Just for the Holidays: Your perfect summer read!. Sue Moorcroft
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it all away?
Refusing to hear Michele’s ‘But –!’, Leah ducked into La Petite Annexe for her keys and purse then emerged with a brief ‘’Bye!’ and a hasty ‘C’mon’ in Ronan’s direction.
Ronan, with a last word to Curtis, allowed himself to be collected up and chivvied out of the garden.
From his position, prone on the cool grass, Curtis watched his dad follow Leah up the path beside the house.
He turned back to his new friends. ‘Your mum’s a MILF,’ he muttered, too quietly for the adults to hear. He’d been waiting to use the line ever since he’d seen American Pie on DVD when his mum and Darren had been out one evening but, frankly, mums usually weren’t.
‘What’s a MILF?’ Natasha screwed her neck to try and see what Curtis was doing on his phone.
Jordan groaned. ‘You must need your eyes testing. And don’t even think it. She’s our mum.’
‘Still a MILF.’
A throaty roar emanated from around the house. Jordan cocked an ear. ‘Leah’s taking the Porsche. Hope your dad doesn’t scare easy.’
Curtis stared. Jordan had short back ’n’ sides dark hair. Curtis wished he, too, had dark hair, like his dad, instead of being sandy with freckles, like his mum. ‘Why do you call her Leah?’
Propping his chin on his hand, Jordan treated him to a condescending stare. ‘Because … it’s, like, her name?’
‘Duh! But why don’t you call her Mum?’
Jordan frowned. Then he began to laugh. He laughed so hard he had to slap the ground making that ‘Huuuurgh!’ sound between peals that people did when they couldn’t even inhale for mirth.
Curtis gave Jordan a shove. ‘What?’
Although she giggled, Natasha was more helpful. ‘Leah’s not our mum. She’s our cool auntie.’ She nodded to where Michele was talking in a low voice to Alister, who was brandishing the nearly empty wine bottle. ‘That’s our mum.’
Jordan laughed harder. ‘Do you still think our mother’s a MILF?’
Face burning, Curtis realised he hadn’t even thought who Michele was in relation to the rest of the group. Yet Michele was much more his idea of a mother – old and a bit plump, wearing a frown most of the time. ‘Erm, sorry.’ The ‘No’ was implicit in his tone.
‘Leah can’t be a MILF because she’s not a mother,’ Jordan pursued, with unanswerable logic. ‘She’d have to be an “AILF”, which you can’t even say.’ His voice was rich with the superiority a fifteen-year-old reserved for thirteen-year-olds.
Scowling, Curtis hunted for a way to redress the stupidity scale. ‘Does she ever look after you?’ He ripped up a handful of lawn to throw into Jordan’s face.
Jordan coughed up a blade of grass before mashing Curtis’s head playfully into the ground. ‘I’m a bit old to need looking after. She used to though.’
‘If she’s a babysitter she’s a BILF then,’ Curtis said smugly, and got the Urban Dictionary up on his phone to prove that ‘BILF’ wasn’t something he’d made up.
Natasha clamoured, ‘But what is a MILF? And what is a BILF?’
In the vicious tone siblings seemed to reserve for moments of inexplicable irritation Jordan suddenly snapped, ‘Look it up, Gnasher.’
Glaring at her brother, Natasha snatched up her phone. ‘I will, then, in the Urban Dictionary!’
But as Curtis could see she was spelling it ‘erban’ she had no success. Soon she shoved her phone in her pocket and went off to the woman that Curtis now understood to be her mother, complaining that the lemonade was warm.
As she drove out of the village, Leah relaxed into the driving seat of the Porsche and glanced over at where Ronan lounged in the passenger seat. ‘I didn’t want to subject you to The Pig.’ As if she would, when she hadn’t driven the scarlet Porsche Cayman since washing the dust from her after the long trek to Kirchhoffen.
Ronan ran his fingertips over the stitching in the leather. ‘I can understand why.’
‘I love this car. I never get tired of driving it.’ Feeling a surge of proprietary delight to be behind the wheel, Leah began to accelerate up the lane out of the village, slotting into third gear as the engine note climbed.
‘And Alister doesn’t mind?’
‘What?’ Flicking into fourth, Leah felt the day’s irritations slithering from her shoulders, glorying in the power of the engine that thrust her back in her seat.
‘He doesn’t mind you driving it?’
The irritations thudded smartly back. ‘Mind? Not at all.’ Leah kept her eyes on the road, turning over in her mind the realisation that Ronan, who handled a truly cool machine as his job, appeared to have leaped to the conclusion that the Porsche could only belong to a man. Her foot steadied on the accelerator and she reined herself in to a stately forty-five miles per hour.
Leah butted heads with dismissive men every time she went on a track day, especially when she was the only female participant. It had created in her a burning need to prove herself in the eyes of the condescending male. In fact, most males. The need was burning particularly fiercely right at this moment, urging her to make a stand on behalf of snubbed women drivers everywhere. And though they were currently sailing past neatly laid-out fields that rose up to meet more distant tree-clothed hills she knew they’d soon come to a half-finished business park on the outskirts of Muntsheim with a very different kind of wide-open space. One that would provide the perfect arena to challenge Ronan’s assumptions.
As she formulated her plans Ronan made up for her silence with a helpful rundown of the tram system into Strasbourg and where to find the ‘office de tourisme’, near the cathedral. ‘But perhaps you’ve visited Strasbourg already?’ he prompted.
Leah, attention not really on city tourist traps, replied absently, ‘I expect we’ll get there but Alister’s more into cycling and active stuff,’ and Ronan retreated into silence, too. Maybe he was worried Leah wasn’t capable of talking and driving at the same time, she thought, grinning to herself.
Ten minutes later the fields petered out and the road became broader and busier, street lighting and advertising hoardings signalling the town’s approaches. The business park came up on their left. Leah slowed to give it the once over. Work at the site looked to have halted some time ago. Red skips and depleted brick stacks were corralled behind temporary fencing but she saw no sign of a workforce.
Would the owners mind her borrowing their big empty car park for a few minutes?
No, she decided, as she indicated and turned across the traffic to nose the car through a drunken line of plastic cones.
Ronan glanced across at her, expression perplexed. ‘You’ll need to go on a bit for either the supermarket or the garage.’
‘Oh, dear!’ Leah tried to look as if she were gazing about helplessly while actually assessing the area for hazards. ‘I’ll turn around.’ She straightened the car up, confirmed it was in first gear and made a last check of her mirrors. Then she stamped on the accelerator.
‘Whoa!’ gasped Ronan as the engine, howling in joy that it was playtime, catapulted them across the tarmac.
‘Oops,’ crooned Leah, relishing the feeling of acceleration. Settling her left hand on the handbrake she gathered power for another few seconds. Then she simultaneously yanked up the handbrake, stamped on the clutch and spun the steering wheel hard left. The Porsche changed direction like a dog chasing a rat.
Flung against the door, Ronan gasped. ‘What the fu—’
Standing on the accelerator again Leah sent the car flying back the way it had come, powered