Read Chocolate Cake for Breakfast for Free Online Page B

are not improved by blushing. It makes us look far too much like peeled tomatoes.
    There was a tense, electric silence. One of those really meaningful silences when you realise suddenly that if you said just the right thing – or didn’t say anything – or smiled, or kissed the other person, or something , it could be absolutely perfect. But if you’re me, you’ll probably just cock it up instead.
    ‘Sorry,’ I muttered, bending again to my docket book, and the moment vanished like mist in the sun.
    ‘What do you charge for something like this?’ Mark asked, running his T-shirt under the tap and beginning to scrub his arms with it. There was a tattoo on the inside of his right forearm, a pattern of thin interlocking whorls that snaked from wrist to elbow.
    ‘Hmm? Oh, four or five hundred dollars.’
    On the way back up the driveway we got a clear view through Joe’s living room window. He was lying back at his ease in an armchair in front of the TV, coffee mug in hand. I leant on the horn in the hope he’d jump and spill his coffee, but he never even glanced in the direction of the ute.

    During the ten-minute drive home the conversation touched on the weather, the Super Rugby schedule and the relative merits of Neutrogena foaming facial scrub and Jif in removing the smell of dead calf from your hands. I parked the ute between Mark’s beautiful car and my scruffy one and we climbed out into the frosty darkness.
    ‘Would you like to come in for a coffee?’ I asked, the blood rushing once more to my cheeks as it occurred to me that asking someone in for a coffee really just means, ‘Do please come in if you feel like sex.’ Hastily I added, ‘Or a shower.’ Awesome. That’s cleared it up nicely.
    ‘No, it’s getting late,’ said Mark. ‘I’ll let you get to bed.’
    ‘Um,’ I said for about the thirtieth time in our short acquaintance. Presumably refusing the coffee actually meant, ‘I don’t find you all that attractive.’ I wished I was better at this stuff; gaucheness might be charming in the heroine of an old-fashioned romantic novel, but in the real world it’s just a major turn-off. ‘Okay. Thank you for coming with me – I’d never have calved that cow by myself.’
    ‘You’re welcome.’ He reached out to straighten the ute’s aerial, bent after an unfortunate sliding-sideways-into-a-hedge incident the month before, and said abruptly, ‘Can I see you tomorrow?’
    I blinked at him in surprise. ‘After covering you in rotten calf?’
    ‘Yeah. If that’s okay by you.’
    ‘I – yes, of course it is. Who knows, you might even get to do another horrible calving.’
    ‘I can hardly wait,’ he said solemnly.
    ‘How come you’re allowed to wander around the countryside calving cows instead of concentrating on rugby?’ I asked.
    ‘They try to give the guys who played in the Super Rugby final a bit of a rest before the Tri Nations games.’
    ‘That’s nice of them,’ I said. ‘Would you like to come for tea, or will Hamish be upset that you’re not spending enough quality time with him?’
    ‘There’s only so much quality time a man can spend with Hamish before being forced to hit him over the head with something heavy.’
    I smiled; too much Hamish affected me in exactly the same way. ‘So why go and stay with him for a week?’
    ‘Oh, well, it’s nice to get out of Auckland. And he had a couple of big farm jobs he needed a hand with. Retagging the herd, and giving them all copper bullets.’ He pulled his ear sheepishly. ‘And then I met this really great girl on the weekend, and I wanted to see a bit more of her.’
    ‘I – I’m not that great,’ I stammered, and then gave myself a swift mental kick. There was just no need to take gaucheness to these new and previously unscaled heights. Or depths. ‘You know, it’s going to be really embarrassing if you were talking about someone else.’
    ‘I wasn’t,’ said Mark, and closing the distance between us in two