A Hopeless Romantic
The warm and enchanting novel from the bestselling author of ‘Going Home’.Laura Foster is a hopeless romantic. It is her most endearing characteristic, yet consistently leads her into trouble. Friends and family look on with amused tolerance – until Laura’s inability to tell reality from romantic dreams causes betrayal and a broken heart.Taking refuge in Norfolk, Laura is bitterly aware that her rose-tinted glasses have to go. She swears off men, and all things romantic, for good – until she meets Nick, the estate manager of a huge stately home. But Nick has a secret too. And it’s one that Laura, however much she tries, can’t get past her prejudice about.Just as she was stubbornly a die-hard romantic, so Laura is stubborn about there being no future for her and Nick. But will he manage to change her mind?
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A Hopeless Romantic
Harriet Evans
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperFiction
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2006
Copyright © Harriet Evans 2006
Harriet Evans asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Extract from The Sound of Music © 1965 Twentieth Century Fox. Screenplay by Ernest Lehman. All rights reserved.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007198467
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2011 ISBN: 9780007369270
Version: 2016-09-09
For the magnificent specimen, my mother Linda.With all my love.
How to understand it all! How to understand the deceptions she had been thus practising on herself, and living under! – The blunders, the blindness of her own head and heart! – she sat still, she walked about, she tried her own room, she tried the shrubbery – in every place, every posture, she perceived that she had acted most weakly.
Jane Austen, Emma
Maria: I don’t remember any more.
Brigitta: Your face is all red.
Maria: Is it? I don’t suppose I’m used to dancing.
The Sound of Music, screenplay by Ernest Lehman
Table of Contents
Laura Foster was a hopeless romantic. Her best friend Jo said it was her greatest flaw, and at the same time her most endearing trait, because it was the thing that most frequently got her into trouble, and yet falling in love was like a drug to her. Having a crush, daydreaming about someone, feeling her heart race faster when she saw a certain man walk towards her – she thrived on all of it, and was disastrously, helplessly, hopelessly incapable of seeing when it was wrong. Everyone has a blind spot. With Laura, it was as if she had a blind heart.
Anyone with a less romantic upbringing would be hard to find. She wasn’t a runaway nun, or the daughter of an Italian count, or a mysterious orphan. She was the daughter of George and Angela Foster, of Harrow, in the suburbs of London. She had one younger brother, Simon, who was perfectly normal, not a secret duke, nor a spy, nor a soldier. George was a computer engineer, and Angela was a part-time translator. As Jo once said to her, about a year after they met at university, ‘Laura, why do you go around pretending to be Julie Andrews, when you’re actually Hyacinth Bucket?’
But Laura never stopped reality getting in the way of fantasy. By the time she was eighteen she had fallen for: a runny-nosed, milk-bottle-glasses-wearing primary-school outcast called Kevin (in her mind Indiana Jones, with specs); her oboe teacher Mr Wallace, a thin, spotty youth, over whom she developed a raging obsession and calluses on her oboe-playing fingers, so ferociously did she practise (she would stand outside his flat in Camden in the hope she might see him; she wore a locket which contained a bus ticket he’d dropped around her neck); and about fifteen different boys at the boys’ school around the corner from hers in Harrow.
