The Foster Husband by Pippa Wright Read Free Book Online Page A

Dean had excelled himself by dragging the talent to the
party, as promised. ‘I’ll get it myself. Sarah, what are you having?’
    ‘Bottle of Star,’ she called, having ‘accidentally’ got stuck in the crowd right next to Jay, one of her cameraman conquests. He turned his shoulders towards her,
blocking out his identikit friends. She lowered her eyes bashfully, and then looked back up at him through her lashes. I rolled my own eyes, guessing a replay was imminent.
    Chris, obviously thinking that I, too, might be keen to revisit the past, broke away from the group to come and stand next to me at the bar. I craned my head over his shoulder to check out the
VIP area, which was nothing more than a corner of leather sofas on which, I was glad to see, Slender Dee had been seated, awaiting the arrival of the governor.
    ‘Hey, Kate,’ Chris said, nudging me to get my attention. It hardly sounded like a declaration of true love.
    I wondered if it was because Matt’s words had hit a raw nerve that Chris seemed so much less attractive than he had done in Ibiza. There was a time when the very sight of him, muscles
flexed on his camera platform, his dirty-blond surfer boy hair in his eyes, had made my stomach flip over. Now I felt nothing more than a kind of indignant boredom at Chris’s assumption that
we’d just pick up where we’d left off.
    I often wondered if my love life was confined to shortlived work flings because of my job – all the travelling, late nights and unpredictable hours were hardly conducive to domestic bliss
– or if I had somehow chosen the job in order to avoid being settled in any way. Work was always my excuse to stay out of anything serious. I’d always preferred to keep my relationships
short and easy – much like myself, ho ho.
    But a girl can tire of the production merry-go-round. And I don’t just mean when she runs out of options and is reduced to recycling available cameramen. Maybe I was getting old. But
thirty wasn’t old. Not compared to someone like Dean, who was still running around snorting coke with the riggers backstage and fooling around behind his wife’s back when he’s
pushing fifty. I mean, that’s old
and
pathetic.
    ‘Hey,’ said Chris, again. Mr Romance. It’s not as if I felt he had to get down on one knee or write me a poem, or compose a song in my honour, I just felt like it would be good
if he showed even a little effort. Standing next to me and repeating ‘hey’ until I got drunk enough to let him snog me was hardly appealing, and it certainly wasn’t true love.
    There was a stir over in a corner of the room, and the crowd of cameramen moved for a moment, as one, like a shoal of fish, for long enough for me to glimpse the governor entering the room,
outfitted in a beige uniform that was ostentatiously draped with swags of gold braid. His teenage daughter held his hand, her skinny frame swamped in a patterned dress, biting her lip nervously in
anticipation of meeting her hero.
    ‘Excuse me,’ I said, grabbing two bottles of Star off the bar and handing one to Sarah as I left Chris looking baffled.
    It was a mere two minutes’ work to introduce the governor and his daughter to Slender Dee, and I left them happily chatting in the VIP area, which suddenly looked more impressive for being
surrounded by the governor’s security detail. Dean nodded over to me anxiously from the buffet table where he was ‘working’, i.e., getting drunk with some artists, and I mimed
deleting the photograph from my phone. He smiled back nervously, not quite trusting me. I’d never send anything like that to Marie, but maybe I didn’t need to – maybe just the
threat of it would make him keep it in his pants tonight.
    Now, at last, I could relax. The show was over, the de-rig had begun, in just – I looked at the clock on my phone – in just nine hours I’d be on a plane home. And until then, I
had a lot of drinking to do. The cameramen had parked