Married By Christmas Read Online Free PDF Page A

said.
    ‘Thank you.’ Liv had hugged her. ‘But you still can’t talk to me about you sex life. And that’s final.’
    And so Anna had gone on a journey of discovery with Tom without the aid of her best friend’s opinion, on which she usually relied on so heavily, even secretly making a list of sex things that she liked, and sex things that she thought Tom might like and doing her best to check them off every time they made love. Had the honeymoon period been too short, had Tom lost interest in her already? Had she lost interest in him? After all, if it wasn’t for his strangeness recently she would have been perfectly happy to curl up with her head on his chest and drift off to sleep and not mind at all that they hadn’t done anything on either of her lists in more than two weeks. Perhaps, Anna found herself wondering ever so quietly, almost in secret from herself, marrying a man with whom the fires of passion had already died out could be considered, in some quarters, a mistake, but she quickly hushed that particular thought and filed it away mentally in her secret but overstuffed drawer labelled ‘Now You Are Just Being Insane’.
    Things that had been going so well, and so right, couldn’t just suddenly go so wrong. Could they?
    ‘What’s up Tom?’ Anna asked him quietly, after several seconds of silence during which they both pretended to watch TV.
    ‘Up?’ Tom asked vaguely.
    ‘Today at the Manor, you seemed really uncomfortable. Have you got cold feet? If you tell me now that you’ve got cold feet, then perhaps I will need only ten years of therapy, prescription drugs and alcohol abuse to recover.’
    ‘Me?’ Tom hugged her a little closer. ‘Why would I have got cold feet? I’m marrying you, the singularly most perfect woman I have ever encountered in my life. The only woman in the world who irons her PJs before getting into bed and, most importantly of all, the woman that I love.’ He kissed the top of her head reassuringly, but Anna noticed the forefinger of his left hand tapping insistently under the covers.
    ‘Look,’ she said, sitting up away from him and pushing her mass of hair off her face. ‘If you’ve changed your mind about marrying me, I completely understand. I am a terrible pain the arse. I know that. And you, you are a catch, Tom. Six foot two, with that body and those arms, and that chest … You’ve got a good job, you’re kind and funny. You could marry any girl you wanted. So if you’ve changed your mind about me, even though it will kill me, and I will never recover and will live the rest of my life utterly heartbroken parading around in my spectacularly expensive wedding dress, which by the way cannot be returned as it’s already had one set of alterations, like some modern day Miss Havisham until I eventually wither away and die, I
will
understand.’
    Finally, Tom looked at her and the expression that Anna saw there didn’t do anything to reassure her. It was one of uncertainty and something else, something she couldn’t quite pin down. ‘I still want to marry you, Anna, nothing’s changed, I
promise
you.’ He clicked off the TV, leaving the room in soothing darkness. ‘Now come on, come here and give me a cuddle. I’ve got a six a.m. start in the morning and I need to get some sleep.’
    But something had changed, Anna thought anxiously, as she lay awake staring into the dark, as Tom’s breathing eventually relaxed and evened out. Tom had changed and for the life of her Anna couldn’t work out why.

Chapter Two
    ‘Which is why we need to follow him,’ Anna told Liv the next morning, with some urgency.
    ‘I beg your pardon?’ Liv stared wide-eyed at her best friend. She was holding a colander rather defensively, Anna noticed, as if she might feel the need to whack her near-hysterical friend over the head with it. ‘Anna, what on earth are you talking about?’
    They were standing in the exquisitely appointed basement kitchen of an oligarch-owned