Lessons in Heartbreak by Cathy Kelly Read Free Book Online Page A

awful.’
    ‘Not greed,’ he insisted. ‘Hey, I ate mine too.’
    ‘You’re a guy,’ Izzie said, as if explaining experimental physics to a four-year-old. ‘Guys can eat and it looks macho. In our screwed-up universe, women can’t eat.’
    ‘Except for you,’ he urged.
    ‘Except for me,’ she agreed, feeling suddenly heifer-like.
    ‘Good. Because I was going to ask you out to lunch and there wouldn’t be any point if you wouldn’t eat. Or if lunch isn’t acceptable, we could have dinner?’
    Izzie wanted to shriek ‘yes!’ at the top of her voice. This man, all elegance in a Brioni suit that cost more than a month’s rent on her apartment, had captured her as surely as if he’d caged her. He might dress like a civilised man, but he was a hunter all the same, a predator, the alpha male.
    And playing with alpha males was madness. They knew what they wanted and went after it ruthlessly. Izzie didn’t want to be hurt.
    To steady herself, she reached for the stem of her wineglass and twirled it. The table no longer looked pretty. It was sad now: the menus tossed aside, place names scrunched up, dirtied napkins left carelessly alongside coffee cups and untouched petits fours.
    The whole shebang was nearly over and she had to go back to work afterwards, back to her normal life where millionaires didn’t flirt with her.
    She lived in a tiny apartment with a dripping shower head, mould in the cupboard under the sink in the kitchen and still owed $1,200 on her credit card, for God’s sake, after splurging on those Louboutin platforms and the StellaMcCartney trousers. Had he mistaken her for someone else from his blue-chip world? She imagined people she knew hearing about her flirting with Joe Hansen and winced. She’d never wanted to be a rich man’s arm candy: arm candy was twenty-something and ninety pounds, most of it breast enhancement, veneers and ego.
    ‘Everything is possible,’ she said cheerily, the way she spoke to woebegone models on the phone when they hadn’t been booked for something they were sure they’d got. ‘Not probable, though.’
    ‘Why not?’
    Izzie thought about her words. ‘Because although I don’t know you from Adam, Mr Hansen, I have a pretty good idea that you live in a different world to me and it’s not my world.’
    ‘What’s your world?’ he asked.
    ‘I’m a booker for a model agency,’ she told him and explained a little about her job.
    ‘Why is that different from my world?’ he asked.
    Izzie threw up her hands. ‘OK, I’ve got three questions for you and if you answer yes to any of them, then we agree that you come from a different world. Deal?’
    ‘Deal,’ he agreed, his eyes amused.
    ‘Have you flown commercial in the past year?’ She smiled and so did he.
    ‘No,’ he admitted.
    Izzie held up one finger. People needed more than the average production-line worker’s salary to fly on private aviation.
    ‘Were there three or more noughts on the cheque you gave for today’s charity?’
    This time he laughed. ‘You’re clever.’
    ‘Is that a yes?’
    ‘That’s a yes.’
    She held up two fingers. ‘Two yeses,’ she said. From the way one of the table-hopping organisers had gushed over himearlier, Izzie had surmised that Joe had dropped a cheque for at least $100,000 on the charity.
    ‘Finally, do you own another home on the East Coast, say in the Hamptons or Westchester or fill-in-the-blanks Ralph-Lauren-style destination?’
    He closed his eyes and ran a hand over a jaw that already had stubble shading it. Sexy, Izzie thought. Men who were smooth in every sense worried her: this guy was very real, very male. She liked that.
    ‘You got me,’ he said. ‘None of that explains why we can’t be friends.’
    Izzie favoured him with her narrowed eyes look that said, without actual words: And the cheque’s in the post, right?
    ‘I’m not very good at this,’ he added ruefully.
    ‘You’re probably marvellous at it,’ she said. ‘I’m the