Page 31 of The Payback Plan
Made a man feel like a king for a few moments. Like he could conquer the world. Yeah, it sounded really dumb but he didn’t make the rules.
This morning he was taking his in the toilet that adjoined a bathroom servicing the living area, when he thought he heard the garage door open. Paige must be back from town. Turning to the loo roll, he frowned. Someone – Paige,of course– had put the bloody thing on the wrong way.
What the hell?
Everyoneknew there was a right way and a wrong way. The paper had to come over the top of the roll, not from underneath. It was like…science. For fuck’s sake, it was like finding the damn remote controls scattered all around the media room instead of lined up in a row on the coffee table where they belonged. Or his CDs replaced (when she bothered) willy-nilly on the shelf instead of following his carefully alphabetised system.
Seriously, since Paige had come to stay, nothing was the right way. She was like areverseMary Poppins, taking all things ordered and creating chaos.
And now this. Apparently, he couldn’t even take a morning dump without being inconvenienced, yet again, by the woman who had blown into his life only a week ago. He wasn’t sure how much more he could take of it – she really was getting on his last nerve.
And she wasn’t leaving until theend of next month!
Irritated, he turned the toilet roll around. What kind of heathens didn’t know the unwritten rule of toilet paper? Had she been raised by wolves? He blinked. Actually… wheredidshe come from? He realised they’d never really spoken a whole lot about her.
He knew she had a brother and a sister and a nephew called Bunky and a niece called Lulu.That was it.He supposed they didn’t talk a whole helluva lot. Which probably had a lot to do with him trying to avoid her because of a) the general chaos that surrounded her and b) those damn freckles which drove him just a little bit crazy and made him think – in the moments when she wasn’t being Mary Poppins’ evil twin – that maybe he could take a whole lot more of her.
But she knew about way more intimate things where he was concerned. His struggles with his script for example.Andwhat he’d done to Bella.
He was just exiting the bathroom after washing his hands when he heard a strange kind of clicking noise. Frowning, he turned his head to locate it only to find some kind of feral animal trotting into the hallway from the door that linked the garage with the rest of the house. Paige, in some kind of cape contraption, her hair a veritable mass of knotty, windswept curls, followed closely behind.
What the…? Shehadto be joking. A strange animal and toilet roll the wrong way around?
‘Stop.’ He held up his hand and, to give them their due, both Paige and the animal – a dog – did halt. In fact, the animal, which looked like it had been rolled in sand, grass and mud, sat his ass on the pristine cleanliness of his polished blonde wooden floorboards. ‘That…thing, is not coming into my house.’
‘Shhh.’ Paige looked at him like he was about to produce a gun and shoot the animal. ‘It’s okay lovely,’ she crooned as she glanced at the dog. ‘Daddy didn’t mean it.’
Oliver almost choked. Lovely? Daddy?Nope.‘Oh, hell no.’
‘Oliver. Casper’s a stray. I know you don’t have any idea how cold it is out there because I haven’t seen you leave the house but trust me, it is.’
Oliver had been in Cornwall in January enough to knowexactlyhow cold it was which wasexactlywhy he wasn’t venturing out. Mostly. And if he hadn’t, the pink in her cheeks would have told him anyway.
‘He has nowhere to go.’
The dog looked at him with big brown eyes, a string of drool forming around the area where a scruffy-looking ball was lodged in his mouth. A twinge of guilt hit Oliver square in the solar plexus. ‘How do you know he’d called Casper if he’s a stray?’
He rolled her eyes at him. ‘I don’t. But we have to call him something.’
‘Um… no we don’t!’ For God’s sake, he had a fucking hamster in his life he didn’t want. He certainly didn’t need a mangy-looking dog. Oliver shoved a hand through his hair. ‘Where did you even find him?’
‘He hopped in the car.’
Oh, bollocks. The creature had beenin his car? Oliver shuddered to think what state it was in. ‘Just… jumped in?’
‘I’ve seen him around town the last few times. He doesn’t have a collar and he doesn’t have a chip and no one knows where he’s come from and people have apparently tried to take him in but he keeps evading them.’
‘He didn’t evade you.’
A small smile played on her mouth as she shrugged. ‘I guess I’m irresistible.’
Oliver glanced at the dog who looked back at him with adude, it’s trueexpression and he wondered if anyone ever said no to her. Or was it that they just struggled to escape the centrifugal force of her as she spun around spreading the chaos of metabolically challenged hamsters and filthy strays.
And fucking loo rolls.
As if sensing he was about to capitulate, she walked toward him, peeling off her cape to reveal a raggedy ass jacket that looked like it had inspired Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colours. ‘I called the vet, she knows I’ve taken Casper home.’ She unzipped the coat then and shrugged out of it to reveal another classic T-shirt.
Surely not everyone was Kung Fu fighting.
