Sex with the Ex by Tyne O’Connell Read Free Book Online Page A

of years. And then I started to wonder why I had ever got divorced in the first place? What could possibly have been so bad about my marriage to Richard that had made me trade it in for this? Richard used to bring me coffee in bed in the morning. Sometimes, he even cooked me breakfast on Sunday and delivered it with all the papers…although, come to think of it, that was only if he was planning on sloping off to work.
    David called out. “I’ll have a triple-shot latte, babe, and tell the guy to use skim milk.”
    Dawn was only just struggling with the night, so the chances of finding a Starbucks open were nil. The man was clearly insane. I had just spent the night with a madman. “Sure,” I told him as I gathered up my things, pulled on my Earl jeans, slipped on my Gina sling-backs and closed the door on his bachelor squat. It was still dark at five in the morning and I had to trudge to a main road for a cab and it was while I was trudging toward Wandsworth Bridge Road in the thin light of a May dawn that I had my epiphany. I had finally reached the Tipping Point.
    When I eventually climbed into a cab on Wandsworth Bridge Road, I wasn’t just closing the door on David—or Fulham. I was closing the door on an entire chapter of my life. The chapter entitled The One Night Can’t Stand.
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    Jean was waiting for me as I opened the door of my tiny flat. The morning light had started filtering in through the open blinds. I picked her up and kissed her little nose but she squirmed and wriggled; she wanted her walk.
    I shoved her into her bag and skipped on down to Berkeley Square. The uniformed doormen of Annabel’s, another of London’s private members’ clubs, were used to the girl with the rabbit clambering over the railings and watched sentinel-like as I set Jean free for her ritual morning run. I slumped on one of the benches dedicated to some fellow who had once spent many happy moments in this square and began to think about my life. Really think.
    Tiredness was beginning to overwhelm me, but as I watched Jean running about, happily humping legs of chairs and trees and anything else she could find and nibbling at the grass, my thoughts turned to Richard. He’d given me Jean on our first-month wedding anniversary. That was when we still had a house and Jean had her own little rabbit hutch—well, more of a rabbit chalet, actually.
    What is it about the past? Everything was bigger, brighter and better then…

four
    Although considered a great beauty in her day, Henrietta refused to have her portrait painted, declaring that her portrait would be the impressions and memories she left behind. Perhaps her aversion to portraiture came from her father’s habit of shooting the eyes out of ancestral portraits he didn’t like. She did, however, write a book, Hold Your Glass Like a Poem, which was a great success over several “seasons,” although it was never reprinted after her death.
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    By far the most lasting accomplishment of Lady Posche, though, was persuading her husband to build one of the finest private houses then standing in London. Posche House soon became a focus for London society. An invitation to one of her parties was more highly prized than an invitation to thepalace. Her parties were known to continue well into the dawn. Sometimes they went for days on end.
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    Secret Passage to the Past:
A Biography of Lady Henrietta Posche
By Michael Carpendum

 
    R ichard and I had met at Posh House a few years after I’d started working here. Only, Richard wasn’t a bit posh. He was ordinary, only in a really wealthy sort of way obviously or he wouldn’t have been able to afford the £1,500 joining fee and £1,500 annual fee and the general mintedness that was part and parcel of being a Posh House member. I was merely the events coordinator—as opposed to the senior events manager—back in those days.
    Richard owned a