The Bad Boyfriends Bootcamp

by The Bad Boyfriends Bootcamp (retail) (epub)

  Patrick turned and his blank eyes found Molly’s. ‘Don’t explain.’ His voice was cold and severe, like brain freeze.

  ‘It was one last exercise; we’re learning each other’s ropes so we can diversify, honestly, that’s all—’

  ‘No, really, don’t explain.’ Patrick blew a long breath out through his nose, like a racehorse waiting for the off.

  A pang of injury and anger hit Molly’s brain. ‘Hey!’ She took a few steps behind him and shoved his shoulder, dragging him back into the conversation with her, even if it was by force. ‘I know I said I’d take two weeks off, but I promised Josie I’d help out. Plus, I haven’t really done anything that wrong, you know!’

  When Patrick turned his face back to Molly, he had only an expression of shock and confusion there. ‘Really? So that,’ he pointed over her shoulder, at the exhausted tangle of men doing press-ups in the South London mud, ‘isn’t wrong? You’re making them lose weight, wear different clothes, do different things. You’re changing them. If I said to you, “Oh, Molly, you’d be a great girlfriend if you just dyed your hair blonde and wore lacy underwear and pretended I was cleverer than you,” it would be sexist and illegal. Or something. But if you do it, suddenly it’s not wrong.’ Patrick caught his breath; his rant was exhausting in more ways than one. ‘But, besides all that, besides how …’ he spluttered, searching for the right word, ‘creepy it all is: you promised, Mols.’ A look of pleading broke through Patrick’s hardened features. ‘You said you could step away for a while. It was all I asked. I thought you understood that that mattered to me. But maybe you were just telling me what I wanted to hear. Playing your tricks on me, trying to mould me into whatever sort of lapdog you think makes a good boyfriend. Well, I know who I am and I won’t be pushed around again.’ Patrick rubbed a weary hand at his forehead.

  With Patrick’s last words uttered, everything became crystal clear: Patrick wasn’t so much cross about Molly meddling in all these other men’s lives: the bootcamp was bringing back memories of his time with Hayley, how she tried to make him someone he wasn’t. But Molly refused to be painted as a heartless manipulator. She had made many, many men happy recently, and not via the most obvious route, either. She had been thinking of others, not herself, and she had built a damn good business while she was at it. Patrick was letting his own baggage drag him down: if he didn’t know that she was a good person, what was the point in any of this?

  Molly folded her arms and shook her head in one sharp twist. ‘I am not changing people – I’m just polishing up what was there in the first place. And they want me to! God, you are so … grrr! For Noel’s sake, we have been, you know, together for five minutes are you’re asking me to throw away my business because of this … issue you have. Is that it? Just because you had one nightmare high-maintenance girlfriend, doesn’t mean every woman on the planet is just waiting to sink her claws into you. You’re not that good a kisser, OK?’

  The argumentative wind left Molly’s sails with that last bit. She realised she had gone far too far and far too personal, but she hated to be legitimately in the wrong. And, despite his hang-ups clouding his judgment, Patrick had caught her out, fair and square, breaking her word.

  Patrick opened and shut his mouth slowly and repeatedly, like an automatic garage door with a jammed control. He raised his shoulders up and down, at a loss for any words to throw back at this confounding woman. ‘Pfffh!’ he blew air through his lips. ‘I was coming to your flat to surprise you with breakfast. Guess you had me pretty well trained already, huh? I have made such an arse out of myself for you, but … Let’s not bother. Don’t bother with the Tweets or the pokes again, Mols. I really will be ignoring them this time round.’ He turned on his heel, facing away from her down the road and began to stride away.

  ‘I won’t bother poking you, don’t worry!’ Molly bellowed at his back, startling a passing Lycra-clad cyclist, who swerved a little into the middle of the road. As she grumbled her way back to the cadets sprinting in relays across the grass, it was only the tatty little Peckham Rye pigeons that overhead Molly mutter, ‘Bloody … who does he think … huge stupid feet.’

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  ‘Alright, Mollypops?’ Sam hung in the doorway, hands in pockets, shoulders casually slumped. For just one moment Molly saw that fourteen-year-old little brother who wore too much wet-look gel and threw up after his first (and last) cigarette behind the rhododendrons in Windsor Great Park. But in another look the scrawny kid was gone and a fully-fledged man stood in his place, on the eve of his wedding. Little Samwise.

