Read Online A Spring Affair by Milly Johnson - Free Book Online

heads were down, concentrating hard on the work they were doing–checking everything time and time again and then fretting that the checking was taking up too much time.
    Lou felt so sorry for them. She would have bet the contents of her purse that Nicola had been on their backs again. It wasn’t fair and she wished she could do something. But standing up for her colleagues might only make things worse. Of course, if this had been school, Lou would have had Nicola by the scruff of the neck like she’d had her then nemesis–Shirley Hamster–on numerous occasions for bullying the younger kids. But that Lou was long gone. This Lou sat at her desk and got on with her work quietly and expediently, and didn’t rail against the social order.
    She couldn’t have known that some primitive sense in Nicola was alert to the dormant strength which still lay within her. The irony was that Lou felt the weakest of them all, especially at the moment. Never had her name been so apt. Inside, she felt as cold and dead as Winter itself.

Chapter 8
    The night before the skip arrived, Lou totted up ten binliners-full of throwaways, not counting an old carpet that she had had to cut up into strips with a Stanley knife. She had asked Phil to help her lift it downstairs in one piece but he had looked at her in total horror and said, ‘I’m not knackering up my back lifting that thing. Why don’t you just leave it where it is for now?’
    Lou found that was no longer an option. Her initial plan might have been merely to clear out a few drawers and cupboards, but knowing there was so much space taken up by the useless and the broken had seriously begun to irritate her and, once she had started, she found she couldn’t stop. The clear areas just showed up the cluttered areas more by comparison. How could she have lived for so long with so much rubbish and not seen it? Plus she hadn’t had as much enjoyment from getting her teeth into something since she and Deb had planned Casa Nostra , despite the fact that all her nails were broken.
    ‘Well, if that is how you want to spend your leisure time, Lou, you go right ahead,’ said Phil, watching her heave bulging bin-bags downstairs. ‘But all I want to do when I get home from a hard day’s work is sit down,have my tea and read the paper.’ He omitted to mention that he had spent most of that day sitting down, drinking tea and reading the paper.
     
    The skip wagon reversed down her drive at nine o’clock the next morning and out of the cabin jumped a man and a shire horse. Well, he was certainly as big as a shire horse anyway and he stole Lou’s heart instantly–ran away with it and refused to give it back.
    The dog bounced over to her, sensing that in her he would have a warm reception, and dropped into the play position, his great furry head on his paws, his huge dark eyes looking up pleadingly at her for attention.
    ‘Clooney, you big tart, come back here!’ said the skip man gruffly.
    Lou bent and ruffled the huge German Shepherd’s head and when he opened his mouth to pant, it looked as if he was smiling.
    ‘Clooney, what a great name,’ said Lou, taking in the skip man for the first time. He was a wardrobe in overalls with dark hair that flopped at the front over a pair of very smiley bright grey eyes. He wasn’t her type, though. Lou had never really gone for big men. It was too impractical for a five-foot-one woman to smooch with anyone over five foot seven on a dance floor without her neck being half-broken, and without them looking like a pair of total prats. Marco Pierre White excepted, Lou’s tastes had always been for the smoother, average-heighted blokes. That said, Lou’s inner checklists, for some unknown reason, were telling her that this was a man who was making her pupils dilate.
    ‘He gets all the women. I wish I had his knack,’ saidthe man, unloosening the giant hooks on the skip.
    ‘Shall I pay you by cheque or cash?’ asked Lou as Clooney nosed her hand