Page 39 of About Last Night
‘That’s becauseJezwas awful.’
Lula gave her friend a pained look and took a sip of her drink.
‘He was a smarmy little twonk, Lu.’
She nearly snorted coffee out of her nose. ‘Nice insult.’
Emily frowned. ‘Lula, the only person who thinks you don’t deserve to be happy is you. Your bloody parents have a lot to answer for,’ she said, swiping some crumbs from her muffin off the table, her expression unusually serious. It wasn’t like Emily to get heavy with the semantics and it brought Lula up short. Tears pressed at the back of her eyes and she took another long sip of coffee to cover her loss of cool.
Another horrible thought struck her. ‘He’s probably still in love with his ex-girlfriend anyway. He told me he’d thought she was the perfect woman for him. There’s no way I want to get caught up in a rebound thing and then left behind when he’s had enough.’
‘I hear you,’ Emily said, polishing off her coffee and motioning for the waitress to bring her another one.
‘The last thing I need is to fall for my boss right now,’ Lula continued, warming to her theme now. ‘I should be putting all my energy into making a success of my Breakfast Show, not mooning around after someone who doesn’t give a fig about me.’
Emily was looking at her with a baffled expression. ‘If you say so.’
‘I do,’ Lula said resolutely, picking up her muffin and taking a large bite.
She was putting Tristan out of her mind once and for all. From now on, her energy was going into working and friends only, everything else would have to take a back seat.
After spending Saturday morning in a state of restless sexual frustration, Tristan called up a couple of old uni friends and arranged to meet up with them over the weekend. He needed a distraction from the slow, sinking feeling that he’d made a total balls-up of his last interaction with Lula.
She seemed to be able to wreck his hard-worked-for control with just the glimmer of a smile and it made him jumpy.
‘You okay, Tristan? Something on your mind?’ his friend Alex asked as they stared out across the spectacular view of the city from the top of the London Eye.
‘Just work stuff,’ Tristan replied, unwilling to get into the whole mess with Lula. He couldn’t even get how he felt about her straight in his own head, let alone explain it to someone else.
‘Business okay in Scotland?’
He nodded at his friend. ‘Fine. Same as usual, but it’s good to have a break from it, to be honest.’
‘Was it right after uni when you took over there?’
‘Yeah. Ten years ago, now.’
He was actually shocked to realise it had been that long. No wonder he was feeling jaded about going back to it. Being at the radio station had made such a refreshing change.
‘Didn’t you used to have some great schemes and plans for setting up something by yourself? I thought the idea was only to learn the ropes at the family business, then move on.’
Tristan sighed. ‘It was, but I got stuck there. My dad totally lost interest in it and my brother doesn’t give a toss about it either, so I stayed. It’s been good though. It’s a profitable business.’
‘But dull as hell?’
‘Yeah. It’s not the most scintillating industry to be in, but it pays well.’
‘Fair enough,’ Alex said, before he was distracted by his two-year-old daughter and dragged away to look at a view from the other side of the pod.
Tristan watched him interacting with his kid and felt a strange sense of longing that he’d not experienced before. Lula’s face flashed into his mind, but he boxed it, knowing it was ridiculous to read more into his connection with her than was actually there. He was just tired and out of his comfort zone and it was making him feel sentimental.
They wanted very different things and it would be crazy to believe otherwise.
After a few more days of keeping her head down and disappearing whenever Tristan walked into the room, Lula was ready to face the Radio Industry networking event with her calm restored.
Sort of.
Her nerves weren’t just about having to maintain a state of emotional distance from Tristan all night though, the thought ofperforming as her DJ persona face to face with all those people made her feel positively queasy.
