BARE NECESSITY

Bad boy bares bum. His girlfriend’s, that is—and it’s a fine sight to see.

Emily Miller (34) was decked out in a teeny-tiny red chiffon Santa suit that left nothing, including her bountiful breasts, to the imagination. No harm in letting her darling Declan O’Donnell, boyfriend of five years, take a snap or two with his new digital camera, was there? And how amusing of him to take a black marker and scribble HO HO HO across her flawless buttocks. She never dreamed that he would post the provocative result online for every lusty lad and wheezing pensioner alive to see. Emily is famous. Too bad the headmaster at the posh school where she teaches has also seen it: the photo has been splashed all over the tabloids, along with a candid shot of her in a tattered blue bathrobe, looking like a council-housing harlot. So she’s fired, and she’s furious. But Declan secretly hopes to make money from the “Saucy Santa” and make it up to Emily somehow, since his dot-com enterprises have all turned out to be dot-bombs. Porn is about the only thing that makes money on the Web these days, so porn it will be. Classy porn. Emily, holed up with flaky girlfriend Cara, has to listen to Cara twitter on about auras and feng shui and other New Age concepts that might help heal her friend’s wounded heart. She even enlists the help of her scruffily handsome colleague, Adam, a photographer for the local Hampstead newspaper that broke the story in the first place. Cara obviously has a crush on Adam—but later, when she happens to get close to the ever-seductive Declan amidst the steam and froth of a hot tub—why, she’s positively blowing bubbles. Then Adam spies Emily across a crowded room and he’s smitten. And it looks as if Emily is smitten right back.

Lightweight romantic farce, often quite funny, from the British author of For Better, For Worse (2001).