Sweet Temptation (7 page)

Privately I called it ‘Desperadoes’ – because that’s who we attracted. Sad, lonely types who were all looking for the person of their dreams. Yeah right. Like that was going to happen. As a bitter-and-single type myself, I was only too aware of the romantic nonsense that society deluded itself with. Valentine’s Day? Forgeddaboudit! Red roses? They only went rotten. Candlelit dinners? Fire hazards –
and
they made you fat.

‘Um . . . hi,’ said a bloke down the line. He sounded muffled and furtive, as if he was hunched over his phone, making the call in secret. Grrrrreat. Another wimp on the books. Just what we didn’t need. ‘I’m ringing to find out about joining the agency.’

‘Lovely,’ I fibbed, trying not to gaze at my doughnut. Would he hear me, I wondered, if I licked some of the sugar off? I imagined it rasping against my tongue and decided I had better not risk it. A new client was a new client, after all. ‘Glad to hear it, sir. We have an excellent success rate, so you’ll be in good hands. Now . . . You can fill in your details online at our website, or I can post you an application form, if you’d rather. Or, of course, you can come into the office and we can have a chat about what you’re looking for.’

He wanted to come in and have a chat. I knew he would. The nerds always did. So bloody needy, most of them, unable to do the simplest thing like fill out a form without someone holding their hand. I bet myself a second doughnut that this guy still lived with his mum.

‘Of course, that’s no problem,’ I gushed. The thing about the ones who came in was that, even though they were a pain and took up your time, they tended to be the keenest and most desperate – i.e. they’d feel lucky to go on a date with any old bint I matched them up with. Swings and roundabouts.

We arranged an appointment for the next day and I put the phone down. Doughnut time. Yum. I scoffed it in about three mouthfuls and licked all the sugar off my fingers. Delicious.

I had a small flicker of guilt, remembering the Fat-Busters class I’d been to only the night before, but quashed the feeling immediately. Rome wasn’t built in a day, right?

Now then. Work to be done. I had a few new clients to load onto our website, which always took a little while. I clicked on one of the files to check it through before I submitted it to the site, and skimmed through the details. Okay . . . Andrew Preston . . . aged forty, divorced, two children, construction project manager, six foot two, brown hair, green eyes . . .

Hi, ladies
, he’d written.
I’m a fun, athletic guy looking for friendship and maybe love.

Oh, Andrew, I thought to myself, rolling my eyes. And him with a divorce under his belt as well. You’d think they’d learn.

I’m generous, sociable, intellectual and caring, I love playing sport and the outdoors. My perfect date would be a long walk in the country, then warming up in front of a roaring fire in a cosy pub.

Favourite films:
The Godfather, The Terminator, Highlander

Favourite food:
chicken tikka balti, rogan josh

They always put curry, the blokes. The really macho ones put ‘vindaloo’ – like that was something to impress a woman: sitting there with a scarlet face, eyes watering from the chillis . . . yeah, dead sexy, that. Why was nobody honest enough to come out with good old shepherd’s pie, or sausages and mash with onion gravy? The latter would have been my meal of choice, no questions asked, although I had to admit that, in the past year, I hadn’t bothered to cook a single sausage or spud – or any proper food when it came to it – very much.

Sadly, lots of the women ignored the ‘favourite food’ section of the questionnaire. Too scared of looking greedy, I reckoned. No man liked a porker with her nose in the trough, did they?

It was probably why all the clients felt comfortable with me. As a larger-than-average woman (as I was these days), the men saw me as a safely unattractive type – not intimidating, and not someone worth lusting over. And the women didn’t feel that they had to compete with me for blokes. They looked me over and felt better about themselves, and that was that. I was cool with it. Most of the time, anyway.

But back to Andrew:

In a woman, I look for: sense of humour, long hair, a nice smile and a sexy bum! Slim, sporty figure essential.

If they hadn’t already disappointed me with their predictable food choices, I tended to go off the male clients at this point. I mean, how shallow could you get, specifying that your perfect woman had to have ‘a sexy bum’ and be slim? What happened to beauty being in the eye of the beholder and all that? What happened to
personality
?

I wasn’t feeling too obliging towards Andrew Preston any more – I felt sorry for his ex-wife, to be honest, for ever having been married to such a superficial shit – but uploaded his profile anyway and sent out an alert to all the female clients who might be interested. More fool them.

