Nine Uses for an Ex-Boyfriend Read online

  About the Book

  Hope Delafield hasn’t always had an easy life.

  She has red hair and a temper to match, as her mother is constantly reminding her. She can’t wear heels, is terrified of heights and being a primary school teacher isn’t exactly the job she dreamed of doing, especially when her class are stuck on the two times table.

  At least Hope has Jack, and Jack is the God of boyfriends. He’s sweet, kind, funny, has a killer smile, a cool job on a fashion magazine and he’s pretty (but in a manly way). Hope knew that Jack was The One ever since their first kiss after the Youth Club Disco and thirteen years later, they’re still totally in love. Totally. And then Hope catches Jack kissing her best friend Susie …

  Does true love forgive and forget?

  Or does it get mad … and get even?

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Sarra Manning

  Copyright

  Dedicated to my best friend, Kate Hodges, who was gestating and then giving birth to Dusty and Arthur while I was writing this book. Your finished product totally trumps mine!

  Thanks

  As ever, I owe huge amounts of gratitude to Gordon and Joanne Shaw, Sarah Bailey, Sophie Wilson and Lesley Lawson for not minding too much when I never returned phone calls or emails. I’d also like to thank my running buddy, Gael Oldfield, and the ladies of Twitter: Sam Baker, Anna Carey, Sarah Franklin and Lucy McCarry for all their support. I’m especially indebted to Ruthie Morgan who very kindly shared her experiences from the primary-school frontline with me and taught me several new ways of telling people off.

  Finally, an entirely inadequate thank you to my amazing agent, Karolina Sutton, and Catherine Saunders, Helen Manders and all at Curtis Brown. And to my editor/cheer-leader/provider of tough love, Catherine Cobain, as well as Sarah Roscoe, Madeline Toy, Sophie Wilson (yes, I know, two Sophie Wilsons), and the rest of the team at Transworld.

  http://twitter.com/sarramanning

  Prologue

  It was obvious it wasn’t the first time that Hope’s boyfriend and her best friend had kissed. It also looked, to the casual observer, as if they usually did more than kiss when they weren’t on a clock or running the risk of being discovered.

  Hope could hear the wet clash of their mouths and Jack’s groans as Susie stroked him, and she didn’t know why she was simply standing there when she should have been charging out of the back door and shrieking something along the lines of, What the hell are you two doing? You utter, utter bastards!

  Jack and Susie were illuminated beautifully in the glare of the sensor light that Jack’s dad had fitted on the outside wall to scare off the foxes that kept scavenging through their bins, and Hope had a perfect view of Jack’s hand threaded in Susie’s glossy treacly brown hair so her beautiful face was upturned, his other hand making strange, contorted shapes under her Catherine Malandrino silk top. If she squinted extra hard she was sure she could even see the tangle of tongues as they kissed as if they were starring in their own porn film.

  Jack never kisses me like that any more, Hope thought to herself as she stood on the steps that led from their tiny kitchen to their tiny back garden. Hasn’t done for ages and ages. Not since they’d been teenagers snogging furiously in the no-man’s-land between their respective houses, ten minutes after Hope’s curfew had ended. But Hope would never have shoved her hands down the front of Jack’s jeans in those days, as Susie was doing now, and if Jack had tried to touch her breasts under her clothes, Hope would have screamed loud enough to wake her parents, if her parents had actually been asleep instead of staying awake until their only daughter was safely tucked up in her single bed.

  And still Hope stood there as if her feet had taken root, hands lifted to her mouth to mute any noise she might make. The scent of garlic clinging to her fingers made her stomach heave and oh God … Her childhood sweetheart, the boy she’d been with for half her lifetime, her one true love, the man she was meant to be with for ever and ever and ever, amen, was passionately and furiously kissing her best friend.

  How could they?

  AT PRECISELY TWO on a sunny Saturday afternoon Hope Delafield came to the sudden and shocking realisation that she should never have decided to throw a dinner party.

  This epiphany came during her fifth attempt to tie up her lamb roulade without the stuffing oozing out. The same leg of lamb that had meant an hour-and-a-half round trip, up and down several hills, to get to the organic butcher’s in Kentish Town. It was only after she’d lugged the lamb and four bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon Blanc back home in the blistering early-September heat, that Hope realised she’d forgotten to ask the butcher to butterfly the joint and had been forced to retrace her steps.

  At least it had been a brief respite and a dose of fresh air for Hope who’d been up since six making double pesto for the roulade filling, a marinade for her scallops starter and soaking brioche in Cointreau for a bread and butter pudding. ‘God, I never want to see another pine nut as long as I live,’ she proclaimed loudly, but it wasn’t loud enough to be heard over the racket of Red Dead Redemption and the new Fleet Foxes album. Hope didn’t know how Jack could play video games and listen to music at the same time, and she wanted to barge into the living room and yell at him, because the noise was giving her a tension headache.

