Dog Handling
that you didn’t want him back. . . .” Alex ignored Liv’s oh-come-on-get-real look and persisted, “Then who would it be?”
    “There is no one else.” Liv was defiant. Not only was it bad enough that she was in pieces inside, but she was suddenly being deemed single and therefore suitable fodder for all and sundry to fix up with life’s leftovers. All those blokes who had a “nice personality” or were “perfectly good-looking” were going to be offered up on a plate for Liv to sample. Sadly, the platter was not made up of Tiny Tims or even Wayward Williams or Sexy Simons. Dreg city from here on in, Liv imagined. So best embrace spinsterhood here and now.
    “Okay, then the last person who you fancied before you met Tim. Though you’ll notice that I’m very sweetly overlooking the fact that you’ve had about sixty thousand crushes over the last five years
while
you were deeply in love with him, which must tell you something.”
    “That was because I didn’t know what I had until it’d gone.” Liv took a sip of her VB and churned with regret and guilt. Surely Tim chucking her was just bad karma for the time she’d imagined what it would be like to have Jude Law lick the inside of her thigh.
    “So before you met Tim,” Alex demanded.
    Liv cast her mind back over the years of bliss and happiness. Unconsciously leaving out the afternoons she’d been bored senseless while Tim played golf, the evenings she’d wanted to go on from dinner to some party and he’d preferred to go home to bed (not
that
sort of bed, either), the fact that he hadn’t bought her a bunch of flowers for about three years and picked his nose in front of her in a way that suggested he’d begun to take her love and adoration very much for granted. That kind of stuff she edited as she skimmed over the love story to end all love stories.
    “Okay, but I was a baby. It wasn’t really love like Tim and I had,” Liv insisted.
    “Don’t care. Tell me all about it,” demanded Alex as she lay back and listened.
    “He was called Ben Parker. It was sweet. I mean we were really young so it was all kind of puppy love, but . . . ,” Liv protested.
    “From the moment you met him. Just tell me.”
    “It was at the farmer’s market in Aix-en-Provence. I was on holiday with Mum and this troop of Mum’s friends. A few of the families staying at our cottage had piled into a convoy of Volvos and hired Renaults and driven into town. When we got there, all the Sloaney parents wandered off to buy local art at a little gallery and Mum and Lenny got pissed and played boules with these tobacco-stained seventy-year-olds in the square. So all us kids went off to some American bar that had MTV and we were ordering Diet Cokes and trying to score Es from Pascal the waiter. I was feeling pretty ropy after a night on the cognac, so I went for a wander around the market to practise my Franglais. I looked around a few of the stalls and asked the woman who owned one of them if I could have a
pomme de terre.
But what I really wanted was an apple. Anyway, she stuffed a mucky potato into a bag and just grunted at me. I wandered off not realising and was perfectly happy thinking that I was Emmanuel Beart in
Manon des Sources.
I remember feeling really sorry for the cockerels in pens and wondered whether Lenny and Mum would agree to take a beige baby goat back home with them if I spiked their
vin rouge
with Ecstasy.
    “Then I saw this guy buying this huge Brie. He had a perfect French accent and was so tall and beautiful that I almost took a bite of the potato. Anyway, after haggling and swearing he walked away from the stall with his cheese under his arm. I followed him for a bit around the stalls. He had this body that no English boy could ever compete with. Really strong tanned arms and these beautiful long, almost hairless legs. Anyway, I decided that he had to be called Serge and he must be home from the Sorbonne for the summer with his
famille.
I just knew

Similar Books

The Metallic Muse

Jr. Lloyd Biggle

Woman Bewitched

Tianna Xander

Featuring the Saint

Leslie Charteris

Ice Like Fire

Sara Raasch