I was a cynic, yes, but that hadn’t always been the case. Just two years earlier, I had been giddy with excitement about getting married myself, believe it or not. I spent every evening poring over wedding magazines and websites, deliberating for hours about my dress and the menus and the table plans, practising walking in my high silver sandals without going arse over tit, the works. It was as if a mist had descended on me . . . a pink, sparkly mist, filling my mind with a temporary madness.

Oh, I
thought
I was happy, I
thought
I was headed for the big, loved-up fairytale with my handsome prince, Brendan Davies, I
thought
I was the luckiest girl alive. And that was why I took on the Love Hearts franchise in the first place, because I wanted everyone else to feel the same way I did – to find their so-called perfect partner and to ride off into the sunset with them.

How wrong could you get. Six months into the marriage, Brendan Cheating Davies had only gone and got the pink sparkly mist for
somebody else
. And if that wasn’t enough, she was a colleague of mine, too, who I’d met when she came in to put her details on the dating database. She’d been so capable and assured that I’d ended up giving her a job as my assistant, as well as her own Love Hearts web profile.
Ruth McGregor
,
looking for love and friendship.
Should have looked a bit further than my bloody husband, Ruth.

So that was why I was off love. For good. Oh yes. I’d resigned myself to the single life ever since, with just my cat Eddie to worry about. Things were a lot easier that way. You didn’t have to do all that legwork, trying to impress someone else, trying to charm them, trying to kid them that you were Wonder Bloody Woman.

But hey ho. A job was a job. And sometimes the Love Hearts agency did make people’s dreams come true. Occasionally a couple was mad enough to get married. In fact . . .

I turned on my swivel chair. ‘Patrick, when are Damon and Francesca getting hitched?’

‘What, Dumb and Dumber?’ he shot back. ‘First weekend in August, isn’t it? Plenty of time for you to choose your hat, darling.’

‘Plenty of time to think up an excuse not to go, you mean,’ I said tartly. Weddings weren’t exactly my thing any more.

‘Oh, sweets,’ Patrick said sympathetically. ‘Take me as your plus-one, we’ll have a riot. Dumb will get his vows completely mangled and Dumber’s relatives will start a punch-up, you wait. Sheer entertainment from start to finish.’

Patrick was my assistant, my mate and pretty much my saviour. After I’d lost my husband and personal assistant in the space of a week, I’d been in a bit of a mess. My life had fallen apart, I was comfort eating for Britain, and I’d become somewhat slack on the personal hygiene front. I’d also lost a client by telling him, after a large lunchtime gin and tonic, that he stood no chance of ever finding a life partner because his eyes were too close together.

So everything was going down the swanny, basically, when Patrick came into my world. And thank God he did. He spotted my ad in the
Evening Mail
and applied for the job. Within two minutes of the interview starting, he had me in hysterics with his Tyra Banks impression, went on to pique my curiosity with his interest in modern art (a passion of mine), and then, when he commented on how much he liked the font I’d used in the Love Hearts logo (‘You can’t go wrong with Bodoni’), I knew for certain he was a kindred spirit and hired him on the spot.

Life had been on the up ever since, even if he did spend way too long lobbying to get Hollywood hunks onto his Facebook friends list and tempting me into cocktail-heavy evenings out after work that always seemed to end with us eating kebabs round at his place.
Well, why not
, I thought each time I ended up crashing on his sofa. It wasn’t as if there was anyone waiting for me at home. More to the point, he was great company, he made me laugh constantly, and we’d already agreed to live together in our old age if Mr Right and Mr Right hadn’t arrived by then. (His words, not mine. Obviously I already knew that, like Father Christmas, there was no such thing as Mr Right.)

I got back to work, sending sexy-bum-hunter Andrew to the database, then checking over the next profile in my folder: Emily Perks, who was twenty-two and claimed to be ‘into big bad men’. I was quite tempted to stick in a deliberate typo so that it read ‘big bald men’, but she didn’t look the sort to appreciate a joke – or the Ross Kemp lookalikes on our books, for that matter. I chuckled out loud at the thought, though, and Patrick looked up from his desk.

‘What’s so funny?’

I emailed over the profile. ‘What do you reckon for Emily Perks – big bad men, or big bald men?’

