Kat French - Love Your Neighbour - A laugh-out-loud love from the author of One Day in December

Emily was just glad Tom was away on business. Again . At least this way there was no one around to have to paint a brave face on for. She could quite easily spend the entire evening curled up against the radiator. In the end she cried herself to sleep, and only the lure of a very large glass of Shiraz held enough incentive to make her drag herself downstairs some time just before midnight.

Three hundred miles away, Tom dropped down onto the bullet-hard mattress in his drab Brussels hotel room and kicked off his shoes. It had been a long day of ball-ache meetings, and he was hot and hassled. He needed to relax.

Guilt gnawed through his gut as he glanced at his BlackBerry on the bedside table. His hand even hovered over it for a second before he bottled it and reached for the TV remote instead. Emily would’ve called if there was good news to report, and he just couldn’t muster up a long-distance supportive shoulder. This trying-to-conceive business, or the TTC club, as it was chattily called on the many message boards Em had signed up to, wasn’t at all like those rose-tinted rom-com movies she adored. Oh no. This was more like some fright night, bloodthirsty Halloween movie being shown on nightmarish monthly repeat, and Tom was sick to the back teeth of the lot of it. He’d had a bellyful of Emily’s brave attempts to raise a smile for his benefit with grey tear tracks on her cheeks, and he could practically recite his own predictable ‘maybe next month’ speech in his sleep.

How in hell had it got this bad?

God knows he loved her, and before all of this baby crap he’d known exactly how to show her, too.

‘Let’s make a baby.’

He wished he’d never uttered those immortal bloody words as he’d cradled her in his arms in bed, still buried deep inside her, knowing he wanted nothing else for the rest of his life.

Since then, somewhere along the way, sex had become less about impulsive lust, and more of an insert tab A into slot B, and then hope like hell that something sticks. And now, to make things worse, if things could possibly be any worse, Emily had started to mutter about going to the bloody doctor to get tests.

He sighed hard and dragged his weekend bag closer.

A fresh wave of guilt washed over him as he shoved his hand underneath the carefully folded shirts, feeling for the dog-eared porn mag beneath the baseboard. He tried to block out the thought of what Emily would think of him for wasting precious semen.

But then, she wasn’t in her fertile window anyway, so what did it matter?

The bleakness of being more familiar with his wife’s menstrual cycle than he was with the football fixtures wasn’t lost on him. He pushed the whole sorry mess to the back of his mind and unbuckled his belt. He flicked the magazine open to his favourite page. At least he could rely on Candy from Arizona not to take her temperature before spreading her legs.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.