I Should Be So Lucky Read Online Free Page A

those out of the public eye, especially those permanently out of it.
    Rhys had been a music-biz one-hit non-wonder with a mediocre boy band, but had had the kind of lucky looks that rescued him, as he hit his thirties, from the usual road to has-been obscurity by qualifying him for the serial-shagger role in a twice-weekly medical drama called
Doctors and Nurses
. He’d played a randy, rather cack-handed surgeon who couldn’t keep his own anatomy under control, let alone fix other people’s. Off set, he’d become less and less keen to leave the character behind at the studio and specialized in gambling , casual women, speeding fines and the odd drunken bar brawl: if the tabloid press were having a slack day scavenging for celebrity gossip, Rhys could usually be relied on to provide some kind of handy little nugget for page four. Worse, since he’d once told an interviewer that he liked women with curves, he’d acquired a small adoring posse of female admirers who gave up going to slimming clubs and took up the avid pursuit of Rhys instead.
    The posse ran a Facebook fan page, sent birthday cards, would knock on the front door of Bell Cottage and claim they happened to be passing or a car had broken down. There were only about twelve of these admirers, but what they lacked in numbers they certainly made up for in brazen persistence. Was it one of them he’d run off to be with, Viola would wonder in the middle of the night. He’d always claimed he could barely tell any of them apart … but maybe that wasn’t entirely true. There’d definitely been someone hugely special. Rhys was like a cat – once he’d settled into a good, comfortable home, it would take an earthquake to shift him, but, at the end, shifted he had been.
    Viola had hated his tabloid coverage: ‘Where exactly is the show-biz glamour in a pub fight, and all on the front page of the
Daily Grot
?’ she would challenge on the days there were photographers hanging around the gate in the mornings and Rachel had to push her way past them on her way to school. Rhys would just shrug and come up with his ever-ready answer: ‘What does it matter? You and me and Rachel, we know it was no more than me standing on a bloke’s foot, saying “sorry, mate” and buying him a beer. They exaggerate for a living.’ But then he’d do his delighted-with-himself laugh. ‘And hey, who cares if they make it all up? It’s another sprinkle of glitter on the old image!’
    Under threat of his role being killed off in
Doctors and Nurses
, Rhys had been actively putting a more positive shine on his bad-boy image when Viola had met him, and was having a phase of being keen to be seen doing good works instead of bad deeds. Her sister Kate had booked him to be the guest auctioneer at a charity fund-raiser event she’d helped organize and Viola had gone along as a guest. Kate, smiling animatedly, had been showing off her celebrity catch, and had introduced him rather excitedly to her sister. Kate had then been inexplicably miffed when Viola had accepted a lift home with her pet star in his bile-green Porsche. ‘You were only supposed to
chat politely
to him,’ she’d hissed down the phone the next day. ‘Not bloody get off with him!’
    ‘But I sort of thought that’s what you wanted!’ Viola had been puzzled. ‘You practically threw us together! And you and Miles are always saying you’d like to see me settled again, which is a weird term – makes me feel like a badly rooted tree.’ I can’t get it right, she’d thought, sighing at the fickleness of families. Kate was stolidly long-term married. She, on the other hand, had been long-term single since the divorce from Marco, and was beginning to wonder if anyone – anyone
ever
– would ask her out again. But Rhys
did
ask – and he didn’t have to do it twice. He was all charm and fun, seemed to adore her on sight and she, slightly needy and not believing her luck, fell like a stone for him.
    ‘Because it’s