I gave up struggling, rolled onto the bed, and settled more comfortably against him, folding my arms on his duvet-covered chest, leaning my chin on top of them. “Fine, I’m going to ask, because you’ve goaded me into it, because you said we’d talk this morning and because Richard said–”
“I don’t give a flying fuck what that asshat said,” he snapped.
“Anyone else would be pleased that I talked about them when I was on a date with another man.”
“KT, if you mention him again, I’m not going to be responsible for my actions.”
“Why are you being all possessive? It’s not like we’re in a relationship or anything.” I ignored his warning growl. Perversely, I was starting to enjoy this conversation. “We’re not even dating.”
A frown creased his brow. “We’ve been on dates.”
“No, we haven’t. You’ve played watchdog when I’ve been on dates, but that’s not the same as taking me on a date.”
He thought back. His eyes widened and a smug smile crossed his face. “We went on a speed date.”
“We bitched about the other people there and you picked up the Barbie doll.”
“I drove you there, bought you a couple of drinks, and drove you back. That’s a date.” I gave him a look that showed exactly how underwhelmed I was with his idea of a date. “Fine. I was your date at the wedding.”
“Technically, you were Mum’s guest.” Thanks to Anne the bitch, who didn’t want to upset the numbers, “and, well, you know, it’s not as if you’ll need a plus one, Kate”.
“We live together.”
“You’re grasping at straws now. You’re my lodger.”
“I don’t pay rent, and” – he played his trump card – “I’m sleeping in your bed.”
“Payment in kind,” I countered. His eyes sparkled. He was clearly enjoying that idea. “Don’t get too excited. I meant you do DIY.”
“Way to ruin a fantasy.”
“Hmm.” I smiled. We hadn’t resolved our argument last night, but it was like I was seeing things through new eyes after talking with Richard. A load had been lifted off my chest and my heart felt light and hopeful. “You were getting a little too into the idea of payment in kind.”
“I don’t want you going out with other men, KT,” he said quietly, but the emotion behind his words struck hard.
My stomach dipped and my heart stuttered. This was what I’d been waiting for. I licked suddenly dry lips. “Then why didn’t you say something earlier? Why make me go out on all those dates in the first place? You knew I didn’t want to.”
He shook his head. “I did say something earlier.”
“No, you didn’t.”
He stroked my hair back, hooking it behind my ear, so he could look into my eyes. “Yes, I did.”
“What? When?”
“When we were at Ottomans, you described your ideal man – tall, dark, and handsome, intelligent, solvent. I did everything but dance around the room shouting, ‘Me, pick me!’ Hell, I pointed at myself and nudged you with my foot under the table.”
“I thought you needed more legroom.”
He rolled his eyes. “After I spilt with Barbie, when you were looking at the lonely-hearts column, I suggested we date each other.”
“You’d just been dumped. It was a joke.” He stared me down. “A rebound thing?” He shook his head. “You weren’t serious.”
“As the plague, KT.” Why hadn’t I picked up on that? “I was serious. I am serious, about you.”
“Then you should’ve been more obvious. How was I to know?”
He dropped his head back against the pillow, staring up at the ceiling. “I described an ideal man for you, using myself as the template. I flexed my muscles and nearly froze to death walking around this place wet, with hardly any clothes on, so you could cop a look and hopefully a feel.”
I licked my lips. “You look good without any clothes on.”
He smiled, looking down at me. “I knew you liked it.” He paused. “I might even have said, ‘What about me?’ at one point. How much more obvious could I have been?”
“Your tone must have been wrong.”
“My tone?”
“Yes. It’s like you told me about, how when a woman says ‘maybe’ with a ‘no’ tone, it doesn’t work on a man. Saying, ‘What about me?’ in a jokey I am way out of your league tone doesn’t–”
“I didn’t say it in a–”
“Did too.”
“I did not. This is pointless. So, listen carefully. Shit.” He ran a hair through his hair, looking nervous. “I hoped I’d be able to wait until later along the line to say this. Like when we were in bed, after a really athletic round of sex, as you were drifting off to sleep.” He sucked in a deep breath then said in a rush of exhaled air, “I’m in love with you, KT.” He watched me. I stared back. “I’m saying this now, in an ‘I mean this’ tone: I do not want you going out with other men.”
“Are you saying you want to be my boyfriend?” I wiggled against him.
“Yes.”
I ignored his frustrated tone. “Are you sure? I mean, you were going out with Barbie five minutes ago.”
“It was weeks ago. I’ve not been going out with her for longer than I went out with her. Besides, she was just camouflage.”
“Trying to make me jealous?”
“It worked, or you wouldn’t have spent the whole time calling her Malibu Stacey or Cindy.” I shrugged. He sighed. “Barbie dumped me because I was hung up on you.”
“Poor baby, my heart bleeds for you.” I patted him on the chest before turning to roll off the bed. “Look, I’d love to sit around here all day and bicker about your ex and who said what in which tone” – not – “but I don’t have time. I have to go–”
Mark let his head thump back against the pillow, an expression of pain on his face. “This is unusually cruel even for you, KT.”
