The Honeymoon Prize

Of course, she knew she was supposed to be pushing herself to the limit, but it was a question of priorities, and she had to balance convincing Pel to support her new mission in life against the trim, taut, toned body she had been promised by the instructor who had set her the torture otherwise known as a fitness programme.

‘It’s my birthday next week,’ she told Pel, who was obsessive about keeping fit, and had barely broken into a sweat after running for twenty minutes. ‘I’m going to be twenty-seven. Only three more years and I’ll be thirty!’ she added melodramatically. ‘What’s going to happen to me after that?’

‘You’ll be thirty-one?’ suggested Pel. ‘Just a wild guess, of course!’

Freya stuck out her tongue. ‘You know what I mean. It’ll be downhill all the way into middle age and before I know where I am I’ll be wearing a felt hat and keeping cats. I want to live a little before then! I’m stuck in a rut,’ she complained. ‘I never go anywhere. I never do anything. I never meet any men.’

‘You do meet men. Lucy and I are always trailing eligible types under your nose.’

‘Like who?’

‘Like Dominic. I know he’s an estate agent, but he couldn’t help that. He was clean and solvent, and he really liked you.’

She stared at him. ‘How many estate agents called Dominic do you know, Pel? The one I met wasn’t the slightest bit interested in me!’

‘Yes, he was, but you never gave him any encouragement.’ Pel shook his head knowingly. ‘Your trouble is, you don’t read the signals right.’

‘So you and Lucy keep telling me,’ said Freya crossly. It was an old argument. ‘Anyway, he wasn’t my type. I know I said I was going to wait for Ben Affleck, but there’s no saying when he’ll be free, and in the meantime I want someone more exciting than an estate agent from Chigwell. I’m tired of being a good girl. I want to live dangerously for a change, and I’ve decided that Dan would be perfect for me.’

Pel looked a little dubious. ‘You don’t think he’s just the teensiest bit out of your league?’

‘Well, thank you for that vote of confidence!’

‘You were the one who told me he’d been on the cover of People,’ Pel pointed out. ‘He sounds seriously cool.’

‘And I’m not, I suppose?’

Pel looked at his friend. She was labouring on the treadmill, puffing with exertion, her face bright red and her fringe sticking sweatily to her forehead. ‘I hate to be the one to break this to you, pet,’ he said affectionately, ‘but you are never going to be cool!’

Freya sighed. She hadn’t needed Pel to tell her that. ‘I know.’

‘It’s not that you’re not a pretty girl,’ he went on hastily. ‘In fact, you could be very pretty if you made a bit of an effort.’

‘I am making an effort,’ she objected. ‘I’m at the gym, aren’t I?’

‘In body, but not in spirit,’ said Pel austerely. ‘Look at you now, moving at the pace of a lethargic slug! If you really want to change your life, you’re going to have to lift your game.’

Grumbling under her breath, Freya increased the speed on the treadmill by a fraction. Pel watched her with beady blue eyes until she grudgingly upped it another three levels.

‘The point is, you’re too nice,’ he went on, having sniffed his disapproval at her lack of enthusiasm but settled for the compromise. ‘We all adore you, and we know that you’re not nearly as tough as you seem beneath that spiky exterior of yours. I don’t want you to get hurt, that’s all.’

‘But the only way to be sure that I won’t get hurt is to sit at home, which is what I’ve been doing for most of the last five years,’ Freya objected. ‘I’m sick of it! I’ve realised that the perfect man isn’t going to come and knock on my door, so I’ve got to go out and find him for myself. And you know what? The day after I made that decision, Dan walked into the office. It’s like it was meant to be!’

The treadmill was blurring beneath her feet now, and she clutched at the bar to stop herself being borne backwards and tossed ignominiously at the feet of the fitness instructors who were prowling around the gym, looking effortlessly lithe and faintly contemptuous.

‘Oh, Pel, he’s so gorgeous,’ she puffed. ‘He’s got these deep brown eyes, and when he smiles at you, you just melt into a little puddle on the floor. And you should hear his voice. It’s a real American drawl, so deep and so slow it sort of reverberates up and down your spine…’ She shuddered lasciviously at the mere thought of Dan’s voice.

‘He sounds divine,’ said Pel with a touch of envy.

‘Oh, he is. But he’s not just incredibly sexy and unbelievably cool. He’s intelligent and funny and exciting. Dan doesn’t flog into the office on the tube every day. He’s off dodging bullets in some war zone or working undercover on a story that really matters.’ She heaved a sigh. ‘He makes every other man I meet look so boring.’

