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Authors: Kathy Lette

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‘Me too.’ And then Anthea hugged her sister properly, for the second time in their adult lives.

Controlling her emotions, Jane thumped Jacko in the arm. ‘He’s an ugly devil. But, hey, you can’t always judge by appearances.’

‘At least you can no longer say that all the men who ever liked you for your sense of humour, ended up fancying me instead,’ Anthea said, glancing sideways at Jacko.

‘Anyway,’ he replied good-naturedly, staring right back at Anthea as if seeing straight through her, ‘ugliness is purely in the eye of the beholder. You can get it out with Optrex drops.’

His remark stung her. Anthea felt furious with herself. Stranded out there in the bush, she had lost her balance, that was all. She’d been teetering like a tight-rope walker … and had momentarily fallen from grace.

By the time she had settled into her seat on board the aircraft, she felt her old self returning. It wasn’t fair of Jacko to judge her. She’d been terrified, jet lagged and drugged up on
painkillers.
Kissing him had been a mistake, that was all. Rough diamonds like him were all very well, she thought to herself, as she sipped champagne in the first-class cabin, but she liked her men with a little polish. As the plane taxied down the runway, the whole experience began to feel like a mirage to her.

They took off and turned towards Perth. The intensity of the last few days faded away as fast as the mining town below. Eventually her sister and Jacko were both just a blip on the horizon so far as Anthea was concerned. All she could think about now was boarding the flight to London and returning to the safety of her side of the world, her home, her beloved.

Chapter Ten

Love May Be Blind, But Marriage Is A Real Eye Opener

IN HER ABSENCE
London seemed to have changed from sparkling European gem to grubby fake jewel. The city, smeared by car fumes, looked grey and grimy. Pedestrians seemed to hurry everywhere like caged mice. And the sky appeared to be falling in. After the big blue expanse of the Australian Outback, the London sky felt alarmingly low.

‘Darling!’ Rupert glanced up from his spotless glass desk – which looked, now Anthea thought about it, like a case in a museum. She was about to recount the details of her accident when he interrupted. ‘Notice anything?’ He leant back in his posture-correct chair. ‘No glasses!’ he said,
before
she could answer. ‘I had my eyes lasered. It’s almost Biblical … “I can see! I can see”!’ he joked.

‘But I liked your Clark Kent look,’ Anthea said, feeling baffled. ‘Why didn’t you talk it over with me first?’

‘I wanted it to be a little surprise. I had to take a week off to recover.’

‘But you said the reason you couldn’t come with me was because you were busy selling your shares so that we could buy a house.’

Rupert got up from his desk, crossed the room and slipped one arm around her waist. ‘Ah, well, yes, but the prices fell. It wasn’t the right time to sell. We’ll just wait another six months or so … maybe a year …’

Anthea’s heart sank down into her shoes. ‘So, while I was out in the bush, trying to save my sister, nearly being killed by feral emus and floods and bush fires, you were merely getting your eyes lasered?’

‘It was supposed to be a surprise. I booked in for surgery months ago. I didn’t want to cancel … What do you think?’

What Anthea thought was that their carefully designed, earth-toned apartment lacked
character.
It was seared by light yet freezing cold. Winter and summer, Rupert liked the thermostat set to Arctic level. She missed the Outback heat, the air thick with abundant birds and insects. The browny-green carpet Rupert had imported from Italy now looked to her like creeping mould. His discarded tie lay in a tired snarl of silk on the chair.

‘And to tell the truth, I wasn’t entirely convinced you needed to go on your mission, Annie. Jane’s miner may be rough and ready, but to be frank, with her looks, who else was she going to attract? I thought the only thing she’d ever have between her legs would be that ridiculous cello.’ He laughed at his own joke.

‘Jane is a highly intelligent, artistic woman,’ Anthea objected. ‘Are looks all that count with you men? When they say beauty comes from within, Rupert, they do
not
mean from within a jar marked Estée Lauder.’

‘I hate to think what their children will look like. I just hope they have a life guard by their gene pool,’ he continued.

Anthea bristled, and not just because of the insult to her sister. She’d always presumed she and Rupert would be the first to have a child.
Her
sister’s news had left her reeling. And now Repert wanted to put off having a family yet again.

Rupert misread her upset mood. ‘I’m only joking, Annie. Did you leave your sense of humour at Customs? I think you must just be a little tired after your trip out to that hellhole.’ He massaged her shoulders. ‘How bad was it?’

‘Actually, it has its own beauty – the bush.’

Rupert slid the silk top she was wearing off her shoulders and nibbled her neck. ‘Not as beautiful as you.’

‘I’ve been trying to call you for days but there was no answer. So many things happened …’

‘Oh, yes. So sorry, darling. There was no signal at the clinic in the country. And I was quite doped up on painkillers.’

‘I needed to talk to you … I …’

‘Why not let our bodies do the talking? Let’s make love, right here, looking out over the river.’

The touch of his fingers on her skin felt so soothing. She sighed with relief and pleasure as he caressed her. Her irritability melted away. She kissed him back with passion. Perhaps she was just a little jet lagged after her trip. Rupert knelt to peel down her jeans, but his head jerked back
like
a snake surprised by a mirror. ‘Is that … is that … cellulite? Good God, I never noticed that before.’

Anthea’s fiancé began to examine her thighs with such intensity that she felt like a new strain of bacteria beneath a microscope. ‘How long have you had cellulite?’ he asked playfully, but his gaze was reproachful. ‘Come to think of it, I’ve never really seen you naked before. My eyesight was so bad and I always took my glasses off when we made love. Well, well, well … Who’s been letting herself go?’ He addressed her as though she were a stray cat which had wandered into the garden.