I paused, looking back at him over my shoulder from my perch on the edge of the bed. “Why didn’t you just say something from the start?”
“You were too wrapped up in hating me from when we were kids. Plus, you hadn’t been out with anyone for a while. I wanted to give you a chance to see who was out there to get to know me all grown up.” He winked and flexed his arm muscles. “And realise how good we’d be together.”
“And…?” I was missing something here.
“Fine. And I thought it was funny. When your mum first started with the idea and you were all pissed off. It was funny.”
I knew it! “You’d didn’t think it was so funny last night.”
“It stopped being funny around the time you locked lips with Stalker John. You didn’t have to kiss every fucking frog you met,” he snapped, with a mocking emphasis on the word frog. I knew he hadn’t liked that. It served him right. I hadn’t enjoyed it either. That would teach him to support my mother over me.
“I love you, Kate Turner.” He didn’t shy away from the words, holding eye contact. “I think it is time you stopped messing around and agreed to go out with me.”
“Are you asking me to be your girlfriend?”
“This is the bit in those women’s books you read where you’re supposed to say you love me too and throw yourself into my arms for wild sex.”
He was starting to look a bit less cocky. I couldn’t believe it. He really loved me. He really cared about whether I felt the same way.
“I know it’s been a while for you. If you’re having trouble coming to grips with the whole boyfriend and girlfriend concept, I’m willing to give you a little time, work with you. I know how much you love your role play. How about we act it out for a few hours, until you get used to the idea?”
I settled back down, unable to hold back my smile.
Mark. Loved. Me! “Shall I tell you what I spoke about with Richard last night?”
“No,” he snarled.
I ran my thumb over his bottom lip, wiping away the tension. “He might have been Mr Perfect.” He growled against
my thumb. “But you’re my Mr Right.”
He twisted his mouth away, giving me his bristly cheek. “Nuh-uh. Not until you say the words.”
“I did.”
“No, you said I was Mr Right.” He looked worried and hopeful, and I gave in. It wasn’t like he hadn’t said it first.
It was just… “Who’s going to tell my mother?”
“KT!” He flipped, pinning me under a heap of duvet and his body.
I fought to free my face from the suffocating material. “She’s going to gloat. It’ll be unbearable.”
“I’ll tell her. You don’t even have to be there. I don’t think she believed that shit about just watching TV anyway.” He waited, staring down at me, then huffed out a sound of frustration and disappointment. “You’re not going to say it, are you?”
“I love you, Mark.”
I squealed as he ripped the duvet from between us and started shedding our clothes.
“We have to be quick. I have an audition to be lead singer with that country band in a couple of hours.”
THE END
Read on for an excerpt of the second standalone book in the London Loving series:
The Meri Scott Show
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The Meri Scott Show
Chapter 1
Boyfriend: It’s Time To Celebrate!
I bounced off the hallway walls, clasping my three National Television Award gongs to my chest. I, Meri Scott, was the Most Popular TV Presenter, of the Most Popular Daytime Talk Show, and the Most Popular Factual Programme, as voted by the great British public. The rest of my team was still getting drunk at the after-party.
Usually, Tom, my boyfriend, and I would be the last to leave, working the room and celebrating in style, but he had an important audition for the lead role in a romcom tomorrow, so he’d stayed home tonight to rehearse and get an early night. I’d snuck out of the party early and almost sober, to get home and have a private party with him.
The bonus: I was still sober enough that I’d look good in the after-party photos with my three gongs—three!—in tomorrow’s newspapers. Three glasses of champagne on an empty stomach and I felt like I was floating like a butterfly, whilst stumbling around like a fool, but I was a winner. After years of building my career, I’d finally made it to the top of my industry.
I couldn’t wait to share it with Tom.
He’d be so proud. He and my mother were my biggest supporters. They’d been with me since I got my first audition for The Meri Scott Show; hell, Mum was there when I was thirteen and got my first break in an advert for cheese strings; Tom since I was a twenty-one-year-old disc jockey in a small mining town in the Welsh Valleys.
The champagne numbness spread to my arms. I struggled to hold my awards and get the key into the front-door lock. Tom and I had moved to London together when I got my big break. My mother had followed shortly after, moving into a flat just down the road. They’d celebrated every success with me. Now I’d officially made it, big time.
The door finally swung open, and I tripped inside, trying not to giggle. It was only eleven, but the lights were out and the flat was quiet. Tom must’ve already gone to bed. He wouldn’t expect me back before three or four in the morning, and with his audition tomorrow, he hadn’t waited up. Kicking off my four-inch heels, I dumped my purse and keys on the hall table. Cuddling my NTAs to my chest, I headed down the hall, working the zipper under the arm of my dress. Maybe I’d wake him up and give him a little evening delight. After all, his girlfriend was the Most Popular person in town, and tonight I was all his.
I slid the clips out of my mink-black hair and gave it a quick fluff, going for the sexy, tumbled look. Clutching the front of my violet Victoria Beckham dress with one hand, I checked myself out in the hall mirror, tugging the bodice down, tucking the edge under my armpit, making sure I exposed at least some of my minimal cleavage.