  She even took a step out of the kitchen but stopped herself. She was getting a tension headache because there was double pesto dribbling out of her roulade on to the worktop and even with the back door open their tiny kitchen was stuffy and hot. None of that was Jack’s fault and he’d had to work really late the night before and though he thought having a dinner party was a stupid idea, he’d been a really good sport about it, even when Hope had cooked scallops for tea every evening that week as she’d tried to find the right balance between raw and rubbery. It had taken three attempts to get them lightly seared and although there had been a lot of lip-tightening, Jack hadn’t said anything, apart from heaping lavish praise on her minted pea purée.

  Jack wandered into the kitchen half an hour later as Hope was tentatively p
oking at the lamb with a wooden spoon as she gave it a quick sear in a frying pan.

  ‘Why the long face, Hopita?’ he enquired, leaning over her shoulder so he could peer at the contents of the pan. ‘Is it meant to be oozing like that?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ Hope turned off the gas so she could sink down on the floor, which was liberally scattered with pine nuts, and sit with her back against a cupboard and stretch out her legs. ‘I’m this close to going out and getting eight ready meals.’

  ‘You can’t do that. You’ve already blown our entire food budget for the month. We’re going to be living on toast and spaghetti hoops as it is,’ Jack said wearily, as he prodded the meat with his finger. ‘Smells nice though.’

  Inspiration suddenly struck. ‘Maybe I could baste the joint with the gloop that’s oozed out?’ Hope mused, hauling herself up as Jack squatted down so that for a moment they were nose to nose and he kissed her forehead, so he couldn’t be that mad with her. ‘I’m sorry. You were right and I’m never, ever having a dinner party again, even if one day we can afford to live in an actual house with an actual dining room and have the whole thing catered.’

  ‘Do you promise?’ Jack asked, taking Hope’s sticky, garlicky, pine-nutty hand and placing it over her heart. ‘You have to promise.’

  ‘I promise,’ Hope said, wiping her hand off on her T-shirt, which was already smeared with olive oil, butter and jam. ‘I mean, I like cooking. Just not when everything has to be perfect and weighed out and …’

  ‘You end up using every single dish and utensil that we own,’ Jack interrupted, as he rose to full height and surveyed the kitchen, which had pots and pans and cutlery heaped on every surface and even stacked on the two gas rings that Hope wasn’t using. ‘It’s a small kitchen …’

  ‘I think you meant to say “poky”.’ Hope flapped her arms to illustrate said pokiness. Jack could actually stand at the epicentre of their kitchen, stretch out his arms and touch the walls. ‘A poky kitchen in a poky basement flat.’

  ‘It’s not poky; it’s bijou,’ Jack argued. ‘It’s not a basement flat; it’s a garden flat. And it’s your first step on the property ladder, young lady.’

  ‘The scary thing is that I can’t tell whether you sound more like my mum or your mum,’ Hope said, picking up her spoon so she could poke her roulade again.

  ‘Well, when they start on the topic of owning your first home they’re pretty interchangeable,’ Jack said absently as he looked around at the havoc that Hope had wrought. ‘You know, if you just tidied up as you went along, then it wouldn’t get so chaotic and you could tick off each item on your checklist and you’d feel a lot calmer. I bet you don’t even know where the list is.’

  Hope knew exactly where the list was. Nowhere, because she’d never got round to making a list. Jack was all about tidying up as he went along and lists and minimalism and sleek, modern lines, and she was about letting things happen in an organic fashion until they all happened at once, like now, and Jack had to force her to write a to-do list, while he started on the washing-up.

  Jack was also very anti leaving things on the draining board instead of drying them with a tea towel and putting them away so the whole process took half an hour, though Hope put up a spirited defence against putting away things that she’d need again in five minutes, until Jack scooped up a handful of sudsy water and flung it at her so the ends of her red hair, which weren’t skewered in a bun held together with two HB pencils, were soaked and her T-shirt clung to her breasts.

  ‘Don’t you feel better now that you’ve got a list?’ Jack demanded, adroitly fending Hope off as she tried to get in on the dishwater action. ‘Like everything’s under control?’

  ‘Well, I suppose,’ Hope panted, as she tried to duck under Jack’s arm. ‘The thought of making the list wasn’t as bad as the actual making of it, but I’m drenched.’

  ‘I know,’ Jack said with a leer, reaching up with a wet hand to give her sodden left breast a quick squeeze. ‘By the way, nice tits.’

  Hope pretended to glare at him but after twenty-six years of knowing her, Jack could spot one of her fake glares at fifty paces so he just grinned as he slyly tweaked her other breast. And even after twenty-six years of knowing him, when Jack was beaming at her like that, Hope was powerless to resist him.

  ‘You’ll never get to see them again if you keep doing that,’ she told him sternly, because it didn’t do Jack any good to know just how potent the power of his smile was.

