‘I didn’t dare ask.’ She closed her eyes briefly, pinched the bridge of her nose and gave her head a shake of what looked like hopelessness. ‘And they’re the most appalling snobs.’
‘Really?’
She nodded. ‘I’ve never seen such one-upmanship and as for the name-dropping, well, if that were an Olympic sport there’d be golds all round.’
‘Then why do you want to impress them?’
‘It’s a long and tedious story,’ she said, before pulling her shoulders back and lifting her chin. ‘Let’s just say that I wasn’t exactly the most popular girl at school and I ended up with the bruises to prove it.’
As the implications of that sank in Dan’s jaw automatically tightened and his hands curled into fists because he knew about that too. His sister, Celia, had been bullied, and even though, unlike this woman, she’d eventually managed to deal with it, it was still a cause for regret that he’d been too busy dealing with the way he’d felt about their parents’ divorce to realise what had been going on.
‘I wanted retribution,’ she added.
‘I see,’ he said, wishing not for the first time that he could string up every bully who’d ever existed and flog them to within an inch of their lives. ‘So you were aiming for the living-well-being-the-best-revenge kind of thing?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Then what’s the fix?’
She blushed and shifted her weight from one foot to the other and then took a deep breath. ‘It didn’t have the impact I was hoping for.’ She stopped. Winced a little, he thought.
‘And?’ he prompted.
‘And so I invented a boyfriend.’
His eyebrows shot up. ‘What?’
She went red. ‘Please don’t make me say it again.’
‘OK, but why?’
‘Because I figured that that’s the only thing they deem impressive.’ She sighed. ‘It’s totally pathetic, I realise, but I seem to be sixteen all over again and, well, you know...’ She tailed off and shrugged.
‘Don’t you have a real one?’
She flashed him a look of exasperation. ‘If I did I wouldn’t have had to invent one, would I?’
‘I suppose not.’ Although why she didn’t when she looked like that and felt like that he had no idea.
‘And I certainly wouldn’t have been kissing you.’
Which would have been a shame, he thought, briefly distracted by the memory of her mouth moving against his. ‘Did it work?’
‘Like a dream. Or should I say a nightmare? Things have got a bit out of hand.’
‘How?’
She shook her head as if utterly unable to comprehend what was going on. ‘All I did was mention that I had a boyfriend, but I guess I should have realised they’d descend on that piece of information like a pack of starving hyenas. They started bombarding me with all these questions about what he did and where he was from, and things just kind of snowballed. They even started asking if he was The One.’ She grimaced. ‘I mean, seriously? Don’t they know how statistically unlikely it is that you’ll ever find The One?’
‘Presumably not.’
‘The chances have been calculated at around one in two-hundred-and-fifty-eight thousand, which I think you’ll agree are not great odds.’
At her indignation, Dan felt his mouth twitch with the beginnings of a grin. ‘They certainly don’t sound that good.’
&n
bsp; ‘They’re atrocious, and the odds that there’s only one One are even less. But anyway, I was in the middle of extolling my fictitious boyfriend’s virtues, of which there are a great many, naturally—’