THE HUSBAND HUNTERS

by LUCY LAING

  THE HUSBAND HUNTERS

  By Lucy Laing

  Copyright 2011 Lucy Laing.

  Keep in touch with Lucy via www.lucylaingnovels.com

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance of what is depicted in this work to actual events, locations or individuals, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For Daisy, may your path to true love be smooth and trouble-free.

  With Love.

  CHAPTER ONE 4

  CHAPTER TWO 27

  CHAPTER THREE 48

  CHAPTER FOUR 70

  CHAPTER FIVE 96

  CHAPTER SIX 121

  CHAPTER SEVEN 137

  CHAPTER EIGHT 157

  CHAPTER NINE 176

  CHAPTER TEN 191

  CHAPTER ELEVEN 210

  CHAPTER TWELVE 227

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN 244

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN 262

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN 282

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN 299

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 317

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 335

  CHAPTER NINETEEN 352

  CHAPTER TWENTY 366

  CHAPTER ONE

  Anyone peering through the tiny leaded windows of the little Italian restaurant that wild and windy evening could have been forgiven for thinking that something terrible had happened.

  More than five bottles of red wine had been consumed between us, but it had failed so far to lift the heavy gloom that had descended.

  It was a favourite haunt of the five of us: me, Tash who works in the livery yard, where we all stable our horses, Rach, my lifelong friend from school and who knows me better than anyone in the whole world, Kazza, small with a dark pixie crop, who unfortunately will never look at a man under six foot one, and Soph, whose family are so loaded that she can never decide whether men are after her money or her.

  We had just been faced with the crushing realisation that we were all nearing thirty - yet our love lives were still a complete mess. There was not an aisle in sight for any of us.

  There had been men who were too young, men who preferred the company of their friends to you, and even occasionally those who suddenly decided that you had turned them off the female sex for ever, and what they actually wanted was one of their own species. The list was endless.

  In fact, looking back, it could all be deemed our own fault. You know what you should be looking for. Yet you don’t see the Mr Right who has been under your nose for the past twelve months - you may have even sobbed into his shirt when one particularly horrible male specimen dumped you. Instead the only ones you pick always turn out to be disasters.

  And that’s when we came to the conclusion that the only way forward was to organise each other’s love lives. What the hell, we weren’t having much luck ourselves.

  What we all wanted was men who were charming, completely devoted (although not sickly), had a good business head, made pots of money, didn’t ogle other women, was great in bed, and would always head off for a hot water bottle for monthly stomach pains. Ha. Well whoever said it would be easy?

  It was actually Tash’s idea, to give her credit. She has been man free - that’s the way we like to look at it anyway - for nine whole months. Admittedly she is a little finicky when it comes to choosing a suitable mate. No one has ever held her attention for very long and the latest love interest, a bloke from work, had so far made it to the third date.

  ‘But he’s so boring,’ she said, twirling her mule on the end of rouge-noir toenails as we all sat at the table glumly contemplating the future. ‘He just doesn’t do it for me. He’s good looking and everything, but we go out and have a conversation and I find myself glazing over and wondering what he’d look like if he plucked his eyebrows. Put it this way, I don’t think I could face sitting opposite him at the breakfast table in thirty years’ time. It’s you, Bee,’ she added, pointing at me. ‘You’re the one who should be organising my love life for me. The only one I’ve ever liked has been your choice...even if he did end up running off to the other side of the world.’

  Well she did have a point. Stuart had been a great friend of mine. I’d met him at university and at the time I introduced him to the girls, he was a successful freelance photographer. Tash had been bowled over. Stuart was a George Clooney look-alike, and he kept her in stitches all night. He took her out a few times, but then had to go to Australia after a magazine offered him a contract and that was that.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘But the problem is that I can never see who is actually right for me, only for other people. I always end up with the babbling baboons who need another thousand years to evolve into anything resembling a boyfriend.’

  ‘Yes, well, we’re not arguing with that one, Bee. Which is why we all need to step in and help each other. Officially,’ declared Tash, banging her wine glass on the table. ‘We can’t be trusted to make sure we are going out with the right men, so we’re going to have to rely on each other to do it for us. In that way we can be totally objective when it comes to sussing them out for each other. Absolutely no losers will be allowed within ten feet of us.’

  The rest of the girls started to liven up.

  ‘What do you mean?” asked Soph, starting to look a little panicky. ‘Are we expected to actually find each other boyfriends?”

  ‘God no,’ said Tash, shuddering. ‘I want to be able to pick my own man, thanks very much. I’m not in to red-headed Jane Austen freaks.’

  She was referring to Soph’s rather dodgy choice of Colin from the local book club a few years back. Soph had been on a literary course and in a wild moment of bohemian lunacy had decided that she had fallen in love with Colin with his flowing red hair that had cascaded halfway down his back. Soph now looked put out.

