Total pages in book: 59
Estimated words: 56970 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 285(@200wpm)___ 228(@250wpm)___ 190(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 56970 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 285(@200wpm)___ 228(@250wpm)___ 190(@300wpm)
But what if there is no “plenty”? What if Leon Finn is a lone fish? A lone fish in a glass bowl swimming in hopeful but ultimately lonely circles forever?
Dumped and forced to retreat to his tiny-town seaside bach, it’s time for Leon to cast some lines, and quick! Prove to everyone—(*cough*) ex, mother, other ex who he’s now accidentally living with—that he’s a catch.
Only no one is biting.
It sucks, but it’s solvable.
With his trusty sewing machine and endless stash of fabric he’ll make himself into the ultimate suitor. Stitch this right up.
But as a certain someone keeps whispering in his ear, is this the right way?
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Chapter One
I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s an Italian leather loafer, teetering on the top shelf of my walk-in closet right above the ruins of a collapsed step stool. Over which I’m currently sprawled.
I pluck up the left shoe, which had tumbled down with me. Great start to the evening, Leon.
The door from my sewing room rumbles on its sliders, and Karl strides into the closet with his usual self-assurance. He spots me on the floor and blinks, like he’s not surprised to find me sitting on a pile of wooden . . . stakes. In fact, I don’t think he’d be surprised if I were stabbing said stakes into my sewing mannequins. Or if the mannequins came to life and started stabbing me.
I pick myself up and dust off my suit pants, tailored to fit—something I worked on that afternoon. Something I hope he notices. Something I hope he rips off me to break our six-month dry spell.
His gaze sweeps down my neat navy suit. “You do wear clothes other than pyjamas.”
“La Grande won’t let me in otherwise.” I glance up rows of slippers to the shoe playing see-saw. Just. Out. Of. Reach. I smile hopefully at Karl. He is, after all, the size of a steroid-addicted librarian.
He doesn’t move. “I cancelled our reservation.”
My stomach lurches as I jump for the shoe and miss. “Better plans for our third year anniversary?”
“Actually it’s been three years and six days.”
We have the same silly disagreement every year. He likes to count from when we unpacked our boxes. I like to count from the day we first had sex, which was a week after he moved in, a month after he sold me the three-million-dollar villa, and a year after I won the lottery.
I ignore the weird jumps in my belly and smile.
“You’re adorably sentimental about when we moved in together.” Always has been. He took about a trillion pictures of us in this house on moving day, and about a trillion more since.
Karl moves to one of my naked mannequins and rests an arm on its shoulder. “We should break up.”
My stomach is meant to fall. Whoosh, out my feet and all that. I kinda hate that it doesn’t. That I’m not surprised. But there have been signs.
Like our stagnant sex life.
Karl rubs his mouth like this is difficult for him. I can practically guess what he’s going to say. It’s not you, it’s me.
“It’s not me, it’s you.”
Wait, what?
“I debated whether to be honest with you, and decided it’s only fair. Awareness is the first step towards change.”
I blink and blink some more. “What are you talking about? The first step to change what?”
“The second step will be much harder work, of course. But I have every faith you’ll try.” He grimaces sympathetically.
There goes my stomach. “What do I need to change?”
Karl steps into the wreckage and pats my shoulder. “Good on you for being so eager.”
Eager? This is not eager, it’s horrified. Can’t he tell the difference?
I ball shaky hands in his five-hundred dollar shirt. A shirt I could’ve made in an evening for forty bucks, but I’m not a brand, so he told me not to bother.
“I really don’t want to be the guy who says mean things while breaking up with you . . .”
Why not pluck up one of these stakes and drive it into my heart? “But?”
“Actually, how about asking our friends? Any one of them.”
They all think something’s wrong with me? “Our friends—”
“Technically I suppose they’re my friends.”
I loosen my hold on him, laughing over the sting of a thousand needles to the chest. “What’s their consensus?”
“You know.”
I make a nebulous gesture for him to please, continue this plundering of my self-esteem.
“You change into pyjamas the second you come home. You never go out. You don’t even watch telly. Or listen to music! You’re only ever bowed over your ridiculously pink sewing machine. Or reading books in the bathroom.” Karl moves to the corner cupboard and pulls out two suitcases.
Boring. That’s what he means.
“I-I go to parties.”
“When I drag you there. You don’t say much. Just sit in the corner drooling over your kindle app.”
“I don’t like talking to people I don’t know.”
“You don’t like talking to people you do know.”
I grab a suitcase, dump it atop the carnage that was once my step stool, and start unzipping. “Let me help you pack.”
Karl grabs a stack of my neatly folded pyjamas.
I frown. He has a screw loose if he’s mistaken my collection of one-of-a-kind flannel pyjamas for his own. “What are you doing?”
He sets them inside the suitcase, gazing at me like I’m an idiot. “We’ve been together three years.”
“And one week,” I grind out.
“Exactly! In the eyes of New Zealand law, that makes this place half mine.”
I clutch a shelf behind me. He’s right. The house—everything—will be considered relationship property now. I should have signed an agreement with him that my property would remain mine. What was I thinking?