Married by Christmas by Scarlett Bailey Page B

hand was quite different. A little shorter than Anna, with dark olive skin that she’d inherited from her Italian grandmother, her curves were more subtle, her soft brown eyes, fringed with black lashes, less instantly arresting, and her short spiky black hair, which she liked because it was easy to look after and suited her delicate heart-shaped face, was less obviously sexy than Anna’s Rapunzel locks. Also Liv wasn’t the sort of girl who knew how to be girly, which despite her problems, Anna instinctively was. If Liv met a man that she liked, she’d either talk to him like he was her new best mate, or not talk to him at all. And, as in Tom’s case, if she managed to develop a rapport with him at all, she’d live in the vain and foolish hope that one day he’d suddenly see her in a new light and wonder to himself why on earth he hadn’t fallen for this dark, exotic and rare beauty before, sweep her up into his arms, crush her to his chest and then make mad passionate love to her forever more. Well, for at least an hour or two anyway. The trouble was this particular scenario had never quite panned out for Liv. She’d had a couple of proper boyfriends – one had been at school, and the other had been a few years ago, a guy she’d met at five-a-side, a sweet enough man. They’d got on pretty well, and Liv had been really rather fond of him, even if he was two inches shorter than her five foot two and his pet name for her was ‘mate’. Then one morning he’d sat up in bed and announced that he’d come to a point in his life when he felt that it was time for him to really move on with his life, to commit to a relationship, to get married and have children. And that, he told Liv, holding her hand and looking into her eyes, was why he thought it was time they broke up. She was, he told her, a great girl, a brilliant laugh, a total mate, but she just wasn’t the sort of girl he imagined himself marrying. Since then Liv had come to accept that she was the kind of girl who on the inside was a hopeless romantic, but who on the outside tended to be the girl that men bought pints for and then turned to for advice about other ‘proper’ girls.
    Her hopes had been high when she’d met Tom though, about six weeks before his first fateful encounter with Anna, because she could have sworn that the first time he’d seen her that afternoon, screaming like a fishwife, there had been a twinkle of attraction in his eyes as he’d looked her up and down in her sports bra and Lycra shorts. A little overwhelmed by his charming grin, which made sweetly asymmetrical dimples either side of his mouth, and his sheer physical presence, Liv had done two things. Firstly, she developed an instant crush on him and, secondly, she decided to go for her policy of never speaking to him at all, mainly on the grounds that she was fairly sure he was far too handsome to talk to using actual words.
    Tom on the other hand had had other ideas. He sought Liv out for sparring, complimenting her on her sharp right hooks and precise uppercuts, and showed her some of his own techniques, which frankly weren’t quite as good as Liv’s, but she’d pretended to be impressed by his prowess. After about three weeks of friendly hellos, and mostly kick-boxing-related chats, Liv had come out of the women’s changing room one evening, her hair still damp from the shower, to find Tom waiting for what turned out to be her.
    ‘Fancy a drink?’ he’d asked her as if it was the most natural thing in the world for a man like him to ask a girl like her for a drink. Most likely he wanted to ask her advice on girls, Liv had told herself as she had mutely nodded her acceptance, or perhaps he thought, she actually was just a very short, slightly bosomy boy.
    ‘You’re good,’ Tom had told her in the pub, handing her the gin and tonic she’d asked for as they took a seat. ‘Better than you let on, most of the time. Have you ever thought about