  Tash carried on. ‘But when I’m blinded by lust, it can be difficult to see whether he is actually the right man for me – or is actually a complete wanker. And that’s where I want you lot to step in. To guide me along the right path.’

  ‘Hurrah’ shouted Kazza. ‘We’ll be like Husband Hunters. Weeding out the good boyfriends from the bad ‘uns for each other.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ I said. I was beginning to like the idea. There would be no more agonising alone in the hours of darkness after meeting someone new – wondering what he had actually meant when he said he couldn’t come down that weekend to meet the parents. Or when he’d hung up in the middle of a phone call because Manchester United had just scored, did it mean that he was losing interest? My friends could analyse all that for me, and tell me where I was going wrong. Fantastic. It would be like a huge weight off my shoulders.

  ‘We should do it properly,’ said Kazza, firmly. ‘Set up a proper club where we have meetings each week and talk about our progress. We don’t want to do it half-heartedly as we’ll never get down the aisle.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Tash, approvingly. ‘The club should have a name too. What about the Husband Hunter’s Club? After all that is what we are doing, hunting for husbands.’

  ‘Don’t you think that’s a bit much?’ said Soph, worriedly. She was having nightmarish visions of us stalking our prey with spears in hand.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Tash, picking up a fork and waving it in the air. I had to admit, Soph did have a point. Tash looked a bit wild. ‘It’
s a damn good name,’ Tash carried on, punching the fork down on her napkin. ‘It shows we are serious about the job in hand.

  So the Husband Hunters Club it was. There was no arguing with Tash when she’d had a bottle of red wine.

  We decided that the club would be done properly, with agendas, minutes and proper meetings (always down at our local favourite Italian restaurant of course, or the nearby posh wine bar if we were feeling a bit upmarket). I was nominated as chairman, which I felt was a bit unfair as I had probably had the worst luck of all when it came to keeping hold of a man. Even the most suitable ones still had nail marks over them where I’d tried to hold on to them for as long as I possibly could. The only time I’d accepted defeat easily had been with one boyfriend who had announced he was gay two months into the relationship. I had consoled myself that even I couldn’t argue with nature.

  Anyway it was down to me to be chairman. I banged a salt pot down on the table. Guido, the head waiter, stopped in his tracks as he folded paper napkins at the counter.

  ‘Let’s have the first club vote. Hands up everyone who will put the whole of their future lives into the hands of their friends.’

  The drunken roar was unanimous and we were oblivious to the rather frightened-looking stares from the remaining diners. It was time to rise to the biggest challenge life would ever throw at us. I attempted to stand on my chair, still waving the salt pot.

  ‘I declare this club officially open,’ I shouted. ‘Here’s to us all getting down that blasted aisle before its too late.

  ***

  I rang Rach the next day. I work in reception at a local model agency and luckily it was quiet so I had the office to myself.

  ‘When do you think we should have the first meeting?’ I said, doodling the letters HHC on my desk blotter.

  ‘As soon as possible,’ said Rach. ‘I’m looking forward to sitting back and letting you lot do the work for me.’

  After the euphoria of the night before, I was starting to get cold feet.

  ‘I know it’s all very well in theory,’ I said gloomily, peering into my coffee cup, which was growing some rather interesting looking bacteria. ‘But each of our love lives will be dissected by the other club members, and if one of us puts a foot wrong, everybody else will be so critical.. You know what it’s like, Rach. You meet someone who you think is great and you go out with them once. Then they say they will ring, and then they don’t. You spend the next few days trying to convince yourself that his pet dog has just died, or…or that somehow his phone line isn’t working. Then you ring the operator just to make sure his line is working, then you worry that he’s taken your number down wrong. And you’ll have to report all the latest news to the meeting and you’ll be battered five times over with the nightmare truth that he’s not interested after all.’

  ‘Yeah but that’s the whole point,’ argued Rach. ‘At least it means that we won’t allow you to phone him, just to check he’s taken your number okay or that he hasn’t been eaten by his own guinea pig. You need us to wean you away from dickheads like these. Even if it’s just to show you there are no such things as man-eating guinea pigs.’

  I could hear her trying to swallow her giggles down the phone ‘All right, all right,’ I said. ‘I admit I do need help.’

  ‘I’ve already booked the Italian for five next Monday,’ said Rach. ‘It gives you four days to make some progress, find a suitable man, and give us something to discuss.’

  I sat in my flat that night musing over what progress I could make at such short notice. ‘Scarlett, do you know any decent men? ’ I yelled to my flatmate, who was burning toast in the kitchen.

  Scarlett was a model for the agency and I’d met her two years ago when she came in looking for work. Tall and graceful with waist-length ash- blond hair, Scarlett had looks to die for. The girls often asked me why on earth I lived with such a goddess. I’m average height with below-shoulder-length dark hair and green eyes. Very average looking, especially when stood next to Scarlett. But it didn’t matter.

