Staying at Daisy's by Jill Mansell Read Free Book Online

bench ran along the back wall of the summerhouse. As they sat down together, Tara shivered and warned, ‘Say it quickly then, whatever it is. Five minutes and I’m going back inside.’ Despite pretending to be stern, she was bursting with curiosity. It was such a thrill, discovering that you’d had more of an effect on someone than you’d ever imagined.
    ‘I loved you,’ Dominic said simply. ‘You were my dream girl. You were funny and beautiful and the best fun in the world.’
    Not to mention fab in bed, thought Tara, don’t forget that bit.
    Aloud she said, with just a hint of sarcasm, ‘If I was that much fun, seems a bit strange that you decided to chuck me.’
    ‘Can’t you guess why I did that? Can you really not work it out?’ Dominic shook his head sadly. ‘You were perfect in almost every way. But the one thing I couldn’t cope with was the one thing you cared about more than anything else in the world.’
    Tara boggled. Good grief, was he seriously saying he couldn’t cope with her addiction to toffee pecan ice cream?
    ‘Your so-called career,’ Dominic went on. ‘You were obsessed with it. Nothing else mattered. Your whole life revolved around this crazy dream that you were going to make it big one day and you just couldn’t see what it was doing to you. Every Thursday you’d buy The Stage and read it from cover to cover. Then there were the endless auditions that never came to anything. So you started doing the tacky stuff, convinced that it didn’t matter, it was better than nothing and you might still get your big break. You actually managed to convince yourself that some hotshot producer might spot a topless photo of you and decide that you were the girl he needed to star in his next Hollywood blockbuster.’
    Tara, her skin prickling with embarrassment, said indignantly, ‘But everyone has to go through that! The whole thing about acting is you do have to struggle before you get noticed. Madonna went through it. And Geri Halliwell. God, even Joanna Lumley did it.’ She knew he’d always had a soft spot for Joanna Lumley.
    ‘Maybe they did. But I couldn’t handle seeing you do that to yourself. It made me feel… well, a bit sick, to be honest. And then I heard through a friend of a friend that you’d gone along to audition for a job in a lap-dancing club and I knew I couldn’t handle it anymore. I loved you, but I didn’t want a girlfriend who was a lap-dancer. And when I asked you about the work, you told me it was waitressing. That was the last straw. I had to end our relationship.’
    Tara was astounded. OK, she’d lied to him and been caught out, but she hadn’t realized he’d felt this strongly about her whole career.
    ‘But you never even gave me a clue! If you hated me doing it so much, why didn’t you tell me? For crying out loud, Dominic, I didn’t have any idea!’
    He shrugged. ‘I know you didn’t. That’s because you were obsessed. Acting was more important to you than anything or anyone else. It was the love of your life. There was no point asking you to give it up because, well, you just wouldn’t have done it. You were like an alcoholic refusing to believe you had a problem. I just decided to get out while I still could. It hurt like hell, but I realized I didn’t have any choice. It was a no-win situation. I couldn’t stop you doing what you wanted to do.’
    Tara shivered, her sodden uniform cold and clammy against her skin. No doubt Dominic had envisaged her ending up as some bloated, silicone-pumped old hag starring in soft porn movies. The really shaming thing was, it could so nearly have happened. She’d been there, teetering right at the top of that scary slippery slope. All it would have taken was one tiny push.
    She had, thank God, come to her senses in the nick of time. Realizing what she was on the verge of doing, she’d stepped back.
    ‘That’s all in the past now,’ Tara said slowly. ‘I faced up to the fact that I’d been kidding