Good Girl's Seduction

Natalie Carter is twenty two and she is, in her own private estimation, the most dangerous woman on the 14:47 from Manchester to Sheffield.Four years in Paris will do that to a girl. Four years of café tables and married women and locked flats in the Marais and a small private collection of wedding rings that have been slipped off and set on bedside tables and put back on at dawn. Four years of being the one with the key. The one who waits. The one who watches a soft eyed wife in a navy coat at a wine bar and knows, with the calm certainty of someone who has done this before, that by the third glass she will be holding her hand across the table.Natalie does not lose. Natalie does not chase. Natalie selects.So when she steps off the train into a grey English afternoon and finds her mother on the platform with a freckled, auburn haired neighbour holding two Costa cups, Natalie knows what she's looking at within three seconds. The blush. The wedding ring. The husband in finance who is never quite there. The little flustered laugh. The hand on the arm. The way she leans in for a kiss on the cheek and lingers half a heartbeat too long.A married woman. Lonely. Curious. Ready.A gift waiting to be unwrapped, and Natalie, as it happens, has all summer.She runs her usual play. The careful coffee. The studio visit. The second glass of wine and the casual confession about the women in Paris. The kiss outside the bar that ends with the wife pressing fingertips to her mouth and whispering I can't, I'm married, I can't. The next day's tearful confession on the studio sofa, where the wall cracks open and the wife admits her husband hasn't touched her in eleven months and Natalie holds her and strokes her hair and thinks, very calmly, got her.This is a story about a girl who thought she knew what she was. About a wife who saw her coming from a photograph on a mantelpiece. About a summer in a quiet Sheffield suburb where the predator finds out, slowly and tenderly and from her hands and knees, that she was the prey from the moment she stepped off the train.Twenty chapters. Two words. Good girl.