Worlds Apart Read Online Free PDF Page A

wanted someone courteous—she always said please and thank you in a polite voice. Well, unless people were rude, and then she said it sarcastically.
    Someone flexible—she could wrap her legs around her neck if she was lying on the bed, and she could stand with her palms flat on the floor without bending her knees. Roo grinned. She knew that wasn’t what was meant, but now she’d seen Mr. Gorgeous, the thought of demonstrating her flexibility appealed.
    Someone with integrity. Well, she tried to be honest but sometimes it was better to tell fibs. Kindness above everything else because love comes before the truth. Not that she’d ever been in proper love. She thought she had. Lots of times. But if the guy didn’t love her back, then he wasn’t right for her and so she couldn’t have loved him. Any of them.
    Probably.
    Still hurt though.
    Concentrate.
    Someone not prone to panic. Yes, well, that could be a problem. The words Roo and panic went together like bread and Marmite. Not that she liked Marmite. Okay, going together like bread and butter was better, though butter was bad for you and she didn’t often eat it. Though she did like it and always picked it if there was a choice between that and some low-fat spread.
    Concentrate! What was I thinking about?
    Panic.
    Well, it didn’t take much to throw her into confusion. She’d been told by numerous teachers and…other people she didn’t want to think about ever again, that she had an overactive imagination. Roo wasn’t so sure about that. Wasn’t that the whole point of having an imagination? You want it to be overactive to make sure you don’t do anything dangerous. Surely she wasn’t the only one concerned about what would happen if an alien spaceship landed in your garden, or if vampires really existed, or if that big dog walking toward you was a werewolf. Play dead or run? Roo had decided she’d climb a tree.
    She snuggled deeper into the cushion. She was tired. The chicken costume weighed a ton and her feet ached. She’d had to walk from Ilkley station, down a gentle slope and then up the equivalent of Kilimanjaro before she reached Thorpe Lane. From there it was a hop, skip and a series of jumps over pot holes for at least another half a mile before she’d found the gates to Sutton Hall. It lay at the end of a long, rutted drive and was surrounded by woods. The place looked really old, a bit like the Munster’s House, come to think of it.
    Roo might as well have turned round at that point. There was no way she could get here every morning without getting up at the butt crack of dawn. A bus into Leeds and then a train to Ilkley—the cost would cripple her, let alone the time it would take, and then there was the long slog from the station. In any case, Roo had to face the fact that the chance of getting this job was miniscule. But she never gave up on anything without a fight.
    As Teddy Roosevelt said, “ Believe you can and you’re halfway there.”

Chapter Three
    When Roo opened her eyes, the room was empty. Where was everyone? She wiped her mouth to check for drool and sat up. Had she snored, said something embarrassing in her sleep or— Oh God —farted? Roo had no idea whether she did any of those, but she always worried she might, and one of them or all of them could be the reason no boyfriend had ever hung around.
    She stood and pulled at the hem of her skirt to straighten the material and drag down a few nonexistent inches. “ Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. ” Thanks, Teddy! Except if she tugged the skirt too far down, it showed a bare patch across her midriff. Oh damn.
    This was as far from her interview outfit as she could get, but then she’d imagined spending the day as a chicken and had dressed to stay cool. She ought to extract her shoes from the binding of the chicken feet, but it had taken so long to get the damn things to stay in place without them twisting backward every time she took a step, that Roo was