  We clicked from the moment she walked into the agency. She was looking for a flatmate and I’d just had a lodger leave, so it all fell into place.

  Scarlett lived on toast. Toast with peanut butter, jam, hummus, anything she could lay her hands on. She came into the living room where I was inspecting my favourite purple slouch socks, with ‘sex kitten’ written on the side. Scarlett’s boyfriend Simon doted on her every move, and so for obvious reasons she hadn’t been invited into the HHC. She looked at me with the bemused expression of one that doesn’t understand the need to get one’s friends involved in their love lives.

  ‘Bee, as soon as I introduce you to anyone I know, it’s always the wrong time. You’ve always got your eye on someone else.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I protested, rotating my purple sock in indignation.

  ‘Well, what about Paul Hardman then?’ she said smugly. ‘I introduced you to him - he drives a Porsche for God’s sake. Why on earth you passed him over for the bloke who was about half your age, I’ll never know.’

  Hmmm, Paul Hardman. I’d forgotten about him. Six months ago Scarlett had brought him to the pub where I’d gone with her and Simon. He was all right. Didn’t set my world alight when I first clapped eyes on him and then we went on a few dates. I have to give him credit, Paul had been perfect husband material. He ran his own advertising agency, which he’d started from scratch, so he was very successful. But he didn’t spend the whole evening banging on about himself as some men do. He asked thoughtful questions about me, asked me about my horse and my job, and how I liked working in a modelling agency.

  ‘I’m quite enjoying these dates,’ he had confessed to me as he dropped me home after the cinema one night. ‘You’re good company Bee,’ he added, looking admiringly at me. And best of all, I hadn’t made much of an effort to look great that night. I had on jeans and sweatshirt top as I hate sitting watching a film in tight clothes, like I’m trussed up in a sixteenth-century corset and not daring to breathe out. But Paul hadn’t seemed to mind, he had still looked at me admiringly. He was no George Clooney, but hey, I wasn’t exactly Angelina Jolie either.

  But before Paul had a chance to ring me again and arrange a fourth date, Kevin, one of the models from the agency, had asked me out to dinner that following morning.

  I’d almost squeaked in excitement when he came to lean on the reception desk, his dark hair spiked up for a photo shoot. Kevin was twenty to my twenty-eight, but I didn’t care. I had nothing in common with him, but the chemistry was fizzing. What was it about me at the moment? I’d thought as I excitedly got ready for dinner with him. Did I suddenly have ‘shag me I’m so hot’ emblazoned across my forehead. I’d been man free for months, then suddenly I had two men after me at once.

  When Paul had rung me a few days later, I’d made an excuse and muttered that I had to go round and see my mum. He’d rung me again the following week and when I told him that I had to stay in as Rach was coming round I think he got the message. If Kevin hadn’t asked me out when he did, then I would have probably carried things on with Paul, and who knows what would have happened. I’d have probably been happily married by now (grrrrrrrrrrr) but I was too busy swooning over Kevin to even think about it at the time.

  The chemistry between Kevin and I had fizzed for a few weeks. He was a great kisser. I’d never been kissed by anyone like that before. It was just like you see on the films. He would take my face in his hands and kiss me with a passion that left me breathless and with my head spinning. When I told the girls about how great he was, they were all wild with envy.

  For a few weeks I was completely smug about my great boyfriend - the young, good looking amazing kisser. We had even managed to drag our relationship out for a few months. But there’s only so much you can talk about to a guy who has barely left Sixth Form College and continually wants to holiday in Ibiza. So after three months we called it a day - well actually, embarrassingly enough and I didn’t even want
to admit it to the girls at the time, he called it a day. How embarrassing is that, being dumped by a man who is eight years younger than you?

  ‘What happened to the hot older woman thing, like Mrs Robinson?’ I’d moaned to Rach a few days later, after Kevin had rung me and stutteringly told me that he thought it wasn’t working. Haa, he even had the nerve to say that it wasn’t me, it was him. Well, I suppose I could let him off for that one. He was so young, he probably thought he’d made that line up himself.

  ‘I know,’ said Rach. ‘It’s not meant to be that he dumps you, the older woman. You are meant to have him completely hooked with your sexual allure and worldly experience.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said gloomily. ‘I obviously wasn’t alluring and mysterious enough.’

  I dragged my mind back to Rach on the other end of the phone, and away from my disastrous relationship with Kevin.

  ‘Actually Paul Hardman wasn’t so bad after all,’ I mused. ‘In fact he’s quite good husband material when you think about it. He’s loaded, sensible and not bad looking. I think I’m going to start seriously considering him again.’

  ‘Bee, for God’s sake. You haven’t seen him in nearly a year and you were never really bowled over by him in the first place or else you wouldn’t have dumped him for that idiot Kevin,’ she said. ‘What on earth can you say - you can’t just phone him up and ask him out. He was pretty pissed off when you refused to go out with him again.