Courting Trouble Read Online Free PDF

of Oxford even more nail-gnawingly humiliating.
    ‘I believe the police report stated that a pretty eighteen-year-old woman, stark naked with a traffic cone on her head, had been arrested,’ Jack reminded me. ‘Her defence was that she was fresh out of the shower and had darted on to the secluded private balcony of her ground-floor student room to retrieve a drying towel . . . Only the towel had blown away. Then the balcony door slammed and locked behind her. When banging and yelling didn’t rouse her fellow students, she feared hypothermia and so scaled the small brick wall and grabbed the nearest cover, which just happened to be a rubber, cone-shaped roadside bollard, which she put on her head to hide her identity before darting down the lane and around to the front of the building to frantically ring the bell . . . It was then that the traffic cone slipped down and she found herself wedged in the “Keep Left” sign and then got lost.’
    I busied myself packing up another box of my possessions so that he couldn’t see my discomfort. Of all the people to bump into naked with a traffic cone on your head, the fickle Fate Fairy would make sure it was Jack Cassidy, wouldn’t she? Although Jack did manage to convince a suspicious policeman that he should not arrest me for indecency . . . but simply hold my coned head while Jack wrapped me in his jacket, before tugging at my bare legs to set me free. I was so discombobulated with gratitude that I accepted his invitation to dinner – an experience which proved so deliciously, decadently, erotically pleasant that, three weeks and ten dates later, I gave him my briefs – the lacy, not the legal, kind. Over the next month we basically became human origami – well, orgasmic origami, really.
    I was well and truly in love by the time I found out that he’d had three wives already. None of them his own. Turns out Jack Cassidy had bedded one female professor on campus and the wives of two others.
    ‘In retrospect, knowing the exact location of all officers of the law within the immediate vicinity is obviously the minimum precaution one should take before exposing one’s genitalia to the elements,’ I said to him now, in my crispest tones. ‘And I thank you for assisting me. But there’s been a lot of sewage under the bridge since then. So, did you come here for any purpose other than to gloat?’
    ‘Well, from what I hear on the grapevine . . . the sour-grape vine . . . your husband has absconded with all your money and your college rival, Petronella Willets, who, unlike you, is in great demand at the Bar. Not only has she not been sacked from her Chambers but it’s rumoured she’s about to get Silk.’
    ‘Being an unmitigated failure is not as easy as it looks, you know.’
    ‘Is it true? About your husband?’
    I felt a sharp pang of embarrassment that word of my marital humiliation had travelled so fast. ‘Let’s just say Stephen flunked the practical exam for his marriage licence,’ I replied glibly.
    ‘What a bloody idiot . . . Anyway, I just thought you could do with some help.’
    ‘I’m fine.’
    ‘Fine? Really? Remember, you don’t have a traffic cone on your head right now, Matilda. I can see your face, you know.’
    My cheeks were now blazing red, two expressionist splotches of colour. ‘Okay, I admit it. Things are a little fraught . . .’
    ‘In the circumstances, “fraught” reminds me of that British chap who was asked what the Second World War was like and said: “My dear, the
noise.
And the
people
.’”
    ‘All right already. “Fraught” may be an understatement. Sadly, no one at present seems to find offering me a full-time job absolutely necessary. But something will turn up.’
    ‘Yes. Me. That’s what I came here to tell you. I could smooth the way for you to join my Chambers.’
    ‘Regal Helm Chambers? Don’t be ridiculous. I could never afford the rent.’
    ‘I could pay your rent until you established yourself. For the