THE HUSBAND HUNTERS Read Free

kisser. I’d never been kissed by anyone like that before. It was just like you see on the films. He would take my face in his hands and kiss me with a passion that left me breathless and with my head spinning. When I told the girls about how great he was, they were all wild with envy.
    For a few weeks I was completely smug about my great boyfriend - the young, good looking amazing kisser. We had even managed to drag our relationship out for a few months. But there’s only so much you can talk about to a guy who has barely left Sixth Form College and continually wants to holiday in Ibiza. So after three months we called it a day - well actually, embarrassingly enough and I didn’t even want to admit it to the girls at the time, he called it a day. How embarrassing is that, being dumped by a man who is eight years younger than you?
    ‘ What happened to the hot older woman thing, like Mrs Robinson?’ I’d moaned to Rach a few days later, after Kevin had rung me and stutteringly told me that he thought it wasn’t working. Haa, he even had the nerve to say that it wasn’t me, it was him. Well, I suppose I could let him off for that one. He was so young, he probably thought he’d made that line up himself.
    ‘ I know,’ said Rach. ‘It’s not meant to be that he dumps you, the older woman. You are meant to have him completely hooked with your sexual allure and worldly experience.’
    ‘ Thanks,’ I said gloomily. ‘I obviously wasn’t alluring and mysterious enough.’
     
    I dragged my mind back to Rach on the other end of the phone, and away from my disastrous relationship with Kevin.
    ‘ Actually Paul Hardman wasn’t so bad after all,’ I mused. ‘In fact he’s quite good husband material when you think about it. He’s loaded, sensible and not bad looking. I think I’m going to start seriously considering him again.’
    ‘ Bee, for God’s sake. You haven’t seen him in nearly a year and you were never really bowled over by him in the first place or else you wouldn’t have dumped him for that idiot Kevin,’ she said. ‘What on earth can you say - you can’t just phone him up and ask him out. He was pretty pissed off when you refused to go out with him again.
    ‘ Well, he’s still a friend of Simon’s, isn’t he? It’s not as though he will have dropped off the face of the earth,’ I said, defensively.
    Even though she was on the end of a telephone line, I could almost see Rach’s eyebrows rising up so high they nearly disappeared into her hairline. But I took no notice. I was inspired - I had actually had husband material nearly within my grasp. Getting him to go out with me again would be easy.
     
    I got ready for the first meeting feeling mildly excited. It felt like a first date with someone you weren’t quite sure about, but you felt like it might be quite promising. The girls were all there when I pulled up in my battered blue Mini.
    ‘ Come on Bee, we’ve already started,’ shouted Rach, as I came into the restaurant. ‘We’re doing a draw to see what order we’re going to walk down the aisle.’
    Soph ripped up a table napkin into five pieces and wrote the numbers one to five on each. They were put into an ashtray and Kazza was nominated to pick them out. Soph, the youngest of us at twenty-five, was picked to be the first bride.
    ‘ Oh, that’s just great,’ said Rach. ‘That means we’re all destined to be over-the-hill brides. Soph will never get married for at least ten years, which means we’ll all be nearly forty.’
    ‘ Well. I might just surprise you all and be whisked off my feet by a handsome stranger,’ protested Soph.
    Number two was Kazza and I was number three, which relieved me somewhat as I wouldn’t feel so much under pressure. Rach was number four and Tash was number five.
    ‘Oh that’s good,’ she said. ‘Now I won’t feel so guilty when I keep changing men as fast as I change my underwear. At least I won’t have you lot breathing down my neck