Anthea felt a shift in her feelings for her fiancé. It was as though she’d woken up to find that all the furniture in the flat had been rearranged without her knowledge.

Before she had time to adjust, Rupert pulled her down on to the carpet by the mirror in his study. ‘My word, Annie, what were they feeding you out there?’ He gave her three pats on her rump, the sort you would give an old dog. ‘Somebody needs to tone up! Now that I’ve had laser surgery, there’s no pulling the wool over my eyes any more.’

The man she’d thought she adored began to go a little blurry for her, like a smudged water-colour or a photo taken slightly out of focus.

After they’d made love, when she glanced across at him to gauge his reaction to the slight bruises and scratches on her upper arms, Rupert was looking at her as though she were a carbladen, full-fat burger his doctor had told him to avoid, instead of the organic beet salad he’d actually ordered.

‘Perhaps you need a better jogging bra, babe. Haven’t you ever noticed those stretch marks on your breasts? I’ve never seen them before. Did you ever notice them?’ His tone was one of baffled disappointment.

Thoughts crowded her mind like traffic. ‘One day I will have nipples down to my knees, you know. What will you think then?’

‘There’s always cosmetic surgery. Beauty is, after all, one of the most natural and lovely things money can buy,’ he joked. But there was no warmth in his voice.

‘I see. So, are our wedding vows going to say “For better or for worse – but not if your secretary is prettier and predatory”?’

‘Of course not, darling,’ he said, but his smile
did
not quite reach his eyes. He pulled her to him again and tried to distract her with kisses.

She attempted a caress in return, but her lover seemed to be disappearing before her eyes, melting slowly like a snowman until all that was left of him was a pool of ice. He’d noticed her flaws but not the many fading scratches and bruises on her body from her near-death experience. As he entered her again, this time from behind, she glanced up over her shoulder and caught Rupert looking appreciatively into the mirror – at himself.

It was then that Anthea’s mild anxiety changed entirely into revulsion. She couldn’t hide a swift shudder of disgust. ‘Epiphany’ – an enormous breath of understanding – was the word she would use later to Jane. Her fiancé obviously kept fit by doing step aerobics off his own ego. Her sister was right. The man had love bites on his mirror. Rupert might have been the one to have eye surgery, but it was Anthea’s vision which was suddenly, miraculously, clear. They’d been so keen to get an apartment that looked out over the Thames, they had forgotten to take a good long look at each other.

In the evening sun the river became a shining mirror – and Anthea didn’t like what she saw in it. Namely that the scratches on her were not the only superficial things about her. She’d been emotionally short-sighted.
She
was the one who needed her eyesight adjusted. She couldn’t believe she’d ever seen anything in Rupert. Or how blinkered she’d been to his faults. The rushing tidal waves of the Thames smacked against the embankment wall, as though scolding her for her stupidity.

Rupert stopped stroking her thigh and flicked at a patch of dry skin. ‘Maybe you need a body scrub, babe? Or a day at the spa or something? Your skin is so dry, it’s audible!’

Her angry expression evaporated into a look of distant, almost sweet, unconcern. ‘Really? My clever sister has found the perfect cure for that. Lanolin.’ Anthea thought quickly. If she gave in her notice at work, kicked out Rupert and sold the flat, that would give her three weeks in which to get back to Australia for Jane’s wedding. And time to convince Jacko that she was sorry for what she’d done, and that there was more to her than met the eye. How astounded Jane would be to see Anthea do something spontaneous for
once!
Jimbo had promised to take her caving, horse riding, panning for gold …

She slapped away Rupert’s hand and crossed the room to switch off the air conditioning and throw open a window. ‘Oh, a little hint to help you find your next girlfriend, Rupert,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘Ugliness is purely in the eye of the beholder. You can get it out with Optrex.’

About the Author

Kathy Lette first achieved success as a teenager with the novel
Puberty Blues
, which was made into a major film and a TV mini-series. After several years as a newspaper columnist and television sitcom writer in Los Angeles and New York, she wrote eleven international bestsellers including
Mad Cows
(the film starred Joanna Lumley and Anna Friel),
How to Kill Your Husband (and Other Handy Household Hints)
(recently staged by the Victorian Opera),
To Love, Honour and Betray
and
The Boy Who Fell To Earth
. Her novels have been published in fourteen languages.

Kathy appears regularly as a guest on the BBC and CNN News. She is an ambassador for Women and Children First, Plan International and the White Ribbon Alliance. In 2004 she was the London Savoy Hotel’s Writer in Residence where a cocktail named after her can still be ordered. Kathy is an autodidact (a word she taught herself) but in 2010 received an honorary doctorate from Southampton Solent University.

Kathy lives in London with her husband and two children. Visit her website at
www.kathylette.com
and on Twitter
@KathyLette
.

Also by Kathy Lette

The Boy Who Fell to Earth

Men: A User’s Guide

To Love, Honour and Betray
(Till Divorce Us Do Part)

How to Kill Your Husband
(and Other Handy Household Hints)

Dead Sexy

Nip ’n’ Tuck

Hit and Ms

Puberty Blues (co-author)

Altar Ego

Foetal Attraction

Girls’ Night Out

Mad Cows

The Llama Parlour

TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA
A Random House Group Company
www.transworldbooks.co.uk

LOVE IS BLIND
A BLACK SWAN BOOK: 9780552779197
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781448167197

First publication in Great Britain
Black Swan edition published 2013

Copyright © Kathy Lette 2013

Kathy Lette has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Addresses for Random House Group Ltd companies outside the UK can be found at:
www.randomhouse.co.uk
The Random House Group Ltd Reg. No. 954009

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