Love Is a Secret Read Free

wholemeal toast, oozing with butter and marmalade. Food. Meals. As Joy said, few pleasures came three times a day so they might as well make the most of it.
     

 
     
     
    3
     
    MARK
     
    06.40
     
This little bear can make your dreams come true by Christmas!
     
    Delete, damn you. Delete!
    Mark’s finger stabbed the button on his laptop, but nothing happened. The bloody thing had frozen and he knew why. Florrie had been downloading music from one of those illegal sites again. Not only was it illegal but it also – according to the geek at the computer shop – introduced viruses that gradually crippled the machine: it got slower and slower until it ground to a halt.
    That was probably why he was getting rubbish like this. Someone really should do something about the amount of spam that got through, despite so-called filters. The only reason he’d got up at this unearthly hour was to check his inbox in case someone had sent him something urgent for work, not to waste time on rubbish – but you had to open these things to make sure they weren’t important. It only took a few seconds but they added up.
    Turn the machine off, then on again. Pathetically simple but it often worked. Sure enough, it was OK now.
    Mark stared at the screen, rubbing his eyes and making a mental note to get them tested. What was What Mums Know anyway? Probably some self-help group that had bought his address from one of the countless mailing lists he was on. That was one of the problems with being a self-employed public-relations consultant. You gave out your email address to all and sundry and ended up in address books across the world.
     
Do not delete this email or your wish won’t come true.
     
    Mark snorted. He’d always hated Paris – at least since he and Hilary had had their honeymoon there.
    He drained his coffee mug and rubbed the stubble on his chin. You wouldn’t get a man writing stuff like that. Then again, you wouldn’t get a man giving you suspicious looks at the kids’ holiday club, which started – shit! – in precisely an hour and a half.
    He had to log off soon – there was so much to do. Get the kids up. Make their packed lunches, providing there was bread in the freezer. Stop off on the way to holiday club to fill up with petrol.
    His own Inbox of Life was so full he’d have given anything to delete the lot. Apart from the kids, of course.
     
What Mums Know is a new website for mums everywhere! Some of us work and some of us are full-time mums. We want to share chat, tips and experiences. If you’d like to join us, please register below.
     
    Mark nibbled his thumb, as he always did when he felt uncertain. He had so much to do but the email was difficult to ignore. Take the ‘full-time mums’ bit. Not ‘dads’. Not even ‘parents’.
    Typical! As though only a woman could do the job! Which was exactly what the parents at the kids’ old school in London had probably thought when they’d cold-shouldered him every morning.
     
We want to share chat, tips and experiences.
     
    He hesitated. It would be nice to do that with a faceless group of mums who wouldn’t make judgements or, as had happened once in the school car park, an unexpected pass and, on another occasion, a comment from a father that might or might not have been racist, depending on the interpretation. He’d like to know how to deal with Florrie’s moods, and whether it was relatively normal for an eleven-year-old to push other kids about or whether Freddy really did need help, as that irate mother had complained to the holiday club last week . . . God, he could write a book about what he needed to know.
    There was no one he could ask. Daphne, Hilary’s mother, did her best but she was of a different generation. And now he was no longer in an office environment, he had no one to take out for a drink and pump for parental advice. Besides, he didn’t know any other man who had full-time care of the kids.
     
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