  Molly was sat on the wooden bench just outside the French windows, drinking in the cool, damp air that filled her mum’s garden and watching the hired help and friends wind down after a long day’s bustle. Even when Molly had been running Retro Parties events back to back (during the one and only summer that the company existed) she had never known such dedicated and full-throttle party planning. Plus, she had never worked this hard. And that was saying something, coming from a self-confessed workaholic. Cleo had had the whole gang of family members, assembled friends, soon-to-be in-laws and those that were paid to be there fed and watered by 7 a.m. so that they could get cracking on preparations for the wedding the next day. It was going to be a big one.

  The tall white marquee was up now, at 9.30 p.m., and swathes of midnight blue material hung loosely in sweeping curtains from its ceiling. The effect was glamorous, faintly Middle Eastern and everything sumptuous. At the crack of dawn tomorrow the chandelier men would come. Oh yes. Chandeliers. Cleo had finally lost it and blown the budget when an upmarket wedding magazine – Top Tier Brides – had featured a double-page spread of the Forsythe-Huntingdon-Grosvenor wedding, complete with silver-leafed lilies, Italian leather confetti pouches and antique chandeliers hanging elegantly from the marquee ceiling. Cleo hadn’t gone the whole hog and bought vintage crystal pieces, but she had indulged her mother-of-the-groom impulse and hired a set dressing agency to find her five beautiful chandeliers to catch the soft candlelight during the evening reception. And some velvet chaises longues, while they were at it. And if they could find a gold-effect bird bath and the odd distressed leather pouffe seat for sprucing up the garden, well why the devil not?

  Molly had loved seeing her mum in her organisational element all that busy Friday – issuing orders, checking they were carried out, redoing the things that didn’t meet her standards. As the work crew took a well-earned lunch break of takeaway pizza on the lawn (on dust sheets, obviously, lest they get grease on the lawn. That grass was more carefully manicured than Molly’s poor mitts), Molly smiled fondly at her mother as Cleo ran a Montblanc pen down a to do list. And then down pages two and three of that same list. As Cleo wondered off to inspect something at the front of the house, Molly crunched after her on the gravel, a slice of meat feast balanced lovingly on a piece of kitchen roll.

  ‘Yes, darling?’ Cleo looked over her shoulder when she realised Molly was trailing her.

  ‘Nothing. Just watching a master in action.’

  ‘Hmm?’ Cleo had a hand shielding her eyes, looking up into the bright sunny sky.

  Like any good sheep, Molly squinted up in the same direction. ‘What is it? Are we doing a dry run of the sky writing? Or is Tom Jones going to parachute in to do a quick warm-up set? I heard he was a bit miffed at opening for Elton, but they’ll make it up eventually.’

  Cleo rolled her eyes fondly. ‘Oh, that astounding Cooper wit,’ she said, deadpan. ‘I’m checking the guttering actually. I’m kicking myself for not having them cleared last week. If it rains heavily, they might overflow and soak guests as they arrive, or flood the walkway to the marquee. Dear oh dear.’ Cleo tapped her pen to her lips, this morning bare of their usual rouge Coco Chanel lipstick.

  Molly directed her ‘you are one crazy mamma’ face into Cleo’s back.

  ‘And you can stop grimacing and wiggling your eyebrows, Molly dear, I know what you’re doing.’

  ‘Mum,’ Mol
ly half-laughed, ‘it’s a glorious day. It’s been solidly glorious these last two weeks and all the forecasts say tomorrow will be so glorious you could set your watch by it. It won’t rain. The gutters will fulfil their destiny another day.’ Molly came up behind her mum and rested her chin on Cleo’s trim shoulders. ‘But you are a marvel. A true Wonder Woman, though blessedly not in hot pants.’

  ‘I’m just doing what any mum would do.’ Cleo shook off the compliment easily. ‘I’ll do the same for you one day, if you ever decide to rekindle any sort of a romantic life …’

  Molly stood up straight and took a step away. ‘Mu-um,’ she whinged and pulled roughly at a leaf of an innocent bush at her side. ‘I’ve said I don’t want to talk about it. Sam should never have said anything. I’m going to swap his silver cufflinks for Hello Kitty ones tomorrow. And not tell him till the photos are done.’

