Love Rules
An intelligent, sexy novel about best friends, about settling down and about throwing it all away…When you fall in love do you follow your heart or use your head?Thea Luckmore believes in love – the magic spark of true, old-fashioned, romantic love. She's determined only ever to fall head over heels, or rather, heart over head.Alice Heggarty, her best friend, is always falling in lust – with dashing rogues who invariably break her heart. As yet another disastrous relationship ends, Alice makes a decision. It's time to marry and she knows just the man.For Thea, Saul Mundy promises to be the perfect fit and Thea finds herself falling in love and loving it.But though newly wed Alice encourages Thea to settle down and conform, she finds that she's not as keen as she thought on playing by the rules. Alice starts to break them left, right and centre… At the same time, Thea's world, in which love reigns supreme, is shaken to core.When it comes to love, should you listen to your head, your heart, or your best friend?
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FREYA NORTH
Love Rules
HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
This edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005
Copyright © Freya North 2005
Freya North asserts the moral right to b identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for 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: 9780007180363
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2015 ISBN: 9780007325771
Version: 2015-10-13
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
‘Freya North has matured to produce an emotive novel that deals with the darker side of love – these are real women, with real feelings.’
She
‘Tantrums, tarts, tears and text-sex … what’s not to love about this cautionary tale for true romantics?’
Heat
‘A distinctive storytelling style and credible, loveable characters … an addictive read that encompasses the stuff life is made of: love, sex, fidelity and, above all, friendship.’
Glamour
‘Plenty that’s fresh to say about the age-old differences between men and women.’
Marie Claire
‘Sassy, feel-good read … Chick lit with a good sting in the tail.’
Cosmopolitan
‘Raunchy sex and realistic emotional wranglings make this chick-lit with class.’
Eve
‘An intelligent tale of chance encounters, long-lasting friendship and what it’s like to fall in and out of love.’
B Magazine
Contents
Mark and Saul and Alice and Thea
Barefaced Bloke and the Girl with the Scar
Miss Heggarty and Mr Brusseque
The simple lack of her is more to me than others’ presence
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence
Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own
Mark and Saul and Alice and Thea
Mark Sinclair liked to think that there was an inevitability to happy-ever-afters. He believed that they were granted to those who were good in life, to people whose thoughts were honourable, who had worthy goals, whose deeds and dealings were principled. However, at the age of thirty, Mark Sinclair understood that he would need to modify his belief, revise his dream and compromise. He intended to do this without turning into a cynic or allowing his ethics to suffer. He’d just have to let his dream of twenty years fade. It wasn’t going to be easy. But there again, the dream wasn’t going to come true, no matter how virtuous he was.
Mark Sinclair’s dream was Alice Heggarty. But she had gone and fallen in love with someone who wasn’t him. Again. Just as she had at the age of twenty-five. And at twenty-three. And before that, annually at university. And before that, with the captain of the first XV at his school. The girl Mark had loved for so long had gone and fallen in love again but this time Alice was nearly twenty-nine. Mark knew she’d have made a calculated decision that this love ought to take her into her thirties and onwards, into matrimony and children and a house in NWsomewhere. The time was right for her own happy-ever-after. ‘So dream on,’ Mark told himself sternly, ‘dream on.’
In the two decades he’d known Alice, Mark had always had hope because he’d always had the dream because, being a man of patience and principles, he’d taken a philosophical view on waiting. He theorized that Alice had never broken his dream because he’d never brought it out into the open. Besides, she’d been so busy, permanently falling madly in love and despairingly out of love with all those other men. At the time, Mark felt this to be a positive thing and he did not regret keeping his own feelings secret. After all, it meant that Alice had never made a decision against him, she’d never turned him down, never ditched him in favour of another, never suggested they revert to being ‘just good friends’.
