THE HUSBAND HUNTERS (2 page)

‘
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.

‘
Well, he’s still a friend of Simon’s, isn’t he? It’s not as though he will have dropped off the face of the earth,’ I said, defensively.

Even though she was on the end of a telephone line, I could almost see Rach’s eyebrows rising up so high they nearly disappeared into her hairline. But I took no notice. I was inspired - I had actually had husband material nearly within my grasp. Getting him to go out with me again would be easy.

I got ready for the first meeting feeling mildly excited. It felt like a first date with someone you weren’t quite sure about, but you felt like it might be quite promising. The girls were all there when I pulled up in my battered blue Mini.

‘
Come on Bee, we’ve already started,’ shouted Rach, as I came into the restaurant. ‘We’re doing a draw to see what order we’re going to walk down the aisle.’

Soph ripped up a table napkin into five pieces and wrote the numbers one to five on each. They were put into an ashtray and Kazza was nominated to pick them out. Soph, the youngest of us at twenty-five, was picked to be the first bride.

‘
Oh, that’s just great,’ said Rach. ‘That means we’re all destined to be over-the-hill brides. Soph will never get married for at least ten years, which means we’ll all be nearly forty.’

‘
Well. I
might just surprise you all and be whisked off my feet by a handsome stranger,’ protested Soph.

Number two was Kazza and I was number three, which relieved me somewhat as I wouldn’t feel so much under pressure. Rach was number four and Tash was number five.

‘Oh that’s good,’ she said. ‘Now I won’t feel so guilty when I keep changing men as fast as I change my underwear. At least I won’t have you lot breathing down my neck every time I go on a different date’.

‘OK, first item,’ I
said, banging the table. ‘We need to make sure that Tash understands that the word “husband” means getting committed to someone for life. And it doesn’t mean getting off with anyone else’s husband either.

‘
Oww!’ I yelled as Tash kicked me under the table. Tash has been known to show interest in married men before - even once having an affair with a married teacher. ‘If we’re going to find husbands, we need to be looking at men who totally aren’t out of the picture altogether,’ I told her, firmly.

Tash replied huffily that she was going on a blind date with one of her sister’s friends next week and that he definitely wasn’t married.

‘Good. Well, that’s a step in the right direction,’ I replied briskly. ‘What’s he like?’

‘
Well, I don’t know if I will like him, but he has a floppy fringe, so that’s one good thing,’ she said. (Tash has a thing for men with floppy fringes - think Hugh Grant and Robbie from
Eastenders
- uurrrgghh. I’m glad our tastes in men are all different.)

‘
Now on to
a very important point that Kazza wanted raising,’ I said. ‘We need to make sure that we never give off the impression that we are lesbians.’

Soph looked horrified. ‘Why would anyone think that?’ she asked.

‘
It’s just that when I spoke to Rach’s mum the other day, she made a comment that anyone who didn’t have a boyfriend must be a lesbian,’ said Kazza. We all looked aghast at Rach.

‘My cousin has just come out and told her mum that she’s living with a girl she met at college two years ago,’ Rach explained hurriedly. ‘The whole family is in shock at the moment, especially my mum. She even thinks oral sex is a myth and that people don’t do it - so she’s horrified about Caroline, my cousin, and now thinks that the whole of society is falling apart.’

‘Let’s hope that Paul Hardman doesn’t think the same thing, else your plans are up the creek, Bee,’ Kazza said, giggling.

‘Yes, what on earth is all this about sudden hankerings after Paul Hardman,’ demanded Soph. ‘I thought you took one look at him and decided he could never make a Mr Darcy and that was that.’

‘Yeah, well, perhaps I made a bit of a hasty decision,’ I said. Along with the whole of the female population – apart from Rach’s cousin - Mr Darcy in the BBC version of
Pride and Prejudice
was our sex god. For months after watching it I went through life mentally dismissing anyone who hadn’t just staggered out of a nearby lake wearing a wet white shirt. As the months went by boyfriend-less, I decided I was aiming too high. Unfortunately Paul Hardman had been introduced to me about a week after watching it.

‘We’ll
see,’ said Kazza, darkly. ‘There’s always the possibility of him turning gay.’ The girls had never let me forget that one. I’d met Billy at the local gym a year ago, as I was pretending to work out with some rather feeble weights.

He invited me for a drink and one thing led to another. But it all went belly-up two months later when I discovered he had a crush on one of the male riding instructors at the yard.

Since then I had virtually given up hope of finding a red-blooded male.

‘I’m sure it won’t be like that, when Bee gets her act together and phones him,’ said Rach, breaking into laughter. ‘But we might have to warn him that he’s set for the turn.’

‘Oh ha, very funny,’ I said. ‘You’ll be sorry when I get a date with Steve.’

Steve Clark ran the livery yard where we kept our horses. He was, quite frankly, the most gorgeous bloke any of us had ever seen for a long time. Well up there in the ‘Mr Darcy’ league, in fact. We all spent most of our weekends down at the yard, usually neglecting the horses, because Steve always provided a distraction. As far as we knew he didn’t have a girlfriend, and it was not for the want of trying that we were all desperate to get a date. So far none of us had. The only one of us that didn’t actually fancy him was Tash, and none of us could understand why. He was the stuff fantasy was made of, but as Tash pointed out, he didn’t have a wedding ring on, so he didn’t do it for her.

‘Yeah, right, Bee - there’s more chance of Paul Hardman staying straight than you getting a date with Steve,’ laughed Kazza. ‘Or if you did, he’d probably rip you off.’

I groaned inwardly. The girls had never let me forget about my Turkish toy boy Vahid, whom I had fallen hopelessly in love with whilst on holiday one year with Kaz and he had conned me out of my £2000 life savings. I was confident that wouldn’t happen with Paul as he was well off anyway.

The meeting was declared closed. My task was to get a date with Paul. ‘Once you’ve got him, then we step in,’ said Kaz. ‘Before that, it’s up to you.’

***

An email flashed up on my screen from Kazza the next morning. I put down the

model portfolio I was looking through and clicked the mouse. There it was, the minutes of the first meeting.