Sweet as Honey (The Seven Sisters) by Caitlyn Robertson Read Free Book Online Page A

wishing she
hadn’t bothered.
    When the introductions were finished, one
of the men said, “Okay, so how do we choose a foreperson?”
    The impatient man who’d been the first to
speak—who’d told them his name was Matt and that he worked in investment—snorted.
“It used to be fore man . Bloody political correctness.” He tapped his pen
on the paper in front of him. “I’ll do it.”
    The woman next to him gave a wry laugh. “I
don’t think so. With an attitude like that?”
    “What attitude?”
    “Somebody else might like to do it too,” one
of the men said resentfully.
    Matt glared around the table. “Okay, who
else wants to do it?”
    “Not me,” said one of the women. “I hate
that sort of thing.”
    Nobody else said anything. Most looked at
the table.
    Shit , though
Honey. If the misogynistic idiot did it, they might as well lock up the
defendant and throw away the key now.
    “There,” Matt said triumphantly.
    Could she bring herself to do it? She
swallowed, the words teetering on the edge of her lips. She wanted to say it
badly, but then Matt looked at her and the words faded. She didn’t have the
strength to do something like this, to argue with others who would no doubt be
vehement in their opinions. Shame flooded her, and she looked away.
    “I’ll put myself forward.” Tom spoke.
    Matt frowned, but Honey felt a surge of
relief.
    “Okay,” said one of the men, “let’s take a
vote.”
    Six of the women and one man voted for Tom.
The other two men voted for Matt, and so did the youngest woman there—who was
already making eyes at the moderately handsome banker. How frickin’
predictable.
    “Right,” Tom said. “Let’s tell the court we
can get started.”
     
     

Chapter Seven
    Constable Dex had a busy Monday morning.
First up, he did some paperwork in the station, and then helped out with a call
in town from a woman complaining that the guy she’d taken a restraining order
out on was bothering her. The woman didn’t want to press charges, so he gave
the guy a talking to and let him off with a warning, thinking as he watched the
man slouch away how difficult it was sometimes to let someone go, how hard it
was to move on.
    Then at ten, as the schools’ liaison
officer, he had a training session with a bunch of kids from the local primary
school who’d volunteered as road crossing patrol before and after school. He
spent a while showing them how to fit the pole of the metal safety barrier into
the slot—which proved a more difficult task than he’d expected—then walked them
through the process of looking both ways and waiting for an empty road before
saying, “Signs out, check, walk now!” As usual, the girls were a lot more
switched on than the boys, who only wanted to do the practice so they could get
out of their science lessons.
    He found himself wondering as the kids
marched back and forth across the road if his and Honey’s first child would be
a boy or a girl. What would he rather have? Of course the correct answer was
that it didn’t matter as long as the child was healthy, but in truth he longed
for a son. It may have been incredibly old fashioned, but he wanted an heir, a
child to carry on his name, a boy he could show how to play rugby, take
fishing, teach how to dive.
    Then again, boys were hard work when they
became teenagers, he thought as he walked across the road to the high school,
the training complete. He’d seen so many cases of fathers and sons butting
heads once the hormones kicked in, when the boys’ natural urge to challenge and
declare themselves the alpha male took over. How would he deal with that?
    He checked in at reception and made his way
down to the careers block. The careers advisor had invited him in to give a
talk to senior students interested in joining the police force. He smiled as
the woman came out of the classroom to welcome him. They talked for five
minutes while the students filtered in, around two dozen in all, and then