  Cleo tutted. ‘You’ll do no such thing. And Sam was only answering an innocent question I posed about the best man, and whether he was bringing a guest. I didn’t know you’d … dallied with Patrick.’ Cleo sat down on one of the tall porch steps, happy to snatch a moment of R and R with her daughter and a patch of shade, too. ‘God knows, your lives change so quickly now. Look at Sam – drowning in odd socks and beer cans one day, engaged and apparently sorting the red socks from the whites just months later. And you, my darling girl, flitting from business to business, spreading your wings but troubling your overdraft. And then in the post I get a cheque to make the Bank of Mum very happy.’

  Molly smiled and took a seat on the chilly stone next to Cleo. ‘Yup, I did it! All paid off, just like you said. I was going to tell you—’

  Cleo waved her hands in front of her face lazily. ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter. You can fill me in on a non-nuptial day. It’s not what you worked at; it’s that you worked hard. I’m proud of you, Pops.’ Cleo squeezed Molly’s forearm and winked. ‘But I do have a confession.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Cleo grimaced cheekily. ‘I would have let you off the debt.’ Molly tried to bite back a splutter, but failed, and sent meat feast flying onto her best jeans.

  ‘What! But you said I’d have to work in the store if I didn’t pay it back!’ Molly’s face was pale with shock and injustice, reminding Cleo of the summer she confiscated Molly’s Gameboy for failing to load the dishwasher after twenty-three requests to do so.

  ‘That was a polite little chivvy. I knew it was the one thing you wouldn’t be able to even tolerate the idea of.’ Cleo breathed out a soft hoot of laughter. ‘And I was right! But that’s beside the point: you built a business and you cleared the decks of any nasty red figures. And wasn’t it fun?’

  ‘Yeeesssss.’ Molly studied her hands and the slightly scruffy coral pink nail varnish she needed to take off before she went to bed. She’d let Iris practice on her the night before – it was the chosen nail varnish colour of the big day – but she was never very good at keeping a manicure intact. Especially not when there was silverware to polish and bunting to hang and shrubberies that needed trimming. Real, actual shrubberies, of course. The thought of lady garden hair that was so coarse it would scrape your varnish off … Molly shuddered at the image.

  ‘Molly, when someone says yeeessss like that, it means that they mostly mean no. You can afford that cheque, can’t you? Things went OK with your new enterprise, I thought. But I won’t take the money if it’s causing you a headache, of course I won’t.’

  Molly fluffed her hair idly. ‘Nope, it’s not a money thing. The cash flow is coming in nicely. It’s steady and overheads are minimal. All peachy. It’s just that it’s been … emotional, as Vinnie Jones might say.’

  ‘Vinnie who?’

  ‘Footballer, actor, hard man, unlikely Bacardi spokesman? Never mind.’ Molly looked into the open and patient face of her mum and felt the worries of the last months tumble from her heart to her brain to her mouth. ‘I liked the success, Mum, but it was just all the arguments and fallings out and … disappointments. The sad bits. But, I suppose, that’s why you have to put up with, huh?’

  Cleo looked down the drive, her eyes focusing on nothing in particular. ‘No.’

  ‘Yeah, so – wait, what?’

  Turning her eyes to Molly’s now with unmistakeable clarity, Cleo clarified. ‘You don’t have to put up with it, Mols. I knew something wasn’t quite the ticket with you these past few weeks, but I told myself it was the weirdness of seeing your younger sibling getting married, how you’re the last left on the shelf.’

  ‘Gee, thanks Mum,’ Molly said through gritted teeth and a plastic smile.

  ‘But maybe it’s something else, hmm?’

  Molly only looked at her scuffed Converse in reply.

  ‘What I’m saying, Mols, is that money – success, business, whatever you might call it – isn’t worth making yourself miserable over. It’s only money.’

  There was now only silence in reply, due to Molly’s shocked jaw grazing the stone steps. This was the last sentence she’d ever thought would come from multi-millionaire, entrepreneur without equal, Business Woman of the Year 1995, Cleo Cooper.

  ‘I can’t believe you said that.’ Molly shook her head slowly, the truth still rattling between her ears like loose cogs in a clock. If she shook too hard, everything Molly thought she knew might come skittering out her ears.

