, I found Lily looking at one of the issues one day. She couldn’t read yet, so it would have just been a pretty picture book as far as she was concerned, but I was shocked at how strongly I felt my reaction to seeing her with it.
    ‘I thought about all the awful messages those things are packed with, about plastic surgery and liposuction and Botox… Did you know “Botox” is short for “ botulism toxin ”? You’re literally giving your face food poisoning on purpose so it gets swollen up and you can’t see the wrinkles any more. What’s “beautiful” about deliberately poisoning your face until it’s paralysed?’ Suzy shook her head, still repulsed by the memory of the things she’d once brushed off so blithely as harmless. ‘And the less extreme stuff, the diets and the expensive fashions and the celebrity gossip, that’s just a different kind of poison, really, isn’t it? I didn’t … The thought of my little girl absorbing all that, of growing up believing that her worth was tied up with how expensive her dresses were or how thin her arms were or what shape her cheekbones were, that thought was horrible .
    ‘Have you ever noticed how every single celebrity fashion profile in those magazines always says that the celebrity looks “effortlessly beautiful”? What’s effortless about it? They use that word endlessly, constantly. They use it so much that it would lose any meaning it had to begin with, but that’s the thing, I don’t think it had any meaning at all even at the start. Because if any of those magazines believed even for a second that beauty is ever “effortless”, then they wouldn’t be able to push all these injections and surgeries and treatments and fads and fashions and diets and cosmetics, would they? They want you to expend every ounce of effort you’ve got on it. And yet “effortless” is their favourite word!’
    Suzy paused in her rant, shaking her head as she laughed a little at herself. ‘Sorry, I didn’t realise I still felt