Read Online Hold On to Me by Victoria Purman - Free Book Online Page A

spine.
    â€˜It’s not the shop. I know I can fix that. I know I can get back to business.’
    â€˜Then what else has got you all tied up in knots, hon?’
    â€˜Luca Morelli.’
    Stella didn’t like gossip and usually kept things very close to her chest, even when it was bare and only her most private bits were covered with a warm towel. But she’d grown to know and love Summer and felt safe sharing at least some of her secrets.
    â€˜Really?’
    â€˜Oh, yeah. He is absolutely gorgeous.’
    â€˜Don’t tease me. There is a serious lack of men in this town. Hang on, let me qualify. Available men. Where are all the available men, Stella?’
    â€˜You’re asking me?’ Stella chuckled.
    â€˜I know, why am I asking you, the born-again virgin of Port Elliot?’
    â€˜Oh, if only I was.’ Stella laughed.
    â€˜So you don’t mind if I accidentally swing by and check him out for myself?’
    â€˜Please, go ahead. I know I’m a sensible woman, a sensible older woman, but he is hot. Young. Buff. In his prime, if you know what I mean. I don’t know what it is. It’s not like I don’t see hot young men all the time, wandering up from the beach in their boardshorts. They’re everywhere down here. But this one …’
    â€˜Score out of ten?’
    â€˜Fifteen.’
    Summer sighed. ‘I’m coming tomorrow.’
    Stella felt loose and began to talk. ‘It hit me today when I was walking here. I’m thirty-five years old, Summer. I’m too young to not be having sex.’
    â€˜Join the club, hon.’ Summer moved to the other side of the massage table and began working on Stella’s calves with her magic thumbs. ‘But I don’t know what you’re complaining about. My dry spell is way longer than yours. You did have Duncan.’
    â€˜Please don’t remind me.’
    â€˜You’ve been so tough on him. I think he’s … nice. In a suit-and-tie kind of unruffled way.’
    One drunken and very ill-advised night a year back, Stella had slept with Duncan McNamee after an impromptu early-summer street party. All the neighbours had dragged deckchairs and bottles of wine out onto the street and toasted the approaching holidays. The sex had been perfectly fine—if you liked perfectly fine sex—but she shouldn’t have scratched that particular itch with a man who’d turned out to have serious feelings for her. She had no intention of getting serious about anyone ever again. She’d thought she and Duncan understood each other, that their no-strings-attached sex was mutually convenient and definitely not to be repeated. But, in hindsight, neither of them had been entirely honest about what they were looking for. She had been looking for sex. He’d been looking for love—and he wasn’t going to find that with Stella.
    She was a woman with a history: there was no denying it. She’d always guarded herself very carefully, but that hadn’t kept her from having all kinds of relationships with men in her twenties. With everything that had happened in the last of those relationships, she’d decided that the casual kind, the great-sex-with-no-strings-attached kind, suited her best.
    She could have had a relationship with Duncan if that’s what she’d been looking for. He was still hovering, a year later, in the hope that she might decide she wanted him again. But she didn’t. She’d slept with him precisely because she didn’t want him. She’d had an itch to scratch and he’d been there. That was all.
    She’d made some stupid decisions in her life before—hello, Sydney—but this one came back to bite her on the arse almost every day. Duncan clearly wanted an encore, and she’d been so embarrassed about her lapse of judgement that she’d willed herself to be nice to him ever since. On the surface, he seemed perfect for her.