Styling Wellywood: A fashionable romantic comedy (Wellywood Series Book 2) by Kate O'Keeffe Page A

day, but I might make it twelve today.”
    I think I 'm meant to be impressed.
    She certainly looks in good shape I'll give her that. She's shorter than me and very athletic looking - all sinewy arms and taut tummy. She used to be a pretty brunette, but has peroxided her hair to within an inch of its life. The overall effect is she actually looks a little hard.
    She’ s wearing a full face of makeup and large sparkling diamond earrings, which seems a bit much when you're out for a run.
    B ut who am I to judge? I'm seriously considering false eyelashes and a push up bra for my next tennis session with Scott.
    “ Well done. That’s great,” I reply. I'm not really sure what to say, and am hoping she'll just run away.
    Quite l iterally.
    “ Look I'd love to stay and catch up but I really have to go. Got to run home to Thorndon to get ready for meetings this afternoon. Busy busy busy!”
    My prayers have been answered.
    “Oh, shame.” I lie. “Well, nice to see you.” Not.
    S he smiles and runs off, down Wadestown hill towards her home in Thorndon, another one of Wellington’s well-to-do city-fringe suburbs.
    I'd heard she was a really driven and successful businesswoman these days, but I don't think I’d listened when Laura had been telling me what she did.
    Laura! I really need to stop putting it off and just go and see her, especially now I’ve bumped into Brooke. I decide that while I’m waiting for the number fourteen bus I had may as well call her, so I pull out my mobile and dial her number.
    The phone goes to answer phone and I can he ar Laura's husband, Kyle, declaring, “The Moore family can't take your call right now.” I'm just about to leave a message when a puffed sounding Laura answers.
    “ Laura, hey it’s me, Jess! How are you?” I say animatedly into the receiver, my back against the bus stop sign. Very useful in controlling the effects of sudden wind gusts on one’s dress, I’m finding, although the thought I look a little like a streetwalker does fleetingly cross my mind.
    “ Sorry, what was that? It's so noisy, I can hardly hear you,” Laura asks.
    Realising the whistling wind is obscuring my voice I turn my back to the wind as best I can and cup my hand around the receiver, repeating, “It’s Jess! Laura, can you hear me?”
    “ Jess, is that you? Where are you?” Laura asks.
    “ Back in Wellington. Just got here a day or two ago.”
    I’ m just going to act perfectly normal and forget she was weird last time I saw her. Maybe she's over it now she has her babies? Whatever ‘it’ was, of course.
    “ Well, welcome home, you!” She seems pretty normal. This is good.
    “ You sound like you're outside somewhere in the wind. Where exactly are you?”
    “ Wadestown,” I reply as I spot a bus coming towards me down the hill. I flag it down. “Hold on a sec, Laura.”
    Paying the driver I walk down the virtually empty bus, spot a seat on its own and sit down, plonking my things on the seat next to me with relief.
    “ Sorry about that. I'm on the bus, heading into the city. Morgan stranded me at our very first client’s house, but I managed it all and the client seemed pretty happy by the time I left.”
    I watch out the window as we whizz past trees and houses down the hill into the city. There’s a really quite spectacular view of the harbour as you come around one of the more extreme corners on the bus route and I'm struck by how beautiful Wellington can look. Even when I'm feeling thoroughly pissed off with its legendary wind.
    “ Oh my god, that's terrible,” she says. It feels nice to have her on my side.
    “ I know, but I’m sure it was just some minor emergency. I’ll catch up with her later. Oh and then I bumped into Brooke Mortimer,” I groan. “She's definitely still a ‘Narci’.”
    Brooke got in with a crowd of girls after our falling out who defined the word narcissism. Look it up in the dictionary and there’ll be a full colour photo of them there, pouting