Free The Whiskerly Sisters by BB Occleshaw Page A

had done it for her. After several months of angst ridden dithering and several tentative false starts, Jax had finally agreed to join an internet dating site. Well let’s face it, she was too old to re-join the Youth Club and she felt it was somehow sad to sit alone in a pub reading a book in the hope that some erstwhile knight in shining armour might possibly ride by and offer to buy her a drink. She wasn’t the least bit interested in attending evening classes in Italian cookery or creative writing and there was no way on the planet that she would go to a singles club. So how else was she going to find a man? Ruthlessly, Izza had summed up the situation. Slam dunk!
    DesperDates was the very thing, her daughter had assured her, expertly writing her profile. Admittedly, she’d had a brilliant afternoon with several bottles of wine, and several of the girl pals, during which time she was encouraged to preen, parade and pose in a variety of outfits while Fresna clicked away with her new digital camera.
    “Try to relax, you’ve a tendency to hunch those sexy shoulders,” she’d advised from behind the lens.
    “Suck your stomach in and stick your tits out,” ordered Celia, leaning on the dressing table and draining the contents of yet another glass of wine. “Christ Jax, not like that, you look like an overstuffed bouncy castle!”
    “Shut up, Ceals,” growled Fresna. “You’re not helping.”
    “Focus,” commanded Charley, popping her head round from the behind the door to the en-suite where she had been grimacing at the stale contents of Jax’s make-up bag. “Just imagine what you’d like to do with the man of your dreams and work from there, just work from there.”
    “Give me the dominatrix within, Jax, glare at the camera. You got to show the bastards who’s in control,” encouraged Fresna, moving the camera onto its end to try for a full length shot.
    “Stop frowning, it makes you look ancient,” mumbled Izza, sitting cross-legged on her mother’s bed, head down, fixating on her mobile. Why hadn’t he called?
    By the time Fresna smiled the satisfaction that signalled the shoot was over, Jax felt exhausted, but the best was yet to come. For another sixty hilarious minutes, the girls joined in, helping themselves to the contents of Jax’s wardrobes and pouting shamelessly at the camera until each one of them had at least one passable photograph to take home in memory of a fabulous afternoon. True, Jax had been left with the shambles of her bedroom where it seemed the entire contents of her closets had been spilled in crumpled polycotton ton profusion all over the floor. Jax grimaced. Did she really own that much beige?
    Shutting the door firmly on the bombsite that was now her boudoir, the girls spent the evening and several more bottles of wine arguing, debating and giggling over the merits and demerits of the assorted photographs saved on Fresna’s Nikon until consensus held sway and Izza quickly posted the best four images of Jax on the net before she could change her mind. She was out there.
    There was a close up of head and shoulders to show off Jax’s lovely green eyes; there was a saucy shot of her in Tiff’s red basque top and what Jax considered to be a too short, short skirt. The third shot offered a full length picture of her in the garden, secateurs in hand, seeming to nonchalantly prune her roses and the fourth showed her walking Celia’s dog in the local park. A variety of photographs for the discerning e-gentlemen at the other end of the ether to give them at least a remote e-idea of what they might be e-getting.
    So there she was on the net in all her virtual glory, resembling some kind of surreal marketing campaign for the forlorn and dysfunctional. Jax seriously doubted she’d get a hit and that made her feel, at one and the same time, both reassured and anxious. As she lay back on the pillow in the haven of her double bed, contemplating the disorder of her bedroom, she could