  It was no wonder that Lottie and Nancy from next door, who were ten and twelve respectively, went red in the face and giggly every time they saw Jack. The week before, Jack had been bare-chested as he watered the garden with the hose, and the giggling from the other side of the garden fence had got so shrill and frequent that Hope, who’d been treating her roses for greenfly, had feared for her eardrums.

  But if you were a tween, then Jack was all your pre-pubescent fantasies made flesh and living next door. He was tall and slim with thickly lashed blue eyes and a pretty, pouty mouth that wore a perpetual smile. He had a moptop of thick brown hair that was half Beatle, half Justin Bieber, and he dressed just like a teen popstar who’d been given a rock ‘n’ roll makeover by his stylist: tight jeans that were just loose enough to slip down and show his pert, boxer-shorted arse to the world, Chuck Taylors and skinny T-shirts, which clung lovingly to his chest and proved quite emphatically that he didn’t have an ounce of fat anywhere about his person.

  Factor in the cool job as art editor on Skirt magazine, which meant he could procure tickets for premieres of films featuring sparkling vampires, CDs of the latest boyband and, on one never-to-be-forgotten occasion, tickets for the X-Factor final, and it was inevitable that Lottie and Nancy would fall madly and hopelessly in love with Jack, in much the same way that Hope had when she was thirteen and he was fifteen and he’d suddenly stopped being the boy next door and become the measure by which all other boys were judged and found wanting. Back then, though, all that Jack had had in the way of connections was a newspaper round, which meant that he occasionally stole a copy of J17 for her.

  Hope, on the other hand, was a primary-school teacher with red hair, who’d once shouted at Lottie for dashing across the street on her roller skates into the path of a pizza delivery boy on a moped. Even worse, Hope had then frogmarched Lottie back home so she could be shouted at by her mother, Alice, too. Since then Lottie and Nancy had made it perfectly plain that they couldn’t understand what the god-like Jack was doing with that ‘totally mean ginger girl’.

  What he was currently doing was running his eyes down Hope’s dinner-party checklist. ‘So you’ve got an hour free now between sealing the roulade and making the mascarpone cream? Shall we sort out the living room?’

  Hope nodded unenthusiastically. It was far too hot to be lugging furniture about, or serving a main course as heavy as lamb roulade with dauphinoise potatoes, for that matter.

  ‘Maybe I should sauté the potatoes instead of baking them with loads of cream,’ she pondered out loud. ‘Do you think you could get me some more olive oil when you go out?’

  Jack groaned. ‘This is why you need to be more organised. When you go off road, terrible things always happen, Hopita.’

  ‘No, they don’t,’ Hope insisted, because this was nothing like the time that she’d run out of caster sugar when she was baking and had improvised by mashing up brown sugar cubes. Or when she’d been learning to knit and hadn’t been able to get more of the chunky wool she’d been using so had switched to a fine yarn to give her scarf some texture. ‘It’s our first dinner party and everything has to be just so.’

  ‘Our only dinner party,’ Jack reiterated sharply, as if he hadn’t been joking earlier. ‘We are never doing this again. Not in my lifetime.’

  It took them nearly half an hour to tug, shove, lift and heave their futon sofabed (which was uncomfortable both to sit or sleep on) into the bedroom. Hope decided to multitask and use this time to get Jack on board the d
inner-party train. After all, she’d invited his two artboy mates, Otto and Marvin, not just to appease Jack but also as potential cannon fodder for Hope’s friends Lauren and Allison, who were both going through a dry spell. Jack had been boringly insistent that they had room for only four guests but Hope had to invite her other friend Susie as a very paltry thank you for buying her a Latitude ticket, even if it did mean that Susie’s grumpy boyfriend, Wilson, had to be invited too. And anyway, ‘Having a dinner party is grown up and now we own our own home and we have two sets of bed linen and spare towels we should be doing more grown-up things.’

  Jack shrugged. ‘We don’t actually own our own home. It’s jointly owned by our parents, who lent us the deposit, and the Halifax.’ He sat down on their bed, which they’d got on Freecycle and which was almost as uncomfortable as the sofabed, and pulled Hope down to sit alongside him. ‘Sorry. It’s just … well, it’s our last weekend before school starts and you get bogged down with lesson plans and standardised tests. I kinda wanted this weekend to be just the two of us. And now you’re mad at me, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m not,’ Hope said, though she kind of was, after all the trouble she’d gone to. ‘At least I’ve learned an important life lesson about planning a menu that can be made days in advance and shoved in the freezer.’

  ‘Well, as long as it’s been a teachable moment then that’s OK.’ Jack kissed the top of her head, even as he sighed. ‘So, olive oil, and what else have you forgotten? Did you buy a couple of decent bottles of wine that The Pretentious Wanker will deign to drink?’

  ‘He’s called Wilson,’ Hope said mildly, because Wilson was a pretentious wanker, who only seemed to come with one facial expression, a world-weary sneer. ‘The offy was having a four-for-three promotion, so I did get wine but, hmm, I suppose we do need to get something a lot more expensive with a subtle bouquet.’