The Goddess Rules Read Online Free

in Africa on a wildlife reserve, where she still resides in seclusion from the world’s media.’ ”
    “So she’s definitely not dead then?” Tanya, who was sitting next to Kate at the computer, asked.
    “Unfortunately not,” Kate said as she clicked onto a stunning black-and-white photograph of the legendary beauty. “She’s sitting in my kitchen eating the marmalade I bought from Fortnum at Christmas.” Kate had finally fled the smoke-filled kitchen when it became apparent that Mirabelle had said all she intended to say to her. She’d then braved the doorstepping paparazzi—who now appeared to have the correct house after all, and were clearly not going to go away until they’d had the first shot in twenty years of Mirabelle Moncur—and gone to her friend Tanya’s house across the park.
    Tanya was Kate’s greatest and oldest friend. She was also so pretty, it was wrong. Not just morally wrong that one person should lay claim to the prettiness jackpot quite so unequivocally, but wrong because it just wasn’t right to be that pretty anymore. It wasn’t very
now,
to be quite honest. To be a true modern beauty required a delicately broken nose, the grainy skin of a party girl, the breasts of a showgirl, and lips so swollen, they looked as if they’d been attacked by a swarm of Japanese killer hornets. But Tanya was truly flawless. She looked like a digitally enhanced Grace Kelly—blue of eye, pink of lip, and hair so softly, wavily blond that people, not just men either, often got the urge to bury their faces in it. Most of them resisted. When they didn’t, her equally beautiful husband, Robbie, would appear by her side and look down on them from his six foot three in threadbare socks and smile until the offender realized that this wasn’t a dream, and then he or she would skulk back to ordinary life in a bit of a daze. Naturally, Robbie was as rich as chocolate mousse.
    They were also the happiest couple that Kate knew. He was the publisher of a deeply worthy website devoted to all issues green and unpleasant—if it involved offshore dumping of chemical waste, pesticides in cucumbers, or genetically modified anything, Robbie was the man to take an interest. Not only was he brilliant and handsome, he wanted to save the world. Kate would have hated them if she didn’t know them. But thankfully she and Tanya had met way back when—one summer when both girls were working for peanuts in galleries in Cork Street. They’d both just left art college, and they used to hover outside the back doors of their respective galleries having a sneaky fag beneath the shadow of the dustbins.
    One day Kate threw her cigarette butt over her shoulder. It soared up, up, and away over the mountains of rubbish in the Dumpsters and landed in Tanya’s hair, thankfully only singeing a few locks. Thus began a summer of sore feet, stroppy heiresses, indecent proposals from married oil magnates, and—most significantly—a new friendship. The girls would sit on a bench in Bond Street, share sandwiches, and invent shopping lists so grand and jewel-encrusted from the windows of Asprey and Bulgari that they were invariably late back into their galleries and got filthy stares all afternoon from their bosses. Still, in Tanya’s case at least, the filthy stares were replaced by obsequious (and bewildered) smiles when the most eligible and sought-after bachelor in just about every hemisphere you’d care to mention slouched casually into Tanya’s gallery one rainy summer afternoon in search of a small Picasso. And the moment he set foot on the shiny parquet floor, it was obvious that Tanya wasn’t long for the sore-feet, gallery-girl business. Instead a whirlwind of long dinners, weekends of being whisked off down winding country roads to grand houses, and giggly evenings of getting to know one another gave way to snap snap in the newspapers, horror horror that Robbie Hirst was marrying the daughter of a schoolteacher and a doctor’s