Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop
’Sweet, funny and lovely! Marian KeyesA romantic treat, perfect for fans of Lucy Diamond and Jenny Colgan!You can go crazy searching for the one…Nina is addicted to bad boys, the wilder, the better. Despite her friends’ misgivings, she firmly believes that true love only takes one form: wild, full of passion and fire and punctuated by tempestuous arguments. She won’t settle for anything less.But years of swiping right has uncovered nothing but losers and flings, and Nina is no closer to finding her One True Love than she ever was. And when a man from her past walks into the shop Nina knows she has nothing to fear: the geekiest boy in her school has become a boring suit with no chance of making her heart go pitter patter.Which just shows how little Nina knows about her heart…
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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © Annie Darling 2018
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Cover illustration © Carrie May
Annie Darling asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
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.
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Source ISBN: 9780008275648
Ebook Edition © February 2018 ISBN: 9780008275655
Version: 2018-01-31
Contents
Dedication
‘She was a wild, wicked slip of a girl.’
It was morning. Apparently. Weak shafts of sunlight were doing their best to penetrate the gloom of the little flat above the Happy Ever After bookshop.
Nina O’Kelly cursed the sun streaming feebly in through her bedroom windows then cursed herself for not closing the curtains the night before. In fact, she was amazed that she was in her own bed, because she had absolutely no memory of how she’d got home.
She wasn’t hungover. Not exactly. Fragile, sleep deprived, and the sound of her flatmate, Verity, walking from her bedroom to the kitchen sounded like an elephant had been let loose, though generally Verity was quite light-footed.
With an unhappy whimper Nina turned over. Another ten minutes couldn’t hurt. Maybe fifteen. Perhaps she should open one eye very slowly just to check the time, or perhaps she should keep both eyes closed and just doze ever so lightly …
There was a gentle knock on the door. ‘Nina? It’s nine o’clock. It takes you an hour to do your make-up alone,’ Verity cooed softly. ‘I’m coming in. I want feet on the floor.’
Nina wasn’t fooled by the gentle cooing; Verity was not a woman to be messed with. One morning when it had been much later than this and Nina was still in bed, Verity had shocked her awake with a glass of water. It had played havoc with Nina’s hair.
Though every muscle in her body protested, Nina levered herself to a sitting position and swung her legs round so that when Verity opened the door, all ten of Nina’s toes, adorned with a nail polish in a jaunty aqua green, were touching the floor.
The inevitably pained expression on Verity’s face was a blur to Nina who still couldn’t fully open her eyes. ‘I’m up,’ she grunted, taking the mug of coffee that Verity handed her and opening her mouth so Verity could shove a piece of toast in it, because she was actually the best flatmate ever.
Then, because she was a skilled multi-tasker, Nina drank her coffee while having a shower and not getting her hair wet. Her hair was currently baby pink and arranged in Marilyn Monroe-style pin-curled waves. Each Monday and Friday lunchtime Nina went to the old-fashioned nana hairdresser around the corner to have a shampoo and set under a hood drier that was twice as old as she was. Very little could wither her hair between visits. All it needed was a little teasing at the roots and a generous spritz of Elnett, and Nina was good to go.
Well, not quite good to go. She hadn’t taken her make-up off before she’d collapsed into her bed and because time was marching on – Verity had already gone downstairs to the shop to start her working day, though technically they weren’t on the clock until ten and it was only nine fifty-seven – Nina decided to use yesterday’s make-up as her base.
A generous dollop of foundation, primer and ungodly amounts of concealer, then she got to work with liquid eyeliner, mascara and then more liquid eyeliner. A sweep of blusher and then several coats of deep-red lipstick, and Nina had done all she could do with her face. Not that it was a bad face. Nina had all the regular features – eyes, nose, mouth, chin arranged in the usual order – and now she had transformed herself into a vision of retro glamour.
There was just time to don her hated grey work T-shirt with ‘Happy Ever After’ scrawled across her chest in a pink cursive script. It was very hard to dress around the T-shirt: frocks were a no-no, Nina rarely did jeans, but she wriggled into a tight pencil skirt, slipped on her day heels and by the time she tripped down the stairs into the shop, she was only …
