Read Online Maximum Exposure by Jenny Harper - Free Book Online Page A

always did at this time of year, breaking through the darkness in dribs and drabs, peeking out from behind thick cloud cover until the forces of light could no longer be thwarted. Daisy rolled over in her bed and reached out, vaguely, to the side where Jack slept, before remembering, through the blur of half sleep, that she was a year and more out of date. Wrenching her mind from the same old feelings, she tried to visualise The Diary for today.
    The Diary, filled in by the reporters to book her time, was what dictated her every move. Short of fire, flood, murder, pile-up, or other disaster, The Diary sent her to this school for nine, that meeting for eleven, down the High Street by two for a photo opportunity with Provost Porter and his dumpy missus or across the county to snap some lucky lottery winner by four. What did it hold for her today? More of the same, undoubtedly. Unless editor Bond had other ideas, of course. If she had a job at all this morning.
    ‘I am not happy,’ she said to her menagerie. They looked steadily back at her, their loyalty unwavering. ‘Not happy at all.’
    Having got that off her chest she felt well enough to swing her legs out of bed, use her feet to find her slippers, wrap herself up in her old candlewick dressing gown, and shuffle through to the kitchen. She hoped Lizzie might already have made coffee, then remembered that she had disappeared into her room with a new man last night and hadn’t reappeared.
    Lizzie had a relaxed view of relationships. Undemanding and happy, she attracted men like bees to nectar, waving them adieu with such sweet grace when she tired of them that they left uncomplainingly, each feeling that he had been the luckiest man in the world. It was a gift that Daisy had dissected endlessly in her mind, wishing she could emulate both the ease with which Lizzie attracted men and the facility with which she moved on, untouched by sorrow, from each.
    It put her in a class quite different from Shagger Sharon.
    ‘Shagger Sharon?’ Daisy swung round. Damn. She must have been mumbling out loud. Lizzie had appeared, her thick brown hair lying untidily round her shoulders. Uncombed, unwashed, her face completely without make up, she still looked gorgeous. ‘What’s she up to now?’
    Behind her lurked a man, unashamedly naked to the waist. Tattoos adorned his upper arms and he boasted a six-pack any gym-goer would be proud of. Grinning at them from the shadows, he pulled on a sweatshirt and emerged into the kitchen.
    ‘This is … er … meet …’ Lizzie waved at him vaguely.
    ‘Dougie,’ the vision supplied, grinning from an attractively unshaven face. ‘Hi.’
    ‘Hi,’ Daisy said dutifully as Lizzie made coffee.
    ‘You were saying …?’
    ‘About?’
    ‘Sharon Eddy?’ Lizzie loved getting the gossip from Daisy’s office.
    ‘She’s after the new editor. At least, I think she is.’
    ‘Will she get her man?’
    ‘You know Sharon,’ Daisy said dismally.
    Where Lizzie was kindly, generous in bestowing her favours, Sharon’s sexual rapacity had a more desperate edge to it. With Lizzie, sex was simply something she needed to do as part of her work-life balance, like cleaning her teeth or washing her hair. Sharon, by contrast, generally flaunted her conquests triumphantly before, for one reason or another, each moved – or was moved – on.
    ‘Poor Mr Bond,’ said Lizzie, but despite a twinge of sympathy, Daisy couldn’t really bring herself to feel sorry for him.
    ‘Apparently dog poo doesn’t do it for our swanky new editor,’ Murdoch muttered to Daisy as he drifted over to join her by the kettle.
    ‘Really?’ said Daisy, her mind half on how she could get from Hailesbank to Jordanbank to catch the local Member of Scottish Parliament’s visit to a recycling plant, then back to Hailesbank in time for the photo shoot with the cleaners who were stripping the graffiti off the public toilets in town. The reporters on The Herald , in her opinion,