The Love Market by Carol Mason Read Free Book Online Page A

outburst stuns me for a moment or two. Then I add, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know that Aimee made Rachel feel bad. I thought Aimee rang and congratulated Rachel?’
    ‘She did. But Rachel could tell she didn’t really mean it.’
    Rage pounds in me. ‘Well…Sandi, Rachel should have accepted the congratulations and tried to see where they were coming from. If Aimee wasn’t squealing with excitement for Rachel it’s because she was just so gutted that she hadn’t been able to compete! Can’t you understand that? Can’t Rachel? My daughter was genuinely happy for Rachel and genuinely sad for herself.’
    Sandi gives me a withering look. ‘Well you have to teach her that it’s no way to behave.’
    I open my mouth to say: Well maybe you could try asking Rachel to imagine how she would feel if her parents had just split up, then she falls off her bloody bike and is laid up with broken limbs. Then she can’t compete in the one competition that meant so much to her!
    The words are bursting out of me, but instead I look at her Hermes scarf neatly fastened around her neck, and remember that in life you can’t expect everyone to behave and think and feel as you. If I haven’t managed to change her position now, I’m not going to. I’m just wasting my breath. So I say, ‘You’re right. And you know, if you and Rachel think it’s fair to invite every girl in the class except Aimee, well, if you can live with that, then I suppose I’ll have to.’
    Our hard stares last two beats of my rattling heart, then Sandi Bradshaw says a snooty, ‘Good heavens!’ and starts walking back to her car. Then she gets into her supercharged petrol-guzzler and drives off.
     
    ~ * * * ~
     
    I got into the matchmaking business mainly as a hobby when Aimee was little. Going back to my job as a recruitment consultant after my maternity leave, while Mike worked nights and looked after Aimee during the day, wasn’t really working out. I was spending so much time at work and travelling the twenty miles to and from Newcastle that I rarely saw my daughter, and Mike never had time to sleep.
    I had loved my recruiting job initially. With my degree in Human Resources, and my own flair, I was good at the business development side of attracting new clients, the relationship-building. But best of all I loved searching the market for suitable candidates, the interviewing, and the psychology of evaluating their personality tests—seeing how they might react in certain situations and using it to determine if they were the right fit with a certain corporate culture. I loved the whole exploration of who a person really was, compared to how they saw themselves—and saving them from ending up in jobs they weren’t suited to. Then, in my mid-twenties, two things happened around the same time. I had recently headhunted an accountant called Sharon Gillespie for a new position that was being developed in credit control for an international retailer based in Gateshead. It was the only case I’d been involved in where the fit was wrong. But I had gotten to know Sharon quite well as she’d tried and failed to settle into her new role, and I also knew that she was single and wanting to meet someone. I had an inkling she might get on well with another client of mine, who also worked in the financial sector and was having a career crisis of his own. They were similarly educated, similarly attractive and both quietly spoken. I introduced them, and love bloomed. Two years later they were married—Mike and I attended their wedding—and Sharon ended up returning to the job I had headhunted her away from.
    Around that time, I read an article on how Internet dating was set to go mega. So I started to put my mind to a business idea. After a lot more research into the market for personal introductions, I reasoned that I could apply my existing skills of people-fitting while offering a high-end matchmaking service, the likes of which wasn’t really being done in