To Love, Honour and Betray – Sample Chapter
Extract from To Love, Honour and Betray by Kathy Lette
Like all prisoners, I feel the presence of my captor like tentacles reaching down to where I’m cowering at the bottom of the stairs. The house is hushed. I take a deep breath, as if I’m a diver going under, and peek down the hallway. Empty. A rustle of leaves outside the window startles me. The nerves in my body contract as I move gingerly towards the door. I bump into something in the dark and jump as if bitten, but it’s only the fronds of a pot plant I’ve forgotten. I wait an agonizing eternity to see if I’ve been detected. I shuffle forward, apprehension dogging each tentative step. Finally, I can see the outline of the front door, but the sensation that I am being watched intensifies. Goosebumps rise on my neck and arms. Adrenalin slams through me. I tell myself to breathe, then inch, one painfully slow tiptoe at a time, towards liberty. The door handle is almost within reach when a mutinous floorboard creaks. I hear the running thud of feet, and fright licks like flames all over me. Trapped, I wheel around to face the furious countenance of my captor. The hall light snaps blindingly on.
‘What the hell do you think you are wearing? You are not going out dressed like that. Go back to your room and change immediately!’
I glance down in abject humiliation at the Wonderbra-ed cleavage semi-draped in one of her sequinned tank-tops, and the vertiginous stilettos I’ve stolen from her wardrobe. The top is not quite long enough to hide the fact that I haven’t been able to do up the zip on her denim mini.
‘I don’t know how to break it to you,’ her voice is metallic with scorn, ‘but your chances of becoming a famous cat-walk model have kinda faded, you know.’ The next word she utters, dripping with contempt, is ‘Mother’.
I sag into myself. ‘Oh spare me the third-degree sarcasm, Tally, please.’
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