Free Better Together by Sheila O'Flanagan Page B

mind?
    ‘But if you think that’s what we’ve been doing . . .’ His voice was harder than she’d ever heard it before. ‘No point in hanging around. No point in long goodbyes.’
    ‘No point at all.’
    She watched him raise his arm and hail a taxi, and then he was gone. She turned up Georges Street and began walking. She couldn’t quite believe that in the space of two days she’d managed to lose her job, her flatmate and her boyfriend. A hat-trick of losses. She felt sick. As a parrot.

Chapter 6
    Nina had once felt that God was looking out for her the day she married Sean Fallon. She was totally and utterly in love with her husband and, to her astonishment, because he could have had anyone he chose, he seemed to be totally in love with her too. She reckoned that she was the kind of woman he needed, someone calm and sensible who could rein in some of his madder ideas and be a bulwark against his occasionally emotional outbursts. She sometimes still felt inadequate in the glamour stakes in comparison to his previous girlfriends (because no matter how hard she tried, she simply didn’t have that extra something that all truly glamorous women do), but she knew that Sean hadn’t married her for glamour. He’d married her because he loved the down-to-earth practicality of her and her ability to abandon that side of her nature when they were beneath the sheets together.
    ‘You’re my perfect match,’ he whispered on their wedding night. ‘My dad was right about you.’
    Nina, despite her initial reservations, got on well with Anthony Fallon, although his wife was cooler towards her. But she didn’t care about her in-laws any more. All thatmattered was that she was the one who’d tamed Sean, and that she was the one who had him by her side.
    Over time, Sean took over the front-of-house running of the guesthouse. Nina didn’t mind that he was the one who was greeting the guests and making them feel welcome, even though that was the part of owning the Bawnee River Guesthouse that she’d always enjoyed the most. But Sean was even better at it than her, charming the guests with his broad smile, making them feel instantly at home, allowing them to believe that they were treasured friends instead of paying customers. He also took over the finances. Nina didn’t mind that at all – she never wanted to talk to Dominic Bradley again if she could help it. So she was happy to look after the cooking and the cleaning and allow Sean to be the kind of host who ensured that everyone who stayed with them had a good time. The result of which meant that their level of repeat bookings rose steadily higher every year.
    The success of the guesthouse allowed them to have a comfortable, if busy, life. After the children were born, they hired a succession of young women to help with the cleaning, while Sean brought them into the digital age by ensuring that there was Wi-Fi access for the guests, who increasingly booked through the well-laid-out website with its enticing videos of the surrounding countryside. And although the last few years had been difficult as a result of recessionary times, Nina always felt that with Sean at her side she could weather any storm. They were a couple whose marriage worked. There had been a time when the children were small when there had been a rip in the fabric of their lives together. It had shaken Nina to the core. But they’d overcome it. They’d set boundariesfor each other. It had all been, if not exactly worthwhile, constructive in the end. She was quite certain that there was nothing in the world that could drive them apart.
    At least, she thought, that was what she’d believed until Hayley bloody Goodwin had turned up a week before the production of
Pygmalion
and sobbed that Brian Carton, who was playing the role of Henry Higgins, and Stephen Lyons, his understudy, had both broken a limb (an arm in Brian’s case, a leg in Stephen’s) trying to rescue a stupid sheep that had got stranded