  ‘It’s true,’ Cleo said honestly. ‘I worked for you two, to keep you safe and happy. And so I could be independent when a certain sperm donor made himself scarce and seemingly lost his chequebook.’ Cleo shrugged as if to wriggle away that blast from the past. ‘But sometimes I think everything I earned – all this lovely stuff,’ – she gestured to the house, the two cars in the drive, the sounds of drinks popping merrily from the back garden – ‘kept me from finding something else, something just as important. More than. And I don’t want you to miss out on the chance for that lasting sort of happiness, darling girl. Houses are just bricks, cars are just wheels, businesses are just memos and bills and headaches. But having someone to share even the tiniest of salaries with is worth so much more. Your father may have been a – what did Sam call him after that last awful email?’

  ‘An anal beard,’ Molly said in a monotone.

  ‘Yes, an anal beard. He is one of those, all right, but back in the days when we didn’t have a bean, and he wasn’t shagging struggling actresses, we were happy. It was great. I almost miss that. Very occasionally,’ she added quickly.

  ‘Oh, Mum.’ Molly had never seen a shred of loneliness in Cleo before, but now she realised it was all part of her professional mum performance. With all these rooms and no kids to fill them anymore, Cleo must feel like Miss Havisham, but in better tailored nightwear. Molly hugged her mum’s shoulders and kissed her cheek. ‘I’ll come home more.’

  Cleo jabbed Molly in the ribs. Sharply. Not the reaction she’d expected.

  ‘No! That’s not what I mean. At all! I may have worked too hard to notice I’d missed my chance at another love, but you’re not going to bury the best years of your life in spreadsheets and profit forecasts. Live them, Molly. Do fun things, do stupid things, but just do things. You have the rest of your life to work and,’ – Cleo’s face softened from her diatribe for a moment – ‘a mother who’ll always be there to help with any overdue mortgage payments if things go pear-shaped.’

  Molly remained unusually quiet, letting these thoughts trickle through to her stubborn old brain.

  ‘You should be an idiot now, when you’re twenty-six. It’s when you’re fifty-two that you’re forced to be sensible and eat prunes once a week. Obviously, I don’t condone laziness but that’s not the same thing as failing to work every hour God gives. At this wedding I want you to,’ – Cleo plunged on, enjoying the freedom of uninterrupted speech for the first time since Molly shouted her first word (which, incidentally, was ‘mine’) – ‘hoover up the champagne, dance to every song you know, and be the first one on that damned karaoke machine Sam insisted on. Be the Molly I know,
the one who’s fearless and who leads the way. Who smiles in the face of adversity. Leave your troubles in your suitcase, or better yet, put them in the recycling. And whatever has – or may – happen with the Best Man is just between you and him.’

  ‘Uh, mmm,’ Molly managed, still mentally chewing it all over.

  ‘But he’s nice and tall, that’s all I’ll say.’ Cleo smiled faintly and stood up, brushing off her True Religion jeans, a recent purchase supervised by Rachel. ‘Good career. And is extremely polite. OK, back to work!’

  Striding off back to the garden and the troops waiting there to be marshalled into action, Cleo left Molly alone in the shade. There was a lot to think about.

  * * *

  Later that night, still lost in a reverie, Molly had escaped the bustle of all the pre-wedding helpers and was sat alone on the bench, when Sam found her.

  ‘You OK, sis?’ He plonked down next to her and slid along to be right up by her side. ‘You are oddly calm this evening. I had expected to be mocked at least into double figures by now, but you’ve not so much as mentioned the idea that Iris might come to her senses and do a runner before tomorrow. What is it?’ For a beat Sam’s eyes softened with sympathy. ‘Contemplating spinsterhood?’

  ‘Midget!’ Molly showed her true colours and clipped her little brother round the head with an ear-to-ear grin. ‘I just didn’t want to say it. Because there’s a very good chance it will be true. Maybe Iris has just had a year-long bout of temporary insanity and right this moment is being given the vital drugs to help her think straight.’

  Sam stretched his arms out and put his hands behind his head, not bothered one jot by Molly’s jibe. ‘Oh, ho ho,’ he said drily. ‘Nope, once they get a taste of old Sam, they can never go back. She’s hooked. It was all I could do to marry her and put her out of her misery.’