Then I leant seductively against the bedroom doorframe, one arm raised above my head, hitched a hip and struck a pose. Hmm, maybe I should have kept my Choos on. Tom had a bit of a shoe kink. I could nip back down the hall to get them… but my feet were sore.
No.
So long as I got naked, and on my knees, quickly enough, he wouldn’t have time to care about the shoes. Easing the door open with a toe, I aimed my best slutty-vamp look at the bed.
The door needed oiling; it squealed as I pushed it open. A confusing cacophony of sound and images blindsided me. I struggled to make sense of it. Tom’s firm white backside flexed and lunged, his knees spread and braced on the mattress. A pair of skinny San-Tropezed thighs were wrapped around his narrow hips, ankles locked, killer red heels pointing in my direction.
It wasn’t the door hinges squealing and groaning. Tom leant over a woman, one hand clutching her hip, the other holding her wrists above her head. Not that I could see him doing it from my vantage point, but I knew anyway. This was our—his—favourite position. He lowered his head over her breast, noisily suckling. The woman beneath him writhed and groaned.
I should say something, or do something and let him know I’d caught him in the act, but I was frozen, unable to look away as the pace picked up. Tom’s lunging became less coordinated. He started swearing and grunting. Her squeals increased in pitch and frequency.
“Fuck me! Yes! Dig your heels in. Right there.”
“Oh, God. Tom!” No! I knew that lilting feminine voice. “So good!”
Bile surged up my throat. My stomach pitched. “M-Mum?”
Tom stiffened and jerked. “Ungh!”
“Meri?” My mother peered at me over his shoulder, her expressionless medically preserved face, flushed and sheened with sweat, eyes wide with horror.
“Fuuuck…” It was too late for Tom. He’d reached the point of no return and shot his load into my mother with a loud groan and a rigor-like stare fixed on me over his shoulder.
* * * * *
“Meri, darling. Listen.” Talith, my mother, rushed into the living room. I moved across the room, struggling with trembling fingers, to pull up the zipper at my side. “We didn’t mean to hurt you.”
I couldn’t believe this was happening. My heart pounded, my whole body trembled and the blanket of shock that had covered my emotions started to fray, leaving me feeling disoriented.
Talith reached to grab my hand. Skin crawling at the idea of her touch, I spun away.
It wasn’t happening.
It couldn’t be happening.
“We didn’t think you’d be back so soon.”
It wasn’t happening.
It… Was… Not… Happening.
“It’s only just after eleven. You’re usually out much later.”
My heart pounded painfully in my chest, my mind throwing up images of Tom staring at me as he came inside my mother. Tom had always said my mother’s “cougar-ing” was slutish and embarrassing and she should date someone her own age. Clearly, he’d had a change of opinion.
“Meri, Talith is telling the truth. We didn’t mean to hurt you…” At the sound of Tom’s voice, the final threads of shock and disbelief frayed, anger burning through.
This was happening. It wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t a joke or an episode of my chat show.
It was my life.
This was real.
I’d just caught my boyfriend having sex. With. My. Mother.
“It didn’t mean anything,” Tom added.
I couldn’t form words.
It didn’t mean anything.
If sleeping with my mother didn’t mean anything to him, or to my mother, I must mean less than nothing to both of them.
Why would they risk everything for nothing?
“I just… I just… I need
ed someone. You never have time for me anymore.” I didn’t care that he looked like Chris Pratt’s younger, hotter brother. I couldn’t bear to look at him; his tousled blond hair and godlike body suddenly turned my stomach.
I should have known what was going on. I should have at least suspected something. It wasn’t like I didn’t know the signs. I heard about it nearly every day at work, but… Jesus. These things didn’t happen to people like me—I was the Most Popular TV Presenter—it happened to people with low self-esteem and broken families, the kind of people I had on my chat show.
In fact, I’d done an episode on this: “My Husband Is Sleeping with My Mother”. Only Tom wasn’t my husband. He was my partner of seven years. We weren’t married. He didn’t want to conform to society’s patriarchal repression of women—marriage—and tie me up in bondage.
I wouldn’t have minded a little bondage of the matrimonial kind.
So, why wasn’t I screaming and shouting and caving his head in with the stone Buddha we’d picked up on our fourth anniversary trip to India, like I watched my guests do whilst my security team held them apart?
I must be the biggest dupe on earth.
My boyfriend and my mother.
I was so blind. So stupid. Tom used to love coming to celebrity packed events, getting his picture published in Heat or Hello!. Then suddenly six—or was it nine months ago? Maybe longer—he stopped. I’d worried he was depressed because his acting career had never really taken off, whilst my career had gone from strength to strength. I’d worried he was feeling emasculated, because he was forced to live off my wages. I’d spoken to my mother about it. She’d told me to give him space, not to pressure him and to keep going to the events alone.
Were they screwing each other all that time?
My stomach churned.
Was he going from my mother to me?
If I hadn’t caught them tonight, would he have gone straight from shagging my mother to me?
Would he even have showered in between?
Had he done it before? I gagged, slapping a hand over my mouth
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