Lovestruck Read Free Page B

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Ab Fab
by the second.’
    Rosie smiled up at him. Sometimes she felt like she was standing in a rainstorm, being pelted with the force of her love for Jake. She was so lucky. She had everything – her wonderful husband, her two boys and now all this. And her best friend who’d helped her achieve all this. When they were kids, she’d always made up little stories about living in a huge house with a beautiful garden and now …
    ‘All right?’ asked Nicky, head of the delivery squad, winking as he climbed down from the driver’s cab.
    ‘Never better,’ Rosie replied. ‘Just need to unpack the soap, some boys’ clothes, the kettle and we’ll be raring to go.’

2
    It was very early the following morning. Rosie and Jake were lying in their tiny double bed. It had barely fitted into their old room in Neasden, but which in their new bedroom with its dressing area looked like a breadcrumb on a dinner plate.
    Between them lay George slurping from his sippy cup of milk. In Neasden they’d had to dash across the hall into the kitchenette to warm it in the microwave. Here, at six a.m., Rosie had had to go down two storeys and pad in bare feet across the kitchen’s acres of freezing flagstones, then go all the way back upstairs again.
    ‘I think we’d better wean Georgie off his morning milk soon,’ she said.
    ‘Nooo! Mummy! Love my cuppy.’
    ‘Poor little Georgie,’ Jake agreed annoyingly. He loved to do this, side with the boys to be the fun dad. It wound Rosie up that she was always the misery guts, saying ‘No’ to everything.
    ‘Well, then, you go down for his milk tomorrow. Either that or we’re going to have to have a microwave in the bedroom. We’ll need to keep a stash of nappies in here too,’ she added, patting her son’s damp bottom through his pyjama trousers.
    ‘Try not to make it six tomorrow, Georgie Porgie,’ Jake pleaded. Rosie glanced at her husband in the sunshine, streaming in through a gap in Samantha’s peach curtains.
    She loved the way he looked in the morning: his black hair rumpled, chin stubbly, touchingly vulnerable without his glasses. Jake wasn’t traditionally handsome; he was too tall and skinny for that, and his face wasn’t symmetrical: his nose a little too large, his mouth too wide and … whisper it, because it was a subject on which Jake was extremely touchy … his crown was showing just the earliest hints of balding. But he had a gangly charm to him – one that Rosie thought she’d been the only one to appreciate, but which, according to dozens of Internet forums and, freakily, one ‘tribute site’ set up by a mystery admirer, thousands of women shared.
    ‘I’m full of beans!’ George replied proudly. Granny Yolande had told him this and he never tired of repeating it. George was a mini-Jake: dark and vital with rosy chipmunk cheeks. Toby was so much more like Rosie: pale and inclined to fade into the background.
    ‘Did you like sleeping in your new bedroom, Georgie?’ Rosie asked.
    George drained his cup. ‘Want breakfast now!’
    ‘Oh, George, it’s so early.’ And Rosie and Jake had been up until past midnight, finishing Christy’s Moët, which had arrived as promised, and then christening the rooms in the house. They’d done the lot, bar the boys’ bedrooms, and it had been hilarious, even if
Rosie’s bottom and back ached from all the cold stone floors.
    ‘Full of beans!’
    Jake laughed. ‘I’ll take him down,’ he said, just as the buzzer signalling someone was at the front gates hummed like a huge bumblebee.
    ‘Who the fuck is that?’
    ‘I don’t know. It’s …’ Rosie peered at her phone, unable to see much without her contact lenses. ‘Just gone seven.’
    ‘Who the fuck!’ sang George. Rosie cringed.
    ‘I’ll go and see.’ Jake jumped out of bed and grabbed last night’s pants from last’s night’s discarded clothes on the floor.
    ‘You can’t open the door like that,’ Rosie laughed.
    ‘Why not? It might be