Freya North 3-Book Collection: Love Rules, Home Truths, Pillow Talk

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‘Well, you’d know,’ Thea countered brightly, ‘you bought it me.’

‘Got it free,’ Alice stuck her tongue out.

‘Should’ve kept it for yourself then,’ Thea gurned back.

‘Number 7,’ Alice returned to the article, ‘Blink!!! He Might be Standing There, Staring You in the Face!!!!’

‘The postman!’ Thea gasped with mock eagerness.

‘That guy from the ad agency we use,’ said Alice, with genuine enthusiasm. Thea regarded Alice sternly, but Alice licked her lips and winked. And then, like a mist descending, anxiety dulled her eyes and turned her mouth downwards. It was just a magazine article anyway, with too many exclamation marks and a target market half a decade younger than them. ‘I’ll finish it with Bill tonight,’ Alice said, quietly but decisively, ‘I bet he won’t even care.’

‘I think he does care about you,’ Thea said, ‘but I think you’re doing the right thing. I’d better go, I have a client in five minutes and I mustn’t have cold hands.’

‘Will you be around later?’ Alice said, her face fragile and her voice wavering. ‘In case I need you?’

‘Of course,’ Thea shrugged, as if it was the daftest question to even think of asking your closest friend.

So it turned out that Mark Sinclair was right. He was so right that, for some time, he would quietly wonder if something must be wrong. Alice Heggarty was to be married, just as he predicted, by the time she was thirty. Actually, she would turn thirty-one on honeymoon because her meticulous attention to detail and aversion to compromise meant the wedding was shunted to accommodate seamstress, florist, venue and cake-maker. Though, normally, she liked to have her birthday planned to perfection too, she didn’t actually know where she would be when she turned thirty-one. That was up to the groom and she had relinquished some responsibility to him in return for assurances of untold luxury. After all, she was not so secretly dreaming of the Caribbean.

All that Mark had wrong was her choice of groom. Alice wasn’t going to marry Bill. In all other respects, though, Mark had been absolutely right. It turned out that if you are good, you can indeed earn yourself a happy-ever-after. Obviously, Mark Sinclair must have been very very good. Because Alice Heggarty was going to marry him.