Perfect Blend: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

real sexual chemistry between them and that they were destined to become friends rather than lovers.
    Amy’s thoughts returned to Maddy. “You know, Bri, you can’t go on like this. You’ve dumped four women in as many months. Each time it’s the same story. One minute you’re telling the world you’ve found the love of your life; the next you’re ending it because she has a mole or big nostrils.”
    “I know,” Brian said, clearly exasperated by his own behavior. “You think I don’t get it? I mean, it’s not like I’m exactly God’s gift.” He ran his hand over what had lately become a noticeable gut.
    “Oh, behave,” Amy chided gently. “You are a great-looking bloke. You just need to lay off the pain au chocolat and spend some money on yourself, that’s all.”
    At that point they both joined in with what had become a familiar chorus: “All my money goes back into the business.”
    If Brian found it hard to understand what women saw in him, Amy didn’t. Despite plumping up ever so slightly, he could still pass for a decade younger than his thirty-six years. His round fresh face, brown puppy dog eyes, and hamster nest hair made him appear boyish and vulnerable. There was a certain type of woman who loved to mother him.
    Brian adored being adored. He made no secret of it. These days he was in therapy, and he had come to understand that his neediness was tied up with his parents’ deaths. They had been killed in a car crash when he was thirteen. Brian’s father had been driving them to their accountant’s office in Greenwich. They had been called in for urgent talks about their printing business, which was about to go bust. Friends and relatives suggested that they committed suicide, but the police reports ruled that out. Their deaths had been an accident. Brian received a decent insurance payout but no inheritance.
    He admitted to Amy that his parents’ screwing up their business and failing to provide for him had left him angry but determined to succeed.
    Amy suspected that it was the loss of his mother that had affected him the most. Even though he was now a grown man, in some ways he was still a boy looking for his lost mother. It occurred to Amy that this might be one of the reasons his sartorial choices hadn’t changed as he’d gotten older and he still dressed like a grungy teenager. Today, for example, he was wearing his usual uniform of low-slung jeans, tatty Converse with fluorescent green laces, and a zip-up hoodie over a Vandelay Industries T-shirt. Years after the series had ended, Brian remained a Seinfeld nut and had all the shows on DVD. One of a handful of people in Britain who had taken to the series, he had spent the whole of 1997 tagging “giddy-up” to the end of his sentences and perfecting Kramer’s style, skidding to a stop at room entrances and demonstrating his moves to his baffled friends.
    Some women loved Brian’s style. Lucy—two girlfriends ago (continuous eyebrow)—confessed how much she loved smelling Brian’s hair and running her fingers through it. In Amy’s opinion—not that she had shared it with Brian for fear of upsetting him—his sweet-scented thicket needed thinning and layering by somebody other than Jack Dash of Tooting Broadway (police informant slash coiffeur), who charged clients a tenner for a cut and finish. When she looked at Brian’s locks, it was clear that Jack always got called away on police informant business before actually finishing his hair.
    Having unpacked and arranged all the pastries on platters, Amy began slicing one of the lemon drizzle cakes. She swallowed as her taste buds responded to the citrus aroma. At the other end of the counter, Brian had just picked up another coffee-making apparatus: the tamper. This was a metal disk with a red-painted handle. Amy watched him press down on the coffee in the portafilter. Thirty pounds was the requisite pressure. He had practiced this maneuver so many times that she would have put