LITMIR.BIZ

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but Laura could still hear him clearly enough. The bar was beginning to fill up but the noise wasn’t too bad, and the music hadn’t yet started.

      ‘That boring, huh?’ he went on. ‘No, I’m down at the Opera Bar having a drink with a friend from work.’

      Laura frowned, knowing instantly that Ryan was being evasive to whomever he was talking to on the phone. His girlfriend, perhaps? He was sure to have one. He always had some girl on tap from what she’d heard. She’d forgotten about that when he’d offered to pretend to be her Mr Right this weekend.

      What on earth did he plan to tell the girlfriend if she agreed to his suggestion? Laura couldn’t imagine any female enjoying their boyfriend pretending to be another woman’s boyfriend, no matter how innocent it really was.

      ‘I’ll ring you later tonight, sweetheart,’ she heard him saying, confirming her suspicion that he was talking to his current girlfriend. ‘Bye for now.’

      He hung up and swung back to face her. ‘Now, where was I?’ he said as he put his phone away.

      Laura decided to put a spanner in his works with some much-needed honesty.

      ‘Your girlfriend wouldn’t like you pretending to be my Mr Right,’ she said with chilly disdain in her voice. ‘Or were you thinking about not telling her?’

      His eyes grew even colder than her own, if that were possible. ‘Erica does not own me, Laura. Besides, she’s in Melbourne this weekend for a conference.’

      ‘You mean what she doesn’t know doesn’t hurt her?’

      ‘Actually, I have every intention of telling Erica when I ring her back later tonight.’

      ‘Really.’ Laura could not keep the sarcasm out of her voice. In her experience, lying to their girlfriends was second nature to men like Ryan.

      ‘Yes, really. But I can see you don’t believe me.’

      ‘Does it matter what I believe? It’s all irrelevant anyway, because I’ve decided not to accept your kind offer.’

      ‘And why’s that?’

      ‘Because it can only lead to further complications. Gran’s eightieth birthday is coming up soon. If her health improves, the family is sure to throw her a party and she’ll expect me to attend, along with my newly found Mr Right. I can’t honestly expect you to go along to that as well. By then, we’ll be asked eternal questions about when we’re getting engaged and when the wedding’s going to be. Everything will snowball and you’ll wish you hadn’t started it in the first place. Much better I go home this weekend and say we’ve already broken up.’

      Ryan shrugged. ‘If that’s what you want to do. But it wouldn’t worry Erica.’

      ‘If you think that, Ryan, then you don’t know women very well. I think I should go now,’ she added, becoming nervous that people from her work would start arriving any minute now. ‘Thank you for the drink, and for your offer. It really was very nice of you. But not a good idea.’

      She finished her drink and stood up. ‘I’ll see you next Friday at three,’ she said.

      ‘I tell you what,’ Ryan said before she could escape. ‘I’ll give you my private mobile-number just in case you change your mind. Do you have a biro in that bag of yours? I’ll bet you do,’ he added with a quick smile.

      ‘Yes, but …’

      ‘Just write it down, Laura,’ he said with a hint of exasperation. ‘You never know.’

      ‘Oh, very well,’ she said, and did what he asked, writing the number he gave her down on the back of one of her business cards.

      Then she bolted for the exit, thankfully not spotting anyone she knew on the way out. Laura was out of breath by the time she made it to the quay and onto the Manly ferry for the ride home, glad to subside into a seat in a private corner, glad to be alone with her still-whirling thoughts.

      But, once her head settled and her heart stopped beating like a rock-band drummer, Laura knew she’d made the right decision, knocking back Ryan’s offer. It was ridiculous to keep such a deception going, no matter how tempted she’d been.

      What was that other saying, now? ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive’?

      As she’d spelled out to Ryan, it would have been extremely difficult to carry off such a pretence without their dislike for each other shining through somehow. No, she’d done the right thing. The only thing. But she still winced at the thought of telling the family that she’d lied about finding Mr Right. She did have her pride.

      No, she’d do what she originally said she’d do: make some excuse why Ryan couldn’t join them this weekend. Then later on, if Gran continued to recover, she could say that they’d broken up because Ryan refused to get married. That would save her pride too. If Gran didn’t recover—Laura’s heart contracted fiercely at this thought—then it wouldn’t matter. Gran would at least have died happy.

      CHAPTER FIVE

      BY THE time the ferry docked at the Manly wharf and Laura started off up the hill for the walk home, she’d become reconciled to her decision, except for one small regret. It would have been seriously satisfying to go home with a man like Ryan on her arm, she thought with a rather wistful sigh, just to see the looks on the faces of her aunt and uncle, both of whom never let an opportunity go by to point out what a loser she was in the dating department.

      Of course the truth was that they didn’t like her. Uncle Bill had resented her from the moment she’d been brought home to her grandparents’ place to live and it had became obvious that his mother preferred her estranged daughter’s daughter to the son he and Cynthia had produced.

      Laura didn’t think this should have been a surprise, since all the men in the Stone family were odious. Her grandfather especially. Jim Stone had been a male chauvinistic pig of the first order. His son and his grandson had taken after him, believing they were superior beings and that women were only put on this earth to pander to their needs. After actually living in her grandfather’s house, Laura understood fully why her mother had run away from home as soon as she was old enough and why she’d married a man like her father who, though a strong man, had been compassionate and gentle in his dealings with people, especially women. He’d been a lawyer also; Laura had adored him.

      She’d disliked her grandfather intensely and hadn’t been at all sad when he had died. But even in death Jim Stone had been able to make her angry, leaving the family property to his son rather than his long-suffering wife. She’d tried to get her gran to contest the will but she wouldn’t, saying that it didn’t matter, that Bill promised to look after her until she died.

      But that wasn’t good enough, in Laura’s opinion. The home which Gran had lovingly tended for over fifty years should have been hers until she died. Instead, she’d been relegated to the role of a poor relative, reliant on her son for charity. All her gran had been left was a miserable twenty-thousand dollars a year, not much more than the old-age pension. That was until Laura had had a little chat with her uncle and insisted that he bump the amount up to forty thousand at least, warning him that if he didn’t then she would use every bit of her power and influence to get his mother to contest the will.

      Naturally, her firm stance hadn’t gone down too well, but he’d done what she had asked. Of course, he’d made it sound like it was all his idea. When Laura had seen how touched her grandmother had been—she probably wasn’t used to the men in her life treating her nicely—she hadn’t said a word. Several times, during the five years since her grandfather had died, Laura had tried to persuade her grandmother to come to Sydney to live with her, but to no avail. Her gran said she was a country girl and wouldn’t be happy living in the city.

      Yet I have a very nice home, Laura thought as she pushed open the gate which led up the path to the three-bedroomed cottage which had belonged to her parents and which had come to her when they were

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