The Dating Game
Shortlisted for the RITA long contemporary romance award. You need to learn the rules, fast!Book two in the new steamy romance duet from Avril Tremayne!Sarah’s brother Adam has been educating her best friend Lane in the arts of the Kama Sutra for weeks, all in the pursuit of Lane’s real target, David Bennet. So when Sarah finds herself alone with David at an exhibition, weeping over her own terrible dating history, they strike up a conversation. A budding artist, he wants to paint her, so she agrees in return for a guarantee that he’ll find her a relationship that can last more than three weeks (her rather dismal personal best).She reassures herself that she isn’t betraying Lane. After all, Sarah wants marriage and 2.4 kids, and David has made it more than clear he will never want that. Plus he’s going to sleep with Lane any day now. Isn’t he?
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Sarah’s brother Adam has been educating her best friend Lane in the arts of the Kama Sutra for weeks, all in the pursuit of Lane’s real target, David Bennett. So when Sarah finds herself alone with David at an exhibition, weeping over her own terrible dating history, they strike up a conversation. A budding artist, he wants to paint her, so she agrees in return for a guarantee that he’ll find her a relationship that can last more than three weeks (her rather dismal personal best).
She reassures herself that she isn’t betraying Lane. After all, Sarah wants marriage and two-point-five kids, and David has made it more than clear he will never want that. Plus he’s going to sleep with Lane any day now. Isn’t he?
The Dating Game
Avril Tremayne
Contents
AVRIL TREMAYNE
Avril Tremayne took the circuitous route to becoming a writer, via careers in nursing, teaching, public relations and – most recently – global aviation.
She hung up her corporate hat in 2013 after returning to her home city of Sydney, Australia, following a three-year stint in the Middle East, turned her mind to becoming a full time author, and has been writing madly ever since.
When she’s not reading or writing, Avril can generally be found dining to excess, drinking wine, talking about travel, and obsessing over shoes.
I’ve been lucky enough to land two dream jobs in my life.
Being an author is one of them – something I’ve longed for ever since I left childhood behind and imagined working for a living one day.
The other was a dream job because of the industry I was in – global aviation and travel – and the crazy, fabulous people I worked with. Without naming all the lovely folk who came into my orbit during my long career in one of the best airlines in the world, I’ll say that in this moment, I’m specifically looking at you Holly, Dickon, Lloyd, Melissa, Joe, Nicky, Lucinda and Sophia.
These are the people who contributed the most to one of the best professional years of my life – the year I privately refer to as ‘The Year of Holly’, in honour of my smart, beautiful PR colleague who decided the time had come to find the man of her dreams and stationed the rest of the team along the sidelines to provide romance advice date by hilarious date.
Which brings me to an acknowledgement that although this book is a work of fiction from start to finish, some of its funniest scenes were inspired by actual events from that time – one reason The Dating Game has become my favourite book.
And for those of you who like a Happily Ever After…? Well, I can tell you that Holly nailed it when she found Mike during that unforgettable year.
Thanks guys – all of you! – for the fun and the memories.
For Jarrod – my nephew
Heroes don’t come any more gorgeous
… but not sixdays! Six miserly, measly, paltry, pitiful—
Uh-oh.Fist against mouth. Hold … hold … hooold … aaand…whew! Under control. She was not going to give in to those hideous sobs again, even if she had to stuff her fist down her throat to throttle them.
Not that it mattered if she bawled herself into a snot-laden seizure, since there was nobody here to witness it. Well, nobody except the bespectacled bronze head on the shelf to her right, and ‘Clarence Donleavy’—his name, according to the plaque affixed to his wooden base—wasn’t going to be tattling.
In fact, Clarence was regarding her with unwavering apathy, which Sarah decided was the perfect look to carry her out of the storeroom and back to civilization. She swivelled the wheeled footstool she was perched on so she could face him, contorted her face into what she hoped was a matching expression, realized a more scientific approach would be to actually look at herself while she did it, and reached into the evening bag on her lap for her compact.
But it was her phone that her fingers closed around and lifted out.
Perhaps she should check the message. To see if she’d misinterpreted. Because she might have, mightn’t she?
She brought up the text, read the words …
And her breath eased out like a slowly deflating balloon. Nope. No misinterpretation possible.
Liam had dumped her. At the six-day mark—a new low, even by her plummeting standards.
‘It’s a curse, you know,’ she explained to Clarence. ‘I can’t get Lane and Erica to believe me, but I’m definitely afflicted by some sort of anti-love hex. And it’s so unfair, when I try. So. Hard!’ She stamped her foot for emphasis, which proved a little too violent an action for the footstool, which would have shot out backwards from under her if she hadn’t caught it with a lightning-fast shoe-plant.
