Free Bad Brides by Rebecca Chance Page A

listened out for key phrases like
‘refined’ and ‘restrained’, or their antonyms, ‘perhaps a little flamboyant’, or the killer ‘Arab/Russian/nightclub’ trifecta used by the Bentley
salesman, which was the biggest warning of all. Having tons of money was fine in the UK, but being vulgar with it was not. Tamra had learnt to focus her love of shiny things squarely into
jewellery.
    And this kind of shine,
she thought, reaching out to run one finger over the surface of the open table next to her, the walnut lacquered in layer upon layer of hand-painted applications
till it shone like a mirror.
Look at that glossy finish. There can’t be a car in the world more beautiful than this.
    She drank some of the Cristal from the glass she was holding and selected a small canapé from the plate that was resting on the table: smoked salmon, tossed in the lightest dressing of
lemon juice, low-fat crème fraiche and chopped dill, served in a Little Gem lettuce leaf cup. No carbs, of course. Barely ever any carbs in solid form, only in liquid: the Cristal, for
instance. Tamra was fine never eating solid carbs again in her life, but by God, you’d have to pry the liquor bottle from her cold dead hands, even if it was getting harder to keep the weight
off now that she’d gone past the forty mark.
    Forty! My God! I still can’t believe it!
    She resisted the impulse to pull out her pocket mirror and scan her face; she’d told herself to stop doing that any more. It led to paranoia, which led to unnecessary surgery, which led to
looking like one of the women off the
Real Housewives
shows, who literally didn’t know where to stop. Some of them were like wax models of their former selves, Madame Tussaud’s
come to life, smooth, motionless, their eyes stretched artificially wide by upper eyelid repositioning surgery: or blepharoplasty, where any excess fatty tissue was removed from around the eyes,
making them seem bigger, but also oddly stretched. Like Manga teenage eyes in a middleaged face.
    And once you start, you don’t stop
. For confirmation, she only had to look back at all the other women in the social circle in Florida into which marriage to Ken Maloney, the
Fracking King, had precipitated her. Ken had proposed to her within a week of their first meeting and whisked her and Brianna Jade off to his marble beachfront palace. The levels of nipping,
tucking, lifting and liposuctioning in West Palm Beach had to be seen to be believed. If an alien from another galaxy had landed there, it would immediately have assumed that all the women at the
country club were engaged in a terrible, suicidal competition to stretch their skin as tight over their skeletons as humanly possible. Tamra, with only a nose job and boob implants, was quite a
contrast, and only the deep well of common sense from which she had drawn ever since she’d found herself a pregnant single mother at sixteen had saved her from the temptation to start
tinkering with her face.
    It had been shockingly unprecedented in West Palm Beach when she’d gone under the knife to actually
reverse
a cosmetic procedure. Ken had whined when she’d had her implants
removed, but Tamra had his ring on her finger by then, so there was nothing he could do about it. And since she was a B/C cup anyway he’d had to admit, post-surgery, that there wasn’t
that much of a difference.
    Dr Dubrow did a great job,
she thought now, complacently looking down at her breasts.
The girls look great.
Tamra still regretted never having done pageants herself; with her,
it would’ve been Miss USA or die trying. She had the attitude as well as the looks. Brianna Jade was drop-dead beautiful – Tamra had been a knockout at sixteen, but she genuinely
thought that her daughter was even better-looking than she had been at that age. However, Brianna Jade had never truly relished getting up on that stage and selling her personality with everything
she’d got.
    Tamra’s perfectly