Love You Better by Natalie K Martin Read Free Book Online

fact, it probably had.
    ‘Couldn’t you have at least put a bra on?’ Effie asked, screwing up her face.
    ‘Why? You know I don’t like them. Anyway, I had my nipple pierced, and I don’t like the way it rubs.’
    Effie’s jaw fell open. Could her mum get any more embarrassing ?
    ‘Oh, Sweetpea. Close your mouth. You know your face will stay like that if the wind changes.’
    Effie shook her head at Penny’s girlish grin and looked up at the ceiling. This was the woman Oliver would walk through the door to be greeted by for the first time. God help him.
    ‘Just don’t go mentioning that to Olly. He’ll be home soon.’
    Penny shrugged. ‘I don’t know why you’d think I would. I w ouldn’t even have told you if you hadn’t commented about my lack of a bra. I know how prudish you can get.’
    ‘I’m not a prude. I just don’t need to know about your intimate piercings.’
    Couldn’t her mum act like a normal forty-five-year-old?
    ‘Oh, stop.’ Penny tutted and linked her arm through Effie’s as if it hadn’t been years since they’d last seen each other and months since they’d spoken. ‘Come on – I’m sure you’re dying to show me around.’
    Thankful to get away from the impossibly embarrassing thought of her mum’s piercings, Effie showed her mum around the beautifully decorated three-storey house, proudly pointing everything out. She’d devoured decorating magazines for ideas and gone to great pains to make sure the coffee table was the right shade of oak to match the floors, and she’d spent two hours deliberating over which colour to paint the bathroom. It was duck-egg blue. Oliver had said it looked elegant and fresh, and she completely agreed with him. Everything had been thought through, right down to the last little detail.
    ‘Do you really need this much space?’ Penny asked as they stood in the kitchen.
    ‘It’s not that big.’
    True, it was larger than average, and at a cost of over half a million pounds, it was more expensive than average, but Clapham wasn’t a cheap place to live, and the whitewashed Georgian houses on their street were highly sought after. Oliver had only been able to afford the deposit himself thanks to the trust fund his parents had set up.
    ‘Rented?’
    Effie shook her head. ‘I emailed you, remember? Olly bought it. We moved in a few weeks before the wedding.’
    She searched her mum’s face for any ounce of recognition. Despite their irregular relationship, Effie had sent her a long email, offloading her excitement at moving into the physical embodiment of her dream home, but clearly Penny couldn’t remember reading it, if she’d read it at all. She’d probably been too engrossed in her downward-facing dog or saluting the sun, or whatever it was she did in the ashrams she visited.
    ‘For how much?’
    ‘Four hundred,’ Effie replied, picking up the knife from the side to make a start on the salad.
    ‘ Thousand ?’ Penny’s voice rose an octave. ‘Euphemia Willow Abbott, that’s ridiculous. Vulgar, even.’
    ‘It’s London.’ Effie shrugged, ignoring the way her mum used her full name to get her point across. ‘And I’m not an Abbott anymore , remember?’
    She was glad she’d shaved a hundred grand off the real figure. Otherwise, her mum’s voice would’ve shattered the windows. Half a million pounds was a lot of money, but the house was worth every penny.
    Their clean, quiet street was surrounded by delicatessens and Parisian-style coffee shops serving delicate patisseries. When her mum had left, Effie had stayed in hostels until getting her own council flat in Kennington, and though it wasn’t far away, it might as well have been another world. Communal metal bins and gangs of kids with hoodies and dogs had been replaced by recycling boxes and kids on skateboards, wearing skinny jeans. For as long as she could remember, she’d wanted a house of her own, and now she ha d it. It wasn’t a caravan with random waifs and strays