The Last Word Read Online Free Page A

was in LA, and Tabby didn’t want to get charged international rates just because her mother refused to use Skype, but whatever. The person with the purse is in control. And her mother’s purse was made by Prada and full of cash.
    Instead, Tabby went home, changed into her baggy clothes, cleaned the house, hoovered, scrubbed and polished everything she could get her hands on. Then she went for a run. Then she had a shower. In between peeling potatoes and deciding whether or not she needed to flip her mattress, Rhi came home, and they spent a considerable amount of time not talking about the interview. They talked about the crazy people Rhi worked with at the library and watched the news just so they’d have things to moan about. When it got to nine p.m., even Rhi was agitated.
    ‘Turn on your bloody laptop, scaredy cat! I can’t deal with the pressure!’
    In her inbox was an email from Harry Shulman, offering her a twelve-week contract, a decent salary and expenses. Goddamn charm boy, got everything he wanted.
    ‘Shouldn’t we be celebrating?’ Rhi asked, already halfway to the bottle of white wine in the fridge.
    ‘Guess so.’ Tabby sighed. Twelve weeks. In a small office with Harry criticising everything she wrote, then laughing his way out of it. Going from arrogant to interested in under a minute. It was going to be an exhausting twelve weeks.

Chapter Four
    ‘Start being more happy or I’m going to hit you,’ Chandra warned dryly, as they sat at the bar with oversized, overpriced cocktails. ‘I swear, if you turn out to be one of those people who moans and then doesn’t actually change anything, we’re not going to be friends any more.’
    ‘Way to go with the tough love, Chands.’ Tabby rolled her eyes, but nudged her friend. OK, she needed to cheer up. This was her celebration, a night out to, ‘Herald the return of the kickass reporter Tabby Riley,’ as Chandra had put it earlier, when she showed up at the flat, forced Tabby into a clean dress and painful shoes, and dragged her to Covent Garden.
    ‘I really do appreciate this, you know. I needed a night out,’ Tabby said, and instead thought about how what she really needed was her pyjamas, takeaway Chinese food and episodes of Come Dine With Me. Or something, anything, to stop her thinking about her very first ‘Concept Meeting’ with Harry on Monday.
    ‘Yes, yes you did. Is Her Majesty meeting us here, or is it a bit too posh for the Proletarian Princess?’ Chandra raised a perfectly shaped eyebrow and sipped at her Cosmopolitan.
    ‘Don’t call her that. She’ll meet us in the pub later.’
    ‘Pubs,’ Chandra scoffed, and looked down the bar to catch the eye of the cutest barman. ‘Two more here, darling!’
    ‘You will come to the pub?’ Tabby wheedled. ‘If this is meant to be my celebration I need you both there. If only to tell me to stop being a miserable cow.’
    ‘Fine.’ Chandra rolled her eyes, and used her dazzling white smile on the barman, who appeared unimpressed. When he was gone, Chandra sighed. ‘What is it with cocktail barmen? They think they’re so cute.’
    ‘It’s their job.’ Tabby shrugged, frowning at the black-shirted twenty-somethings who provided their alcohol. ‘They know they’re pretty and they think we’re pathetic.’
    Chandra ate the cherry from her cocktail. ‘They probably have damaged egos, and we make them feel better, improving their sense of self-worth.’
    Tabby laughed into her Daiquiri. ‘So what you’re saying is, you’re really doing them a service by imagining them naked?’
    Chandra grinned. ‘Oh, absolutely, you know me, always willing to help a person in need.’
    Tabby and Chandra had been friends since secondary school, drawn together by mutual crushes on television characters and the fact that they both had overbearing mothers. Chandra, being an Indian girl of twenty-six was evading almost daily calls from her mother about when she was going to settle down with a