Free What She Wants by Cathy Kelly Page B

at birth, was long and a gleaming dark blonde. She had it blow-dried at a salon most lunchtimes and it fell in severe, gleaming straightness to her shoulder blades. It was a classy look, one which she’d deliberately chosen so that people would look at her and instantly know she was a player: a somebody. Her face was oval with a strong chin, a long straight nose and slanting eyebrows that showed up intensely coloured tawny brown eyes. Her skin was darker than Hope’s, almost olive. In the summer, she could pass for an Italian because she went a rich, golden brown. At school, people never believed she and Hope were sisters. Only their mouths were similar: they shared the same soft plump lips, a feature which made Hope look unsure and innocent and which gave Sam the look of a woman who’d had collagen injections. To counteract this model-girl plumpness, Sam drew her lipliner inside her natural lip line and only ever wore pale lipstick so as not to draw attention to her mouth. Hope’s mouth was vulnerable and slightly sexy, both looks Sam was keen to avoid. As far as Sam was concerned, once you let your hard-as-nails facade down, you were finished in business. Slim, due to hyperactivity rather than because of any time spent in a gym, Sam looked like the perfect career woman in her tailored grey trouser suit, with a sleek nylon mac, mobile phone and briefcase as accessories. Straight out of Cosmopolitan’s career woman pages, except that at thirty-nine she was a fair bit older than the Cosmo babes. The vibes she gave off said ‘unapproachable’ and that suited her just fine.
     
    ‘If you were seaside rock, you’d have a line through you saying “tough cookie”,’ joked her best friend, Jay, on those nights when they shared dinner together in the local Indian restaurant they both loved. Sam always laughed when Jay said that but lately it didn’t sound as funny as it used to. Jay was a willowy Atlanta woman she’d met in college, part of a small group of people who were Sam’s closest friends. Jay who wore bohemian chic clothes, worked in a bookshop and was only interested in her job as a means to pay the bills. She admired Sam’s single mindedness but said the career fast track wasn’t for her. Tonight, Sam didn’t feel as if it was for her, either. On the packed underground train, she clung to the side of a seat as they hurtled along. Sam hated it when the train was full. She got off at Holland Park, bought some anti-flu capsules in the chemist, and trudged through sleeting rain to the flat, one of four in a huge, white-fronted converted house in an expensive, tree-lined street. The place looked as if it had been burgled, which was pretty much the way she’d left it that morning. A huge pile of ironing lay on one corner of the dining room table; the previous few days’ papers were scattered on the rest of it and the coat she’d been wearing yesterday was thrown on the sofa. Usually chronically tidy, she hated mess with a vengeance. And when the flat was messy, the cool, clean lines of the all-white rooms looked all wrong. Since starting her new job at Titus, Sam had been working horrifically long hours and the housework had fallen by the wayside. Her cleaner had left a month before and Sam hadn’t managed to find a new one. The flat wasn’t enormous or anything, but doing any housework at the end of a murderously hard week was the last thing she had energy for. The flat was a two-bedroom, financially crippling, investment in a posh bit of London and the living room cum dining room was the only decent-sized room in the entire place. The kitchen was so small that two people really needed to know each other intimately if they wanted to spend any amount
     
    of time in it together, while the bathroom was minuscule and without one of Sam’s favourite amenities: a bath. Showers were functional, she’d always thought, but a bath was luxury. Still, with her mega new salary, she’d be able to move soon, to