Chapter 3

Now she was gone, and I knew I had to live my life once more, I dressed, tidied the house, ate a light Mozzarella and tomato salad, jumped into the car to fetch the two greatest kids on this planet and decided that I was the luckiest man alive, I had these two great kids a nice life resulting from a very successful business, and had spent 18 wonderful years in love with a woman who can only be described as my soul mate. If I never kissed another woman in my life again, today, I realised that I had experienced more love in that than most people experience in an entire lifetime.

So it was that my life slowly started to return to normal, I made sure that the kids got to do the stuff that they needed and that every weekend we did something or went somewhere that we all enjoyed and I began to get back into a routine, of work, kids, and the odd night out in the safety of old trusted friends and family, before I knew it six more months had passed. It was coming up to Valentines Day, a time I never particularly enjoyed, and even my mother-in-law was starting to match make on my behalf. My kids thought it very funny to point out single "eligible mothers" of their friends, our friends and my work colleagues felt sorry for me and I found myself paired with other 30 something single, divorced separated women of all shapes, sizes, colours and creeds. But as everyone basically had my best interests at heart I took their meddling in my life with a certain amount of good grace.

As always, you never see attraction coming, it always hits you like a bolt from out of the blue! I was due to go to some friends of ours for dinner on a particularly cold Saturday night in February. They owned a riding stables near our home, this was a particularly tedious night for me as I am far more comfortable in and around anything that's horsepower is measured in cubic inches rather than the four legged variety. However, Miles and Helen had been incredibly helpful in recent months and my daughter adored them, spending as much time as she could at their home in an excuse to be near the horses. Tonight prospective candidate was around thirty, a single marketing executive with blonde hair, very slender, and rather plain if rather equine features, typical of the rather nouveau middle class women that seemed to frequent my current social circle. God, I knew I was ready to start meeting and dating other women, but where were the genuine down to earth women who could enjoy a man's company for what it was, without trying to asses his net worth or his eligibility, without checking his bank balance first.

I needed someone who could make me laugh, who would love my kids, and more importantly could love me for what I was not what I had. As you can tell my mind began to wander through dinner about all these things and more, when I came back to reality with a jolt, as one of the stable hands came running into the house calling to Miles that his favourite hunter was having some kind of fit. All of a sudden pandemonium broke out, Miles called the Vet, and was told that his normal vet was unable to attend but a neighbouring vet who specialised in horses would be there in twenty minutes. Helen rushed out to the stables and started to direct Steveers out there, calling for help from her dinner guests to bring buckets of tepid water to bathe the horses brow etc and towels and blankets in order to keep its body temperature stable. This amount of effort was a direct result of a conversation with the vet who had given a list of instructions to help keep the horse conscious until she got there. I did what I could, but in all honesty I knew very little about horses and did what I could when I could, but had very little effect on the animals true well-being.

The Vet arrived in a midst of this chaos, and immediately took control, she was in her early thirties, long dark hair scrunched into a pony tail, but strands were loose and framed an elegant face with fine features, that even at 9.40 on a winter's Saturday night with no makeup and full of concentration, seemed to radiate an inner beauty, a sense of inner strength and calm that I had not seen for a long, long time. Her body although hidden by heavy work clothes also appeared to carry on this sense of inner beauty, transferring it inexplicably into an outer elegance that seemed to radiate through her garments. She was about 5'9" tall, very fit looking, without leaving you feeling that she spent hours in a gym, healthy rather than fit, with a body that was naturally slim. I couldn't take my eyes of this woman, I didn't know why, but I knew I wanted to get to know more about her. I had noted that she didn't wear a ring, but in her job, that meant nothing.