Some Girls Do Read Free

you’re right – from nought to Luca might be a bit too much. But there’ll be lots of cute guys to choose from. Don’t worry, you won’t go home empty-handed.’
    It sounded more like a threat than a promise. Claire was dreading this party more by the minute. She was relieved when Tom emerged from the back room where he had been doing ordering and paperwork.
    ‘How’s your mother, Claire?’ he asked, as he joined them.
    ‘She’s fine. I called the hospital and she’s over the operation, back on the ward.’
    ‘Glad to hear it. She’ll be there for a few more days, I suppose?’
    ‘Yeah, they’re keeping her in for two or three days, and then she has four weeks in a convalescent home.’
    ‘Oh, that’s great. It’ll be a nice break for you,’ Tom said. ‘Why don’t you go early today? You can visit her and still get home at a decent hour.’
    ‘Are you sure?’
    ‘Positive. Yvonne and I can cope with the hordes,’ he said, indicating the lone customer he had passed earlier, who was browsing the travel shelves. ‘Can’t we, Yvonne?’
    ‘Absolutely!’
    ‘Okay, thanks.’ Claire smiled gratefully at him.
    ‘Oh, look! He’s getting away!’ Yvonne wailed as the customer headed for the door.
    ‘He was looking for guides to Bolivia,’ Tom said. ‘We don’t have any.’
    ‘But we’ve got Chile!’ Yvonne said, already moving from behind the desk to chase after the man. ‘I hear that’s much nicer.’
    ‘She’s amazing, isn’t she?’ Tom said admiringly, as Yvonne accosted the man at the door and led him gently back towards the travel section. ‘Born to sell.’
    ‘No one goes home empty-handed …’

Chapter Two
    Claire breathed a contented sigh as she let herself into the house that evening having paid a visit to the hospital on the way home. Her mother was still groggy after the anaesthetic so she hadn’t stayed long, but now that she knew the operation had gone well, she could relax and enjoy the rare luxury of having the house to herself. She didn’t like to admit it to Yvonne or Tom – she felt guilty acknowledging it to herself – but it was nice to have the freedom to be spontaneous and to please herself, with no one else to answer to or worry about.
    Her mother’s health had been so bad over the past year – hardly a month had gone by without some incident. Claire had come to dread getting a phone call at work to tell her that Espie had been rushed to hospital and as she turned the corner into their road each evening after work, she would find herself automatically checking for an ambulance outside their door. It was a relief to know that her mother would be surrounded by medical staff for the next few weeks and that, if anything happened, she was in the right place.
    Claire had enjoyed living alone when she was at university, and it was nice to have the freedom and independence of her single life again, if only for a short while. Of course, things were different now. When she was a student, all her friends had been footloose, and there was always someone to ring up on the spur of the moment to go for a drink or see a movie. But she had left her university friends behind when she’d moved home, and she had lost touch with most of her old schoolmates. Though she had loved Edinburgh, she sometimes wished she had gone to university in Dublin so she would have had college friends living nearby. Lisa, her best friend since childhood, had movedto Canada at the start of the year, and though they emailed and Skyped regularly, Claire missed having her around. Other friends were pairing up, so she saw them less and less, and over the past few years, her circle had shrunk to the point where it was almost non-existent.
    Nowadays she did most of her socialising online. She chatted to people on Twitter and Facebook, most of whom she’d never met, and the closest thing she had to a sex life was writing her blog – Scenes of a Sexual Nature – in which she lived vicariously through the