He laughed. ‘A haircut should be first on the list, I think,’ he said, pulling a face as he examined her photo. ‘Dear God, that is the worst perm I’ve ever seen. And I’m speaking of a man who’s had one himself, in the teenage years we don’t talk about.’

‘You with a perm?’ I could feel my eyes boggling. Ever since I’d known him, his dark hair had looked impeccable, cut in a short, trendy style. He really was a constant source of surprises.

‘Sadly, yes,’ he said, shuddering at the memory. ‘But moving swiftly on . . . lunch?’

‘I thought you’d never ask,’ I replied. It suddenly seemed ages since the doughnut.

‘Will we be doing Proper Lunch or Diet Lunch today?’ he asked.

‘Hmmm . . .’ I tipped my head on one side while I thought. Yesterday, I had been full of worthy intentions about how I was definitely going to sort out the stone and a half I’d piled on since Brendan and Ruth did the dirty on me – and obviously I’d filled Patrick in on the New Healthy Me regime. I’d had porridge and a banana for breakfast, and a salad for lunch before a thrilling dinner of grilled fish and more salad. Then I’d dared myself to go along to a cringeworthy FatBusters class that evening, where all I could think about was how bloody famished I was.

Today, I’d had porridge and a banana for breakfast . . . and that delicious doughnut for elevenses. It was all Patrick’s fault: he’d brought them in and he knew how much I loved Krispy Kremes.

I was just about to be virtuous and say ‘Diet Lunch’ when he got in there first.

‘Only I’ve still got such a hangover from last night, and I could murder a bacon sandwich. I don’t know if the Greasy Spoon does much in the way of diet food, but . . .’

‘Oh, sod it,’ I said, already imagining a rasher of hot pink bacon and a fat-spattered fried egg. And, while I was at it, thick buttered toast, baked beans, soggy mushrooms and a ketchup mountain. ‘The Greasy Spoon it is.’

After a scarily calorific fry-up (it was going to take more than the promise of a charm bracelet to get
me
back into skinny jeans), a frothy cappuccino and two cigarettes, we were back at our desks, and I had a client to meet. Balls.

‘Wanna swap?’ Patrick called over. ‘I’ve got fifty-eight-year-old Susan coming in who looks like my old headmistress.’ He squinted at the photo, suddenly nervous. ‘Fuck. I’m actually starting to think it
is
my old headmistress. Terrifying old dragon, she was. Who’ve you got?’

‘A bloke,’ I replied. ‘Joe someone or other.’

Patrick raised an eyebrow. ‘Is he hot? Email me his photo,’ he said.

‘Bad luck,’ I told him. ‘No photo.’

‘Hmmm, sounds dodgy already,’ Patrick said. ‘Probably a complete munter. How was he on the phone? Sexy voice?’

‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘We didn’t arrange the booking on the phone, it was all on email.’

Patrick pulled a face. ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘That means a high-pitched, shrieky one, then. God, we’ve got a right pair coming in by the sound of things. Headteacher Dragon, and Shrieky Munter. I definitely need to put those two in our Love Hearts Top Trumps set.’

In a dull moment one day, in between harassing Brad Pitt on Facebook and Twittering about his new jeans, Patrick had compiled a mock ‘Top Trumps’ game featuring all of our most memorable clients. He’d designed proper cards with their photos on and assigned them points for ‘Sex Appeal’, ‘Fear Factor’, ‘Stalker Potential’ and so on. I was terrified of it ever being discovered, but it was a brilliant way to kill a boring afternoon, pitting Slaphead Bob against False-Teeth Hettie, or what-have-you.

‘Well, we’re not swapping,’ I told him now. ‘You do Dragon-Lady, as arranged. The old dears love you. I’ll take the Munter.’

The buzzer went just then to let us know someone was in reception for us. We worked on the top floor of a dingy Victorian building just off Broad Street, and shared the receptionist (Humour-Bypass Carol) with the rest of the businesses.

‘Ooh, someone’s punctual,’ Patrick said, rolling his eyes. He picked up the phone. ‘Hi, sweet-cakes . . .’ (Patrick was surely the only person in the world ever to have called Carol that.) ‘Oh, right, thanks . . . Send her up, then.’ He got to his feet and straightened his Thomas Pink shirt. ‘Okay . . . Enter the Dragon,’ he said theatrically and went to meet her at the lift.