Last Chance Saloon by Marian Keyes Read Free Book Online

was wrong.
    ‘I have to lie on my bed and howl like a dog,’ she said brokenly, and made for her bedroom. Katherine and Liv braced themselves for Roy Orbison. But to their surprise and relief instead they heard ‘Somebody Else’s Guy’. And then they heard it again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.
    Later that night Tara re-emerged. ‘I’m going to call him,’ she announced.
    ‘Don’t!’ Katherine commanded, diving on the phone and confiscating it. ‘You’ll only make things worse.’
    ‘Worse,’ Tara said miserably. ‘How could they be worse? Jehovah, Jehovah, Jehovah!’
    ‘A film called
The Life of Brian
,’ Katherine explained hurriedly to Liv’s perplexed face. ‘No, Tara, no calling him.’
    ‘Let me just apologize,’ Tara begged. ‘If you don’t let me, I’ll wait until you’ve gone to bed, and it’ll be far worse if I phone him in the middle of the night.’
    Eventually Katherine agreed. ‘But if you start shouting at him or making threats, then I cut you off.’
    ‘Thanks,’ Tara said miserably, and dialled Alasdair’s number.
    ‘Hello,’ she said hurriedly, when he answered. ‘It’s me, I’m sorry, please don’t hang up, you wouldn’t believe how sorry I am, or how ashamed I am.’
    Instead of slamming the phone down, he said, ‘It’s fine, I understand.’ Actually, Alasdair was quite relieved. He’d beenfeeling guilty about his involvement with Caroline, but every slap that Tara had given him had changed the balance of sympathy in his favour. Now, instead of it being ‘Poor cuckolded Tara’, it would be ‘Poor beaten-up Alasdair’.
    ‘You know, you pack one hell of a punch,’ he added, with an attempt at a laugh.
    ‘Sorry,’ she whispered. ‘Please forgive me.’
    ‘I forgive you,’ he said.
    But all the same, when he rang her six weeks later to tell her he was getting married, he took the precaution of getting the locks changed first.
    That was the night when Tara met Thomas.
    They were at a party given by Fintan’s assistant, Dolly. Tara, dancing like a woman possessed, absentmindedly took Thomas’s cigarette from his mouth and stuck it in her own. Not in a deliberate attempt to be provocative – she didn’t even
see
Thomas. She was simply dying for a smoke and couldn’t find her own. Since she’d heard of Alasdair’s impending nuptials she’d been losing
everything
.
    Despite the theft of his cigarette, Thomas was instantly besotted with Tara. He mistook her lunacy for vivacity and decided that her forwardness was an indication that she’d be uninhibited in bed. And he was most impressed with the slim figure she’d achieved by throwing all those cartons of yoghurt in the bin. For a few moments, he dithered, trying to decide what his chat-up line should be. But Thomas was a plain-spoken man, so he went for the obvious.
    ‘Can I have me fag back?’ Tara heard, and ceased her frantic dancing. She turned and saw a man standing four-square and smiling at her. Not bad-looking. Not good-looking, either, mind. Not compared to Alasdair.
    But once she took a closer look she saw that he had shiny brown hair and a reassuring stockiness that made her yearn to lean against him.
    He continued to smile, washing her with his warmth and admiration. ‘You’re a cracking bird,’ he told Tara, with an endearing combination of shyness and sureness. ‘Keep the fag.’
    Under normal circumstances Tara would cross the road to avoid a man who called women ‘birds’ but she’d been through a lot. Thomas’s brown eyes held hers, and Tara was astonished to see devotion and respect in them. After what Alasdair had done, she’d thought she was as worthless as the Russian rouble. In amazement it hit her that maybe this man could redefine her, revalue her.
    Though he wore a bit more brown than she considered ideal (any brown
at all
was more than she considered ideal), she felt strangely drawn to him. When she realized he was hers for the taking, the