Читать книгу Who Killed Ruby? онлайн | страница 8

He shrugged. ‘Yeah, it’s sound. Your mum’s all right, ain’t she?’ He stretched and yawned, the hem of his T-shirt rising up to reveal a flash of taut stomach. ‘She’s a character, any rate. Looks like a right old hippy and talks like the queen. What is she, some kind of aristo, slumming it with the proles?’

Viv had smiled and murmured a non-committal, ‘Hardly.’ The fact was, Stella’s parents had most certainly been wealthy, but Viv had never met them. Stella had been estranged from them since before she was born, and her and Ruby’s childhood had been anything but privileged.

‘Well, any road,’ Shaun said then, ‘knows what she’s about, don’t she?’ He nodded at her ledger book. ‘What you doing there, then?’

So Vivienne had told him about her café.

‘Done all right for yourself, haven’t you?’ Though he’d been smiling, there was a hint of resentment in his tone. He’d pulled out a tin of tobacco, begun rolling a cigarette, and started telling her about his misspent youth in Manchester. He was entertaining; funny and quick-witted, though she sensed this was a well-worn charm offensive, that there was an unpredictability hiding behind his smile and his mood might change in an instant. She’d met men like him before. She had, too many times in her youth, slept with men like him before, the sort whose swagger and bravado was a front for damage and gaping insecurity, who triggered her instinct to appease, pacify and bolster.

He was exactly the sort of man, in fact, that she had trained herself to avoid. ‘Your problem is, you go for lame ducks,’ Samar told her once. ‘It’s your saviour complex. You must get it from your mother.’ It was unfortunate that Shaun was so very good looking.

He had just finished telling her about how he and his school friends had stolen a milk float when suddenly he’d disarmed her by saying, ‘You’re one of those women who don’t know how fit they are, aren’t you?’

And it was so clichéd, such an obvious line, yet even as she’d rolled her eyes she’d felt a reluctant thrill. Probably because she’d recently turned forty and no one (apart from Walton) had said anything even vaguely complimentary to her for quite some time. And she hated herself for it, saw by the flash in his eyes that he’d seen his words had hit their mark, and if she’d drunk a little less wine, or been a little less giddy at finding herself childfree for the first time in months, she might have put him firmly in his place.