Woman to Woman by Cathy Kelly Read Free Book Online Page A

stone walls and a box-tree herb garden.
    “Darling, you know I love living in the city,” he said, throwing the property pages onto the floor and nuzzling her neck as he breathed in the scent of the vanilla perfume he loved her to wear.
    “Anyway, setting up the agency has swallowed up most of my capital and I don’t want to take on a mortgage when I can keep renting my flat in Merrion Square for well under the market rate. You’d be mad to sell your apartment so soon after buying it,” he added.
    “Let’s leave things the way they are.” And they went to bed.
    Once Richard had his arms around her, making her feel more turned on and more desirable than any man had been able to do before, she wasn’t
    able to think about anything, never mind buying a house together. All she wanted was his lean body wrapped around hers, his fingers tangled in her hair and his lips gently kissing her skin. When he murmured exactly what he was going to do just before he did it, she melted into a quiver of anticipation.
    His voice did the most amazing things to her head, not to mention the effect he was having lower down. And when they finally came together in a surge of passion, the intensity of her orgasm made Jo shudder, and wonder how she’d ever thought she’d enjoyed lovemaking with anyone else.
    “We’re wonderful in bed together,” he said afterwards. It was amazing the way they were perfectly in tune in bed, even though they weren’t so in tune out of it, Jo thought to herself.
    As she was about to throw a bundle of old papers in the bin a few days later, she looked longingly at the property section and wondered was she mad to think about settling down.
    Richard was happy the way things were, so why wasn’t she?
    His bachelor pad in the city centre was perfect for a man who liked nothing better than to sway the few short yards from Dublin’s trendy hostelries to his front door on a Saturday night.
    Trips to Anfield and Wembley where night clubbing the night away was par for the course, this was Richard’s idea of fun. Not getting up for the three a.m. feed.
    Would he want their baby, she asked herself? You could go round and round in circles and never figure it out. What was the point in dreaming up problems for the future until she knew for sure?
    Ten minutes in the loo would tell her for certain. She looked around at the empty desks abandoned in the lunchtime rush.
    The only person in the editorial office was Brenda and she was thankfully otherwise engaged, telling Mark or was it Kevin about the lingerie catalogue she’d been perusing that morning, ostensibly for a feature on mail-order underwear.
    “You’d really like the black bra with those teeny, weeny knickers,”
     
    Brenda purred down the phone, no doubt sending poor Mark/Kevin into a frenzy with the seduction techniques she’d honed after three years of industriously filling in “How Sexy Are You?” questionnaires in Cosmopolitan.
    At least Brenda was too busy to listen, thought Jo, as she psyched herself up to do the test. She gave up pretending to study a feature article on the latest tanning creams and had just picked up the small elegant handbag which went with nothing she owned, when she was rudely interrupted. Dropping the bag like a shot, Jo straightened up and smiled broadly at the editor.
    “Got a minute, Jo?” inquired Rhona McNamara. She perched one well-upholstered hip on the desk and rearranged the silken folds of her expensive Jaeger skirt.
    “Of course. What is it?” With as much nonchalance as she could muster, Jo casually scooped up the magazines from her desk and dropped them on top of the paper bag which was sticking out the top of her handbag in a very noticeable manner. You couldn’t do anything personal around here without someone landing on top of you, she cursed inwardly.
    “What do you think about changing the format of the new beauty products section? I’ve been thinking that we should get readers to test certain things