Farm Fatale Read Online Free PDF Page B

back into the room.
        "Basher who?" asked Mark, pulling her down again. "Sounds pretty bloody dangerous to me."
        Seconds later, pinned against the floor, Rosie forgot the hairy orange carpet tiles and the danger of friction burn. "Thank God for 'Green-er Pastures.'" She giggled. "In every sense of the word."
    ***

    Samantha finished the single tahini-smeared cracker that constituted lunch, looked at the slender sliver of watch on her wrist, and permitted herself a rare wrinkle of the brow. Where were those wretched magazine people who were coming to photograph the house? She'd been up at the crack of dawn getting the place ready—well, Consuela had, anyway.
        She scrutinized her surroundings with a gimlet eye. Her impeccable sitting room was, she knew, the epitome of urban good taste; no less an authority than designer to the stars Basia Briggs had proclaimed it so. Although not until Samantha had paid her a sum Guy claimed equivalent to the gross national product of a small African country to redesign it.
        Samantha's husband, Guy, had not been impressed with the celebrity design guru's unique vision. "Looks like bloody Lenin's tomb," he complained, waving a tanned, manicured hand at the vast vase, more than a meter square, which Basia had placed in the center of a coffee table the size of a double bed.
        "Vase fascism," Samantha had hotly retorted, "is a central tenet of Basia's design philosophy. She wanted to challenge the fact that I filled the same vases in the same place with the same flowers every week."
        "And what the hell's that ?" Guy had raged at the next item to incur his displeasure, a beige object as big as a Labrador dominating the dining-room mantelpiece.
        "The fossil, you mean?" In her heart of hearts, Samantha wasn't entirely convinced that the colossal, curved ammonite Basia had placed in the spot formerly occupied by the candlesticks and the Staffordshire dogs was one of her more successful innovations. Not the least because Samantha was now obliged to tiptoe about the sitting room as too hasty or clumsy a step might cause the heavy object to fall off. The thought of watching four million years of evolution (not to mention several thousand pounds of hard cash) smash into the grate was too great a risk to run.
        "Lost a bit of one of your necklaces again?" Guy said next, producing what looked like a large piece of glass from under a cushion. Samantha snapped that it was a crystal, one of the many placed about the house by the shamanic-energy consultant Basia insisted she engage at a fee entirely separate from Basia's own. "Basia says it's all about balance," Samantha finished in as dignified a manner as she could manage.
        "Quite. Her bank balance," Guy said drily, hastily erecting a wall of newspaper between himself and Samantha as she continued her passionate defense of crystal therapy.
        "Can't you feel the difference?" she demanded. "I've slept better than I've done for bloody years."
        Guy lowered his paper again and stared directly at her undereye area, purple beneath its Touche Eclar concealer. "Darling, you're a terrible actress," he informed his fuming wife. "Considering you are an actress, that is."
        Guy, not one of the City's most ruthless financiers for nothing and as accurate at pinpointing vulnerability in people as in companies, had been quick to spot that Samantha was less than thrilled with some aspects of Basia's unique vision. Determined not to admit this was the case, however, Samantha had employed every trick in her professional book to conceal the truth.
        She had, for example, reacted with the utmost composure when Guy had homed straight in on the problem with the pared-down bathroom with its square Jade Jagger tub of thick Burgundian limestone. "Where the hell are the taps?" he had demanded.
        Samantha had simply pointed to the single verdigris tube, curved on its end like an