Blowing It Read Online Free Page B

this before, many a time. The first had been when he’d come home one night from Kempton Park races, half-cut and half-owner (with best friend George, late – in every sense, sadly – guitarist from Charisma) of a two-year-old thoroughbred called Lacy Lil. Lil had been hailed, by Mac and George, as the great post-Charisma way forward.
    ‘She’ll keep us occupied, off the streets, out of trouble.’ George had draped his drunk, stoned self lovingly round his furious wife Kate and tried to persuade her and Lottie that horseflesh really was a cracking investment.
    ‘She’ll run at Ascot. We’ll get a box and you girls can do the fancy hat thing,’ Mac had joined in, carried away by Tequila slammers and wild ambition. ‘
Owners
’ box,’ he’d said, fist up in a victory punch. ‘One up from all that Royal Enclosure bollocks. And you two can lead her in when she wins. I can see it now.’ Kate and Lottie had accepted defeat and hoped for the best.
    Possibly as sweet equine revenge for being a drunk’s five-minute novelty, Lacy Lil had not even remotely fulfilled her new owners’ eager expectations. In spite of being placed with a first-class trainer she simply didn’t understand this concept of the ‘way forward’ in a race at all, not unless she had another horse to follow and preferably several. George and Mac bought themselves all the kit – the Barbours, the sheepskin jackets, the top-of-the-range binoculars, shooting sticks and hip flasks – and followed their protégée from race to race but eventually the trainer gave up on her, complaining she was taking up valuable yard space and making him a laughing stock. Kate had insisted they did their best for her and Lil had been retired at some expense to a sanctuary in Gloucestershire. You couldn’t put teenagers like Sorrel out to grass though, Lottie thought as she filled a bucket of soapy water to clean the rooster’s mess off the car roof. You couldn’t re-home them like cats.
    ‘Maybe if we sold the house we could set Sorrel up with a flat in the village if she really didn’t want to leave the area,’ she suggested. ‘There’s a lovely little place going in the high street, just along from Susie’s gallery. I saw someone from Digby, James and Humphreys putting a For Sale sign up.’
    Mac laughed. ‘OK, maybe when we’ve made some sort of decisions we’ll put that to her – if she’s not interested then we’ll know how much she really wants to stay where her friends are. But I know what she’ll say. It’ll be a big, fat “no”. If she gets the idea there’s a flat on offer, Sorrel will hold out for Chelsea Harbour.’
    Lottie went out to scrub the Audi’s roof. The rooster eyed her from the arch in the yew hedge. The Pushkar Camel Fair, she thought. She’d read up on it. It surely had to be more fun than Ladies’ Day in a heavy drizzle. Apart from the smell: camels were horribly pungent things. And didn’t they spit? She hadn’t seen a lot of spitting at a smart race meeting – at least, not among the horses.

THREE
    CLOVER, BLONDE, THIRTY-THREE and as scrummy as a mummy could get, was having an attack of the doubts, her biggest enemy. This Sunday had started badly from the moment she’d skimmed through the Property Abroad pages of the Home section from
The Sunday Times
. Clover longed for and planned for a dream holiday home in the sun. Somewhere she and Sean and their fast-growing daughters could spend long, sultry summers together before their pair of lovely, sunny-natured little girls vanished into the dreadful whirlpool of hostile teen-dom, begging and scheming to be anywhere that their parents weren’t. It would also be somewhere for friends and family (even Sorrel, so long as she didn’t spend all day having noisy sex with that hormone-charged boyfriend Gaz) to visit. She could see them all now, eating artichokes from a rustic market with
pissaladière
and village-baked bread, beneath a shady jasmine-scented pergola