The Goddess Rules by Clare Naylor Read Free Book Online Page A

really how could she? Jake loved her more than he loved anyone or anything; he just loved differently from other people. But she knew there would come a day when he was worn out. When he wanted to settle down. And Kate was all he knew and all he trusted—he’d be with her. Eventually. In the meantime she just had to ensure that when Jake was stepping all over her, it was because she was his rock and not his doormat. At times she wasn’t sure that he understood the difference.

    To tell the truth, when Mirri asked Jonah to take her to dinner she had clean forgotten that Leonard was making supper for her and that she was supposed to be meeting the rather charmless painter girl who lived in the shed. And to be even more truthful, even if she had remembered, it probably wouldn’t have made a scrap of difference. Mirri hadn’t been in such a glorious position as this for a long time and she wasn’t going to throw it away just because she’d made an arrangement. Leonard had known her for years—he was used to her vanishing into the night. After all, that had been how they’d met. And when she did remember, somewhere toward the end of the main course, that he was cooking lamb shanks back at the house, she simply vowed to take him to the opera to make up for it. There was just no way she was going to let Jonah Sinclair disappear down the road now she’d found him. She was in the mood for him, and like all appetites, hers may have disappeared by tomorrow. Besides which, it had been years since she’d met a man in this way. Of course, she’d had her lovers in Africa—even though she lived hundreds of miles from anywhere, there had always been a handsome twenty-two-year-old on sabbatical from his American university or a passing journalist who came to interview her for his drab magazine about endangered species. She’d even had an affair with the vet last year, which was not as much fun as she’d hoped, because his wife had found out, but needs must be met, even in the African bush. Consequently the frisson of her encounter with Jonah was deliciously appealing to Mirri, and though she had originally intended their dinner to be a mere formality, not much more than a precursor to the fingers-on-lips and hands-on-zips routine of later, they were actually enjoying themselves.
    Unsurprisingly they discovered that in many ways they were very similar: Both had experienced the adulation of millions, were possessed of similar sexual appetites, and also exhibited flashes of such pampered wickedness that to most people they would have seemed amoral. To each other it was amusing. So a bottle of wine down and after much talk of film directors they’d worked with and how nauseating they found the paparazzi, they still hadn’t even gotten onto the subjects that interested them most—namely themselves.
    “So, Mirri, why aren’t you married?” Jonah leaned across the table and fed Mirri a golden ring of calamari. She took a very well-practiced bite, which had half the men in the restaurant distractedly putting forkfuls of aubergine in their ears instead of their mouths.
    “Why are you married?” Mirri asked Jonah. “I can’t imagine why you would want to. Unless you want a housekeeper and mother for your children.”
    “Well, sure, she does those things. But really . . .” Jonah leaned over and confided theatrically in Mirri’s ear, “being married makes it easier when it comes to other women—they don’t get as heavy, they don’t expect as much, they know where they stand. It’s neater.”
    “I suppose. But if you’re honest you don’t need to hide behind anything. That is the neatest way possible,” Mirri told Jonah, who hadn’t enjoyed himself this much for a long time. Here was a woman who was completely unintimidated by him, perhaps even a little bored by him, and he found that enormously sexy.
    “So you’re always honest?” he asked her.
    “Of course. Life’s too short not to be.” She took a mouthful of