‘Why now? Before Sumaira and Deepak rocked up for dinner and started talking about it, you were adamant we didn’t need to do it.’
‘Oh, baby, I still am,’ she said, her fingers playing with the hairs on his chest as if to reassure him. ‘But like Sumaira says, it’ll give us a bit of added security, just to know. To reallyknow.’
Bloody Sumaira, thought Nick, but he didn’t complain aloud. ‘Are you sure this isn’t your way of telling me you have pre-wedding jitters?’
‘Of course not, silly.’ Sally pulled his head down to kiss it. ‘But you know what I’m like. It’s OK for you; your parents have been together since the Dark Ages, while my mum’s been married three times and my dad is on his fourth wife. They’re both always searching for something they don’t think they have and I really don’t want to be like them; I want to know that, at least biologically, we stand a chance.’
‘What if it turns out our DNA doesn’t Match?’
‘Then we’ll be mindful that maybe we’ll need to put more effort into our relationship. Like John Lennon said, “All You Need Is Love”.’
‘Yes, but he also said, “I Am The Walrus”, so let’s not hold too much credence to his pearls of wisdom.’
‘So you’ll do it?’ She gave him an imploring look.
Nick couldn’t say no to those puppy dog eyes. ‘If it makes you happy, then yes, I’ll do it. Now can I go back to doing something else that makes you happy?’
Sally caught a flash of his smile before Nick’s head disappeared back beneath the duvet and between her legs.
Chapter 10
ELLIE
The clock radio hit 3.40am as Ellie finally gave up trying to get to sleep.
With a busy day ahead, she desperately needed to get some rest, but her active brain didn’t seem to get the message. Instead, it raced at the speed of a runaway train with what she needed to accomplish in the next few hours in order to promote her newly revamped app. Under normal circumstances she’d have taken one of the sleeping tablets her private physician had prescribed for her, but she couldn’t risk feeling groggy when she needed to be on point.
Being interviewed by the world’s press was something Ellie had grown to loathe since reluctantly becoming a public figure. A decade earlier, she was another anonymous worker bee, busy behind the scenes. Then the next thing she knew, the world’s media was both praising her and lambasting her in equal measure. It had made her a tough cookie and she fast gained a reputation for being someone who was ruthless in her quest to make her business one of the world’s most successful. They hinted at the unscrupulous methods she may have used to get there, but with no concrete evidence, it was all just rumour. Ellie had paid enough people off to make surethe full story of her early days in business were never truly revealed.
As public appetite for her story grew, the tabloids had sifted through every piece of her private life, examining her past as if she were on trial. They picked apart her former relationships and threw enough cash at her exes that they spilled the beans on what she was like as a person, as a girlfriend and as a lover.
It made Ellie not just wary of the press but of everyone else too, and made dating a near impossibility. And while she acknowledged it was unfair to tar every man with the same brush, each time she met someone new her barriers would go up and she’d attempt to second-guess the motivation behind their interest. Were they only interested in her wealth? Did banging a billionaire make for good bragging rights to their friends? Or was she going to see another kiss-and-tell headline in theSun on Sunday? Ellie couldn’t remember a time when Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg or Tim Cook had been hauled over the coals for their sex lives, yet it seemed to happen to her with an overwhelming frequency.
She rolled onto her side, stretched out her legs and recalled how she had been forced to employ a legal team specifically to fire off warning shots every time she had an inkling the press was up to no good. Then, after half-a-dozen successful libel cases, she became too costly to lie about so they lost interest. Her media team became the go-to guys for all press inquiries, and she turned off her Google alerts, Facebook and Twitter accounts to remove any temptation to discover what people were writing about her. Only when absolutely necessary would she step out publicly as the company’s figurehead.
Ellie gave a frustrated groan at her lack of tiredness, threw her sheets to one side and turned on the bedside lamp. She remembered the email she’d received hoursearlier, confirming a DNA Match had been identified. She’d signed up some ten years earlier, when the company was still in its infancy, and as its popularity quickly rose she had assumed it’d just be a matter of time before she found her Match.
But when the number of registered users had powered through the 1 billion mark, Ellie had begun to give up hope. Her Match was either in a happy relationship with somebody else, he was living in a developing country with no access to or knowledge of the test, or he was just not interested in knowing.
So Ellie had grown accustomed to spending her life alone and, in recent years, had become too consumed with work to even care. She didn’t need a relationship to make her content; she could do all that for herself. What could a Match add to her life that she wasn’t capable of finding on her own?
Nevertheless, she had to acknowledge that a tiny part of her was interested in who this person was.
‘Sod it,’ she said out loud, and grabbed her phone. She opened her email, paid the £9.99 for her Match’s details and waited. Two minutes later, an automated response landed in her inbox.
‘Name: Timothy Hunt. Age: 38. Occupation: systems analyst. Eyes: hazel. Hair: black. Height: 5ft 9in.’
His description accounted for almost half the men in the Western world, she thought.
‘Ula.’ She began to type an email to her PA. ‘Discover what you can about a Timothy Hunt, a systems analyst from Leighton Buzzard. His email address is copied below. Email me what you find out in the morning. Thanks.’
To her surprise, Ula emailed her back immediately.Does she ever bloody sleep? Ellie wondered. ‘Has he got a job interview with us? I can’t see him on my list,’ Ula asked.
‘Sort of,’ Ellie replied. ‘And make sure you find a photograph of him. Hire outside help if you need it.’
Ellie placed her phone back on her nightstand and climbed back under the duvet. She turned to lie on her other side and stared at the vacant half of her bed, the sheet just as crisp and unwrinkled as when her housekeeper had laid it that morning.
And for the first time in a handful of years, she allowed herself to imagine what it might feel like to share that space with somebody else.