‘Hey, thanks!’

‘You know you don’t count.’ Freya would have waved dismissively if she had dared to let go of the bar. ‘The thing is, Dan’s really nice, too. When he rings to talk to the foreign news editor, he always asks how I am and what I’m up to. He’s not like…the other journalists…’

She was so short of breath that her words kept coming out in fits and starts. ‘They only ever…want to whinge…about their expenses…but Dan’s…really…interested…in what you’re…saying…Pel, can we stop now?’ she pleaded, gasping. ‘I can’t talk on here!’

Usually Pel would insist on her completing her programme, and would stand over her like a bullying sergeant major until she did, but she was banking on the fact that he would want to hear everything about her plan to seduce Dan Freer.

Sure enough, twenty minutes later found them cosily ensconsed in the gym bar, fresh from a shower and wrapped in a glow of self-satisfaction on Pel’s part, and relief on Freya’s.

‘So, what does Lucy think?’ Pel asked, handing Freya a gin and tonic.

‘She’s all in favour in principle, but she’s very worried about Dan’s surname. She says I can’t possibly call myself Freya Freer!’ Freya rolled her eyes. ‘I told her I wasn’t interested in marriage, but I might as well have spared my breath. You know what she’s like! Ever since she married Steve last year, her mission in life is to frogmarch everyone else up the aisle.’

‘She’s got a point,’ said Pel. ‘Freya Freer does sound ridiculous. It’s impossible to say, for a start. Try it—Freya Freer, Freya Freer…See? It makes you sound as if you’ve got a lisp.’

Exasperated, Freya banged her glass down on the bar. ‘Look, there’s no question of marriage. It’s not about commitment and mortgages and kids. It’s about a no-holds barred, whistle-blowing, rootin’-tootin’ affair with bells on, OK? I want sex, not love,’ she insisted, and Pel pursed his lips.

‘You say that, but you’re not really the type.’

‘I am now. My hormones are on the rampage!’

‘That’s all very well, but there’s not going to be a lot of bells ringing and stars bursting going on with you in London and him in the Balkans! Why not pick on someone closer to home?’

‘That’s just it,’ said Freya triumphantly. ‘He’s coming back to London. Next week! I had a long chat with him today when my boss was in the editorial meeting. You know he works for one of those US cable news networks whose name I can never remember?’

Pel looked puzzled. ‘I thought he was one of your reporters?’

‘No, he just does occasional pieces for the Examiner. The American networks have got so much more money than us. They often charter a plane and fly reporters and equipment into trouble spots which newspapers just can’t get to, and if that happens, and Dan’s going in anyway, he’ll write an article for us at the same time. We’re a British newspaper, and he works for a US twenty-four-hour news channel, so it’s not as if there’s a conflict of interest.

‘Anyway,’ she went on, flicking her light brown hair back over her shoulders, eager to get back to her story, ‘Dan told me today that he’s hoping to get a promotion. He’s been what they call a “fireman”. That means he gets sent in whenever you have a disaster or a war or a riot, stuff like that. He covers the story while it’s breaking, and then flies out again, so although he’s been based in London he’s hardly ever here. He thinks he’s going to get a permanent post in their London office and—get this!—it turns out that he lives just round the corner from me at the moment!’

Pel raised his brows, impressed in spite of himself. ‘I have to admit it’s sounding promising,’ he admitted. ‘Lots of opportunities to bump into him at the local supermarket, that kind of thing?’

‘Exactly! But it gets better!’ Freya took a self-congratulatory sip of her gin. ‘So there we were, chatting away, and Dan tells me that he’s flying back to London next Thursday, and I just happen to mention that it’s my birthday on Thursday.’

‘Did he ask how old you’re going to be?’

‘His manners are much too good for that,’ she said loftily. ‘No, he asked what I was doing to celebrate and then he said—this is the best bit— “You seem like the kind of girl who’d celebrate in style”!’

Pel laughed. ‘You didn’t tell him that we’re going to the pub and will no doubt end up with an Indian takeaway, then?’

‘No, I didn’t. I said I was having a real cocktail party that weekend. I told him everyone was going to dress up and we were going to have dry martinis, shaken not stirred, and all that kind of thing, and Dan said that sounded great. So,’ Freya went on, working up to a climax that was breathless in every sense, ‘I asked if he’d like to come, and he said he would!’

‘What?’

‘I know, isn’t it brilliant?’ She beamed at him. ‘And I said I was inviting lots of people from the Examiner.’