The Contaxis Baby Read Free

shop-till-you-drop girl; she’ll still be packing at dawn!’ Jen giggled. ‘Come on over. We can go out and drown your sorrows together tonight.’
    At that suggestion, Lizzie grimaced. ‘I’m not in a party mood—’
    ‘Take it from me, you need to party. Stick your nose in the air and face down the cameras and the pious types. There, but for the grace of God, go I!’ Jen exclaimed with warming heat only to spoil it by continuing with graphic tactlessness, ‘You ditched the guy…you were only with him a few months, like how does that make you responsible for him getting drunk and smashing himself up in his car?’
    Lizzie flinched and reflected that Jen’s easy hospitality would come with a price tag attached. But then, where else could she go in the short term? People had stopped calling her once the supposed truth of Connor’s ‘accident’ had been leaked by his friends. She just needed a little space to sort out her life and, with the current state of her finances, checking into a hotel would not be a good idea. Maybe Jen, whose shallowness was legendary, would cheer her up. Maybe a night out on the town would lift her out of her growing sense of shellshocked despair.
     
    ‘Work?’ Jen said it as if it was a dirty word and surveyed Lizzie with rounded eyes of disbelief as she led the way into a bedroom mercifully large enough to hold seven suitcases and still leave space to walk around the bed. ‘You…work? What at? Stay with me until your father calms down. Just like me, you were raised to be useless and decorative and eventually become a wife, so let’s face it, it’s hardly your fault.’
    ‘I’m going to stand on my own feet…just as Dad said,’ Lizzie pronounced with a stubborn lift of her chin. ‘I want to prove that I’m not spoilt and indulged—’
    ‘But you are. You’ve never done a proper day’s work in your life!’ A small, voluptuous blonde, Jen was never seen with less than four layers of mascara enhancing her sherry-brown eyes. ‘If you take a job, when would you find the time to have your hair and nails done? Or meet up with your friends for three-hour lunches or even take off at a moment’s notice for a week on a tropical beach? I mean, it would be gruesome for you.’
    Faced with those realities, it truly did sound a gruesome prospect to Lizzie too, although she was somewhat resentful of her companion’s assertion that she had never worked. She had done a lot of unpaid PR work for charities and had proved brilliant at parting the seriously wealthy from their bundles of cash with stories of suffering that touched the hardest hearts. She had sat on several committees to organise events and, well, sat there, the ultimate authority on how to make a campaign look cool for the benefit of those to whom such matters loomed large. But nine-to-five work hours, following orders given by other people for some pocket-change wage, no, she hadn’t ever done that. However, that didn’t mean that she couldn’t…
    Four hours later, Lizzie was no longer feeling quite so feisty. Whisked off to the latest ‘in’ club, Lizzie found herself seated only two tables from a large party of former friends set on shooting her filthy looks. She was wearing an outfit that had been an impulse buy and a mistake and, in addition, Jen had been quite short with her when she had had only two alcoholic drinks before trying to order her usual orange juice. Reluctant to offend the blonde, who felt just then like her only friend in the world, Lizzie was now drinking more vodka.
    ‘When my girlfriends won’t drink with me, I feel like they’re acting superior,’ Jen confessed with a forgiving grin and then threw back a Tequila Sunrise much faster than it could have been poured.
    When Jen went off to speak to someone, Lizzie went to the cloakroom. Standing at the mirrors, she regretted having allowed Jen to persuade her to wear the white halter top and short skirt. She felt too exposed yet she often