If I Never Met You
If faking love is this easy… how do you know when it’s real? The brand new novel from Sunday Times bestselling author Mhairi McFarlane Laurie and Jamie have the perfect office romance(They set the rules via email) Everyone can see they’re head over heels(They staged the photos) This must be true love(They’re faking it) When Laurie is dumped by her partner of eighteen years, she’s blindsided. Not only does she feel humiliated, they still have to work together. So when she gets stuck in the lift with handsome colleague Jamie, they hatch a plan to stage the perfect romance. Revenge will be sweet… But this fauxmance is about to get complicated. You can’t break your heart in a fake relationship – can you?
Читать If I Never Met You онлайн беплатно
IF I NEVER MET YOU
Mhairi McFarlane
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
First published in the UK by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020
Copyright © Mhairi McFarlane 2020
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020
Cover illustration © Abbey Lossing / Handsome Frank
Mhairi McFarlane 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.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008169480
Ebook Edition © January 2020 ISBN: 9780008169473
Version: 2019-11-04
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
A Q&A with Mhairi McFarlane
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Also by Mhairi McFarlane
About the Publisher
Dan
What time you think you’ll be back tonight? Roughly?
Laurie
Dunno. SOON I HOPE.
Dan
You hope?
Laurie
Everyone has raspberries in Proseccos
Dan
I thought you liked Prosecco. And raspberries
Laurie
I do! I’ve got one.
Dan
Your problem is other people like it too? Can’t imagine my criticism of a night out being ‘people ordered the same drink’
Laurie
… Except when you said you hate stag dos that ‘start with getting ten pints of wife beater in at 7am in Gatwick Spoons’.
Dan
You can’t take a moment off being a lawyer, can you?
Laurie
HAH. You misspelt ‘you got me bang to rights, Loz’
Dan is typing
…
Dan is typing
…
Last seen today at 9.18pm
Dan must’ve thought better of his reply. Laurie clicked her phone off and pushed it back into her bag.
Obviously she didn’t really mind the cliché, booze was booze, that was trying to be wittily acerbic bravado. It was a distress signal. Laurie was at sea and her phone felt like a connection back to shore. Tonight was an unwelcome flashback to the emotions of lunch breaks at secondary school, when you had a single-parent mum and no money and no cool.
So far, the girls had discussed the benefits of eyebrow microblading (‘Ashley from Stag Communications looks like Eddie Munster’) whether or not Marcus Fairbright-Page at KPMG was a bad arsehole who’d break hearts and bed frames (Laurie thought on what she’d gleaned, that was an emphatic yes, but also gathered that a verdict wasn’t desired). And how many burpees you could manage in HIIT class at Virgin Active (no idea there, none).
They were all so glamorous and feminine, so carefully groomed and produced for public display. Laurie felt like a dishwater-feathered pigeon in an enclosure full of chirruping tropical birds.
Emily really owed her. Tonight was the product of something that happened roughly once every three months – her best friend, and owner of a PR company, begged Laurie to join their team night out and make it ‘less bloody boring, or we’ll spend the whole time discussing the new accounts.’ Emily, as CEO and hostess, was at the head of the table putting everything on the company credit card and handing round the Nocellara olives and salted almonds. Laurie, late arrival, was at the far end.
‘Who was that, then?’ said Suzanne, to her right. Suzanne had a beautiful shoulder-length sheet of custard-coloured hair and the gaze of a customs officer.
Laurie turned and concealed her irritation with a ventriloquist’s dummy smile. ‘Who was what?’
‘On your phone! You looked well intense,’ Suzanne rolled her doe eyes upwards and mimed a sort of chimpanzee-like, vacant trance state, her hands moving across an imaginary handset. She whooped with girlish, alcohol-fuelled laughter, the sort that could sound cruel.
Laurie said: ‘My boyfriend.’
The word ‘boyfriend’ had started to sound a trifle silly, Laurie supposed, but ‘partner’ was so dry and stiff. She had a feeling her present company already thought she was those things.
