Irrepressible You by Georgina Penney Read Free Book Online

enough.
    He had no doubt that Amy would find his writing just as amusing as the rest of his readership did, who expected witty satire mixed with a bit of the ridiculous with their Saturday morning crumpets and coffee. If his attitude was arrogant, Ben didn’t care. He’d done the hard yards in his youth: stand-up in dingy pubs, writing for any infernal little publication that would pay and taking any job going to get to where he was now. His success had been earned honestly.
    Today, he was particularly impressed with himself. Never in the entire history of his varied fifteen-year career as a writer, comedian, broadcaster, scriptwriter and columnist had he ever submitted work before a deadline. Incredible and, above all, improbable, which is exactly what his editor Ross would say when he received Ben’s email.
    To make matters even more unbelievable, it was before ten in the morning and Ben was awake and out of bed and had been since seven. He’d even managed to get in his daily hour-long swim before sitting down to work. He thought about calling a few of his friends in London to share this momentous achievement, then remembered the seven-hour time difference. That made him want to call them even more, but he decided against it at the last minute. As much as they’d all given him hell about his late nights and later mornings over the years, he was feeling far too damn peppy to be vindictive. In fact, he was in a better mood than he had been for months–and he knew the cause.
    It appeared he had acquired a muse. An unlikely one with an abominably quirky sense of style and a penchant for holding razors to men’s throats, but a muse nonetheless.
    Rain gurgled through the rusty gutters of Amy’s little Fremantle home, pitter patting on her bedroom window. Normally she loved the rain; it reminded her of the nights in her early childhood when she’d cuddled up on the bottom bunk with Jo in the postage stamp-sized bedroom they’d shared, safe in the knowledge that their dad wouldn’t drive to the pub in bad weather. Amy had always slept the best those nights.
    By rights she should be sleeping now, but something was stopping her. Well, not something– someone . Try as she might, she hadn’t been able to get Ben last-name-still-unknown’s dinner invitation out of her head. More to the point, she couldn’t figure out why he’d invited her in the first place.
    The man was good looking, rich, educated and, if Scott’s reaction was anything to go by, famous. For the life of her she couldn’t work out what his deal was. She’d analysed every second of his visit to Babyface time and time again and still couldn’t come up with an answer, and that left her feeling wary.
    She knew she was attracted to him, in the way that humans look at tigers and think they’re cute until they get their heads bitten off, but what did attraction mean? If her past experience with men had taught her anything, it was that if they looked too good to be true, they were either married, gay or a total bastard. Her first experience having a boyfriend had been a nightmare. Since then, other than Tom Draper her no-show date, Amy had made a point of always sticking to the non-threatening variety of man: men who needed her more than she needed them, who couldn’t harm her emotionally or physically.
    That thought led her to the other source of her insomnia, her first disastrous boyfriend, Liam. It was the third week of the month, which meant that he would be home on his monthly rotation from the oil rigs up north. He’d no doubt visit the salon and try his best to scare the pants off her. He’d been doing it since she’d left him nine years before, and it didn’t look like he was going to stop any time soon.
    Liam hadn’t laid a hand on her since she was nineteen, but that didn’t stop him from regularly making her life miserable. Usually, he just came to the barber shop and tried to intimidate her. Sometimes, he slipped abusive letters under her