Anthony Venner Second Intention (epub)

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.She made no comment, knowing that none was needed.She just put her arms around me and kissed me on the cheek.Holding her like that felt good, and reminded me of what was most important in my life.Bugger fencing, I thought.‘You want some coffee, pet?’ she said quietly in my ear.‘Mmmm.Yes please.’She led me into the house and went through into the kitchen while I dumped the bag unceremoniously in the middle of the living room floor.It could wait there for the time being.Hell, I didn’t even need to unpack it, since it didn’t contain its usual sweaty, festering mess of fencing clothing, so I might as well leave it as it was until Tuesday when I went training.Yeah, it could stay there.I followed her into the kitchen.The place was warm, and the recently acquired Gaggia was doing its thing, infusing the room with a rich aroma.She was perched on one of the stools by the counter, the Sunday Times spread out in front of her, and looked absolutely gorgeous.The jeans, baggy jumper, and slippers did nothing to detract from it.Quite the opposite in fact.It’s funny how women sometimes don’t seem to understand how they can look their most sexy when they’re not trying.Yes, it was good to be home.* * * *I had first met her eleven years before, while I was up at a conference in the North East, and she had gone back up there for a few days to visit her father.She was a friend of a friend of friends, who had been deliberately trying to play matchmaker and got rather better results than they had ever bargained for.I thought she was one of the loveliest women I had ever met: tall, curvy, and blessed with an understated gracefulness which meant you noticed her the moment she walked into a room.Her thick dark hair, a testimony to her Italian-ness, glowed like polished ebony in almost any light, and I couldn’t understand how this beautiful vision could possibly be unattached.What I hadn’t realised, of course, was just how shy she really was.She didn’t see herself as attractive at all, thinking her glasses and Geordie accent spoiled everything, and had apparently been teased quite a lot at school when she was young.By the time everything fell into place, round about the age of eighteen if pictures of her in her youth were anything to go by, the damage had been done, and she regarded herself as one of life’s ugly ducklings.It would take a lot for her to see herself for what she really was after that.Of course, I couldn’t see it in the same way.They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it’s perfectly true.The specs did nothing to put me off, and as for her accent … well, what can I say?There are some regional accents which do nothing for me.Take a beautiful woman and give her, say, an Essex Estuary or Brummie voice, and I’m afraid I don’t find it very attractive.The West Country or the Highlands of Scotland, on the other hand, have the opposite effect, and so does a North Eastern accent.When I hear Sue, who spent the first nineteen years of her life in Durham, say anything at all I think it’s lovely.Every sentence sounds like a song.Her lack of confidence took a further dent when she went to Oxford, where I think she got a bumpy ride from posh knobheads like Toby, so by the time I got to meet her she had a fairly low self-esteem, in spite of her gorgeousness.Anyhow, we hit it off straight away, and got on like a house on fire.When we learned that we were both just visiting the area, and that we actually lived within forty minutes of each other back down south, that was it.Our future it seemed, was settled.Except that there was one obstacle to our union.Her father, Mario.Mario Puccetti was a remarkable man: wealthy, self-made, and fiercely protective of his only child, especially since the death of her mother when she was eight.He had started out as a nobody in the mid-sixties with just the one ice cream van, an Italian expatriate who must have cursed his choice of the cold wet North East as the place from which to start his new life, instead of the sun kissed South [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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