The Birds and the Bees Read Online Free PDF Page A

what I’m going to do.’
    ‘Go on then,’ said Catherine, sitting comfortably.
    ‘I’ve got six days left until Matthew comes back. So at lunchtime tomorrow I’m having my hair done.’
    ‘Right,’ Catherine nodded. ‘Good girl. Make yourself feel better.’
    ‘Then I’m going to join the gym to get some weight off.’ Stevie beamed at Catherine waiting for her approval.
    ‘Well, that’s great,’ said her friend, trying her best to smile encouragingly. ‘But…’
    ‘But what?’ Stevie’s smile slipped a little.
    Catherine sighed. With the best will in the world, Stevie wasn’t going to get down to a size zero and look like a Supermodel in six days. Even if she did, that wasn’t going to bring Matthew back to her. There were darker forces at work here, forces for which a hair-do fairy was no match.
    Then again, it wouldn’t do Stevie any harm to go to a gym and see some nice fit males with bulging biceps and trim bums. Surely that was better than sitting in and thinking about what those cheating scumbags were doing. Shehoped their duplicity would catch up with them; after all, a sneaky week away on holiday was not the best way to cement a new relationship, if that’s what it was and not a one-off fling. Matthew had a conscience, and Jo surely would be thinking of what the mad Scot would do if he found out. That was bound to get in the way of the enjoyment of their sun and sangria, and any other ‘s’s’ they were participating in with abandon.
    Catherine smiled. ‘But nothing. In fact, I’ll come with you for the first session if you like, for moral support. They’re always giving out free day passes, aren’t they, these gyms, trying to get you to join up? You can blag me one.’
    ‘Oh Catherine, that would be fab,’ said Stevie, her smile lit up with gratitude.
    ‘Which gym?’
    ‘Well, Matthew goes to the Gym Village one, so maybe I’d be better going to the other–Well Life.’
    ‘Ooh, posh and expensive–go and do it immediately. Ring up and find out how you join before I go home.’ Catherine slid the cordless phone over the table.
    So, Stevie started the three-point plan that would totally absorb her over the next six days and get her man back for her.
1) have great new-image hairdo
2) join gym and start to get thinner
3) practise pretending to have suspected nothing about his affair
    Easy.

Chapter 5
    Listening to the gently shushing waves, savouring the scent of sun oil that smelt of coconuts, and lying next to a long, leggy woman with a Supermodel-type body nearly covered by a white bikini with a sexy little rhinestone clasp between the twin swells of her small but perfect breasts, Matthew waited for the guilt to kick in. A stray thought visited plump, ordinary little Stevie at home. She would be sitting at her computer, writing love stories for the lonely and rejected, blissfully unaware that she was about to join them in exactly five days’ time. It made him feel guilty only for not feeling guilty.
    He really had not meant for this to happen at all. He had been content enough with Stevie and sliding himself gradually into the role of dad for Danny, until he had found Jo MacLean, one of the new designers, crying by his black Punto in the company car park the day after Valentine’s Day. He had only seen her a couple of times before but, Jo MacLean, with her big brown eyes and her long, dark hair and her even longer legs, was someone once spotted, never forgotten. They had spoken once, after a meeting in late January. A few of them had hung around the buffet tabledrinking the last of the coffee. He’d found himself puffing up in front of her, trying to impress, implying things . Then a fortnight later, there he was, offering her his handkerchief in the cold and the rain and asking if she wanted a coffee in the little café around the corner from work. There she had spilled out her life to him–a relative stranger–so desperate was she for consolation. She had told him how she