KISMETOLOGY
Jaimie Admans
Chick-lit, romantic comedy
Release date: September 14th
Finding the perfect man isn’t easy. Especially when it’s for your mother...
Mothers. Can't live with them, can't live without them, can't live three doors down the road from them without them interfering in every aspect of your life.
Fed up with her mum meddling in her love life, Mackenzie Atkinson decides to turn the tables and find love for her lonely mother.
Her lonely and very fussy mother.
Surely finding an older gentleman looking for love won't be that hard, right?
Wrong.
If you've ever thought that boys grow up, here’s the problem: They don't. Ever.
And Mackenzie is about to learn that the hard way.
Author Bio:
Jaimie is a 27-year-old English-sounding Welsh girl with an awkward-to-spell name. She lives in South Wales and enjoys writing, gardening, drinking tea and watching horror movies. She hates spiders and cheese & onion crisps.
Kismetology is her first novel but there are plenty more on the way! She wants you to know that the mum in this book is nothing like her own mum!
Website:
http://www.jaimieadmans.com
Twitter:
http://www.twitter.com/be_the_spark
Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/jaimieadmansbooks
Goodreads:
http://www.goodreads.com/jaimieadmans
Buy Links :
Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0097GFP0I
Amazon.co.uk:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0097GFP0I
Available on all other Amazons too. And coming soon to Sony, Kobo, Barnes & Noble and Apple iBooks.
CHAPTER 1
If
I could give one piece of advice to every teenager in the world,
it would be this: when you move away from home, move far, far
away, and never look back. My biggest mistake? I didn’t move far
enough. In fact, I only moved three houses down the road. The
perfect distance for my mother to interfere in my life, even more
than she did when I lived under her own roof.
"Mackenzie, your curtains aren't even straight,"
Mum complains from her place on our sofa. "I don't know how you
can put up with such a mess."
"How can curtains not be straight, Mum?"
"Well, the join in the middle isn't in the
middle at all and the line where they meet doesn't go straight
down. Plus there is at least six inches more on the left one than
on the right one."
Dan rolls his eyes and gets up from his armchair
with a groan.
I know how he feels.
"Don't be long, Daniel, you'll miss Eastenders," Mum calls
after him.
"Sir, yes sir," Dan mutters, doing an army
salute behind her back.
In all fairness to my mum, maybe my announcement
that I was moving in with Dan came as a bit of a shock to her.
After all, we’d been dating for a year, but my mum had only known
him for six of those months. I’d dated him in secret for the first
six months. I was a bit reluctant to introduce them, especially
after the incident
with an ex-boyfriend—the first and, up to that point, only
boyfriend to ever meet my mum—where she'd nearly run him over with
a wheelie bin (accidentally) and then put a brick through his car
window (she was killing a wasp).
"Can't you get him to brush his hair once in a
while?" Mum asks when Dan has left the room. "He makes the place
look untidy. And don't even get me started on that shirt."
"Leave him alone, Mum," I warn her. "And stop
your bloody dog peeing in my houseplant again, it's dying."
"Oh, Mackenzie, you'll never guess what happened
to me today," Mum says animatedly. "Go on, guess."
"I have no idea, Mum."
"I almost got a criminal record. Can you believe
that? Me! With a criminal record!"
"I'm honestly scared to ask, but how on earth
did you manage that?"
"I nearly got arrested in the park!" She says
excitedly.
Only my mother could be excited about getting
arrested. "What happened?"
"Well, you know Baby's crocodile outfit, right?
I did a really good job of making it, didn't I? I made it look
really realistic?"
I nod.
"Well, Baby was off his lead in the park, doing
his business, you know, as dogs do. And suddenly all these police
surround us. Two animal control vans pull up, there's a helicopter
overhead, there are even a couple of men with tranquilizer dart
guns poised and ready to shoot."
I rub my hand over my eyes. "Why?"
"Well, it turns out that someone had seen Baby
in the park and thought he was a real crocodile. She'd called the
police in case he ate the children."
"Oh, Mum, really?" I groan.
"It was so exciting! I think I might even be on
the news tonight!"
She thinks this is exciting? Embarrassing would
be my preferred term. Very, very embarrassing. "So what happened?"
"Well, the police quickly realised their
mistake. But one of them did take me aside and ask if I could not
bring Baby to the park in that attire again. Then he gave us a
lift home in his police car. He was ever so nice about it."
"I'm sure he was."
"How anyone could mistake my Baby for a
crocodile is beyond me. He's hardly crocodile size, is he? The
woman must have been blind as a bat."
"Well, you do insist on dressing him up as
potentially dangerous animals. And walking him. In public. It's
really quite disturbing."
"Oh, nonsense. I like trying out the sewing
patterns I find on the internet. It keeps me busy."
Well, something has to, I suppose.
"Come here, Baby." Mum pats the sofa and the
miniature Yorkshire terrier, which is practically surgically
attached to her, comes running over. "Don't listen to that big,
mean lady. She loves you really."
Baby is currently dressed as a ladybird. No,
really. Mum's hobby of making these outfits for him is getting out
of hand. He jumps onto the sofa and sinks his teeth into one of my
twenty quid cushions.
"These cushions were expensive." I yank them out
of his way.
"He likes the tassels," Mum responds.
This is our nightly routine now.
On our one-year anniversary, Dan had proposed
that we move in together. My mum had not been overly thrilled by
the turn of events, until she'd found a little house available to
rent and paid the deposit without even asking us. The house
happened to be three doors away from her place.
We should have known better.
Dan was indifferent to the fact that my mum had
decided where we were going to live and paid a deposit without
even telling us. It was one less thing that he had to do. And I
couldn't really be mad at her; she was only doing it out of the
goodness of her heart. Presumptuous, yes, but ultimately only
trying to be helpful. We'd signed a one-year lease two days later.
Since then, Dan has been a gem. Not many men
would put up with my mother being an almost permanent third wheel.
Not many men would run her cat, Pussy (no, really), down to the
emergency vet at three o’clock in the morning because it looked a
bit peaky. It was fine. A screeching woman yelling that it looked
off-colour had just woken it up from its sleep. I look peaky at
that time of day too. Dan had offered his car as transport and
we’d roared off down the road at breakneck speed, scaring the poor
cat half to death. Then Dan and I had sat in the parking lot for
half an hour, while the vet determined that there was absolutely
nothing whatsoever wrong with the cat.
The house being so near had softened the blow of
me moving out and leaving Mum with only her yappy little dog and
not-sick cat for company.
"You can pop in anytime you want," I'd told her.
I had no idea that translated into "come over
every night and bring the dog and cat with you" in mum language.
The night we moved in, just as we’d settled down
together on our new sofa with a glass of wine each and switched on
our newly installed satellite TV, my mum’s special
knock-knockknock-knock on the door reverberated through the living
room. We looked at each other with dread and Dan groaned.
My mum came in, took her shoes off, sat down on
the sofa, helped herself to a glass of wine and put on Coronation Street. She
didn’t actually watch Corrie,
but proceeded to criticise our carpets, our uncomfortable sofa (it
wasn’t) the colour of the walls, the way the walls clashed with
the curtains (they didn’t) the heat in the room (it was too hot)
and the shirt Dan was wearing (I’d always quite liked him in it).
Within three minutes, Baby had peed on my new plant. I don't have
the best of luck with plants anyway, but I'm sure the dog pee
didn't help the plant's life expectancy.
This routine has continued almost every night in
the three months since we moved in. In comes my mum, on goes Emmerdale, Corrie or Eastenders, and out
comes Mum’s opinion of everything from the wattage of our light
bulbs to the colour of Dan’s socks.
