Virtual Strangers Read Free

rosebush?), I flipped my head back up to find Adam Jones beside me. Doctor bloody Adam bloody perfect bloody smoothie bloody Jones. A man so infuriatingly friendly and functional that there should have been a law against letting him out without a leash. A man also infuriatingly married to Davina Jones, my boss. So I had to be pleasant to him.
    Not that you’d ever want to be less than pleasant to a guy so disarmingly good looking and decent and thoughtful, even if he did exhibit a rather shaky taste in wives. Davina was good looking too, certainly, and undeniably successful, but in her case, the words decent and thoughtful sprung rather less readily to mind. I had worked for her Estate Agency firm for several years now, and the only area so far where she’d gained my unqualified approval was in having had the good sense to marry such a man.
    He looked down at me now with his brows slightly knitted.
    ‘You okay?’ he enquired. ‘Want a back slap or something?’
    ‘’s all right,’ I spluttered. ‘It was only a stalk.’
    ‘Hmm,’ he said, raising one eyebrow and smiling. ‘So. Daniel get off to Med school all right?’
    Drat. The D word again. I waved an arm in an extravagant arc and to my astonishment, nearly over balanced. Adam Jones put out a warm downy forearm to steady me.
    ‘Gone,’ I said. ‘Flown the nest. Flown the coop. Flown the....um. Whatever. Anyway. Yes. Gone.’ I peered distractedly into the sediment at the bottom of my glass.
    ‘Uh huh. As they do,’ he said encouragingly, patting me. ‘ He’ll be fine.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘Probably having a ball.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘Best years of his life. Mine certainly were.’
    ‘I know. So they say.’
    ‘No, really .’ He spread his arms to illustrate the point. ‘One big round of parties and drinking and hah, hah..... and, er... Are you all right?’
    No no no no no no. I’m not. Oh God. Here we go again. What’s happening to me? Why do I keep bursting into tears all the time?
    ‘Fine, fine..erm. Just got to. You know. Well.’ And I plunged off through the french doors and into the house.
    Where a posse made up of Rose, Aunty Jenny, Phil and my father were waiting in ambush in the kitchen to bar my way to the toilet and to Express Grave Concern.
    ‘Ah! There you are! Oh! Charlotte! Are you all right?’ Etc.
    ‘Rath er , Dad!’ I twerbled. ‘Just a pip in my eye.’
    ‘A pip?’ Phil advanced on me. ‘How did a pip get into your eye?’
    I rubbed, but fruitlessly. Piplessly. Everyone’s face (bar Phil’s, of course; his had gathered itself into a grimace of concentration) was taking on that tell-tale expression. That one which says, we know you haven’t really got anything in your eye and that you’re actually crying, but we’re far too polite to make reference to it and will simply await further cues.
    ‘A tomato pip,’ I expanded, furiously. ‘It must have been stuck on the back of my hand while I was trying to deal with the twig.’ I slapped Phil’s questing finger away. ‘There’s a lot of acid in tomatoes, you know.’
    Silence fell around us like a batch of badly tossed drop scones, onto which, thankfully, Rose soon stepped. ‘They’re those vine-ripened ones,’ she said. ‘Sharp as a lemon. Matt makes a big hoo-hah about their superior flavour, but he really only buys them because they have a stalk on and he thinks he can fool people into thinking they’re his - come on,’ she pressed a warm hand into mine. ‘Let’s hit the bathroom and salvage your make-up.’
    As we left the kitchen I could pick out my father’s voice. ‘It’s the change,’ he expounded. ‘Had the same with her mother. Thank goodness I’m around now to jolly her along.’
    By midnight, the party had divided itself neatly into two. One half drinking coffee and being sensible in the house, and the other drinking everything else and being legless in the garden. Phil, typically, was doling out instant in the former while Rose and I, on