Someone Like You Read Online Free PDF

her dungarees. Cool and very comfortable, they were ideal for travelling. ‘I was wearing this when you came in,’ Emma muttered, wishing she didn’t feel like a teenager being chastised for wearing PVC hot pants to dinner with the bishop.
    She was a thirty-one-year-old married woman, for God’s sake! She would not be bullied.
    ‘I thought you’d gone up to change,’ sighed her mother in martyred tones. ‘I’d prefer to travel looking respectable.
    I’ve read that people who dress up for travel are most likely to get upgraded,’ she added with a satisfied sniff at the thought of being escorted past the riffraff to a luxury bit of the plane worthy of the O’Briens of the poshest bit of Castleknock.
    ‘Well, you’d better go and put on another outfit, hadn’t you? Or we’ll be later,’ Jimmy said impatiently.
    Emma decided not to mention that their chances of being upgraded were non-existent because there was no first class on a charter flight. Her mother’s fantasies about an elegant lifestyle never had the slightest basis in reality, so what was the point?
    For a moment, she toyed with the idea of saying she wasn’t changing her outfit. But the sight of her father’s taut face made up her mind. As she’d learned during her twenty-eight years living under her father’s roof, he hated ‘butch’ clothes and women in trousers.
    ‘I’ll just be a moment,’ she said with false gaiety and ran back upstairs.
    In the bedroom, she got down on her knees and banged her head on the bed. Coward! You decided yesterday that your dungarees were perfect for travelling in. You should have said something!
    Still berating herself, Emma fished the little red book out from under her side of the bed and opened it on the affirmation page: ‘I am a positive person. I am a good person. My thoughts and feelings are worthwhile and valid.’
    Repeating those three phrases over and over again, Emma ripped off her dungarees and T-shirt and pulled on a cream knitted long skirt and tunic she sometimes wore to work in the summer when all her other clothes were in
    the wash.
    Today, all her decent summer clothes were in the suitcase at the bottom of the stairs. Bought on a hateful shopping trip with her mother, the cream knit suit made her look like an anaemic cafe latte come to life - tall, straight as a schoolboy and colourless.
    While the soft blues of her denim clothes made her pale blue eyes with the amber flecks stand out, creams and taupes reduced her face to monotones: pale skin, pale hair, pale bloody everything. She sighed; she felt so boring and colourless.
    She’d never been good with make-up and, anyway, lipstick only made her thin lips look even thinner. If only she’d had the courage to have a nose job, Emma thought.
    Long and too big for her face, it was hideous. Barry Manilow’s nose was practically retrousse beside hers. Wearing her fringe long was the only way to hide it. Her sister Kirsten had been blessed with the looks in their family.
    She was vibrant, sexy and a huge hit with the male of the species who loved her unusual sense of style and her joie de vivre. The only unusual thing about Emma was her voice, a low, husky growl that seemed at odds with her conservative, shy image. Pete always told her she could have worked in radio with a voice like that.
    ‘What you mean is that I sound like a bombshell so I’d be perfect for radio where people can’t see me and realize I’m not one,’ she’d tease him.
    ‘You’re a bombshell to me,’ he’d say lovingly.
    ‘Come on,’ roared her father from downstairs. ‘We’ll be late.’
    Emma closed her eyes for a brief moment. The idea of an entire week with her parents made her dizzy. She must have been mad to agree to go with them.
    She’d always wanted to go to Egypt and take a Nile cruise, longed to go since she’d first read about the dazzling Queen Nefertiti and the beauty of Karnak Temple as a child. But she’d dreamed of going with Pete, Emma