The Cinderella Reflex Read Online Free PDF Page A

lived alone and didn’t have the sort of friends who called unannounced, they had both the time and the opportunity to be together. Of course, she had known he was married from the beginning. She had noticed the photograph on his desk at their very first meeting, the day he’d interviewed her for the job. There was Richard, looking younger and more hopeful somehow than he did today, with his arm draped around a dark-haired voluptuous beauty – who, Helene later learned, was his wife Louisa – his eyes resting fondly on the two gawky teenagers who turned out to be his children.
    Why hadn’t she paid more attention to that photograph, she asked herself ruefully now, stirring a spoon aimlessly around in her coffee. If she’d taken heed of how besotted Richard looked in it she might have been forewarned about just what she was taking on when she’d agreed to go out with him. Because Richard’s offspring had turned out to be the most demanding teenagers in the history of adolescence. A collage of memories flooded through Helene’s mind.
    There had been the driving lessons Richard had to personally provide himself, because “Anna wants her daddy to teach her”, even though it must have taken a hundred lessons before his idiot daughter was finally able to put away her L-plate. There were the teenage discos Anna and David had to be escorted to and collected from every Saturday night for years. There had even been David’s “little drug problem” which had only involved the youngster smoking a bit of hash but which had been blown into a full-scale crisis by Louisa and ended up with the entire family strong-armed into co-dependency counselling. Oh, and what about the hysterics when Anna didn’t get enough points in her exams to study psychology? And the drama when David was caught driving over the limit?
    On and on it had gone – was still going on, actually – taking up Richard’s valuable time, time he was supposed to be spending with her , the only time they had together until the time was finally right for him to leave Louisa. So far Helene’s goal of becoming the new Mrs Armstrong – which Richard had agreed was a logical, if long-range one – had been continuously postponed because the time never seemed right for Richard to leave the “children”.
    The fact that the children were now of an age when most people were out busy building their own lives seemed to be lost on Richard, who was as endlessly besotted with Anna and David as ever. What surprised Helene most was that she had allowed all this to happen.
    She doodled idly now on her notebook, trying to figure it out. She liked to think of herself as possessing a sharp and analytical mind. She would not have survived the cutthroat nature of the business she was in otherwise. She thrived on competition and, frankly, the contest between herself and Louisa should have been over ages ago. And would have been, she reminded herself, if it hadn’t been for Anna and David.
    Through the years, whenever she’d had a horrible day – like today for instance when Ollie Andrews was being his usual despicable self, Andrea McAdams was preoccupied with one of her interminable domestic crises, and Tess Morgan was at her most irritating – Helene had always soothed herself with the thought that it wasn’t going to be forever. Richard would eventually make good on his promise, leave Louisa and marry her.
    There had been a few scary moments along the way, mind you, when Helene had been forced to question her beliefs. Like the time Louisa had gone in for a boob job, for instance. What had all that been about? Helene had lain awake at night at the time, worrying about it. But Louisa’s boobs, Richard had been quick to convince her, were irrelevant in a relationship that had been on the rocks for years.
    “She’s feeling her age because the kids are growing up and away,” he had explained fondly, as if he really liked his wife. “Louisa doesn’t have a career like you