Crazy Little Thing Called Love: The perfect laugh out loud romantic comedy you won’t be able to put down. Charlotte Butterfield

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СКАЧАТЬ know! I just mean, I know you, and in your head you’d have arrived in India thinking that he was going to twirl you around until your feet left the floor’ – at this, Leila looked a little sheepish – ‘before he booked the rest of the week off work and whisked you to the Taj Mahal where you’d get photographed on the same bench where Princess Diana sat, and then he’d take you to a Maharaja’s palace where he’d booked a candlelit meal on a roof terrace festooned with fairy lights, which is where he’d propose. Am I close?’

      Leila stuck her nose in the air. ‘Not remotely.’

      ‘I had it spot on, didn’t I?’

      There was no point pretending otherwise to her sister, she could always see straight through her.

      ‘But he wasn’t right for you Leila,’ Tasha continued earnestly. ‘You do this, you hop from boyfriend to boyfriend, pinning unrealistic expectations onto each of them. Writing the script in your head of what you want them to say and how you want them to act, and if you keep doing that you’ll always end up being disappointed.’

      ‘Ok, oh wise one. How have you stayed married to Alex all these years then? What’s the secret to finding and keeping the right one?’ That stopped Tasha in her tracks. Running through Tasha’s mind was the old predicament, to tell the truth or the heavily edited soft-focus version she usually wheeled out. The trouble was, Leila was the only one in the family who knew exactly how she and Alex got together seventeen years ago, and had kept the secret too, so fobbing her off with platitudes almost never worked. If their parents ever found out that their daughter had been Alex’s mistress for a couple of years and was the reason for the breakdown of his marriage they’d be horrified. They didn’t even know their son-in-law had been married before, let alone that he’d got Tasha pregnant which is why he had to divorce his first wife to marry her. But, that was fifteen years ago, so absolutely no point raking it all up now.

      ‘Top me up before I answer that,’ Tasha held out her empty glass, ‘and can I just say how impressed I am that you have an ice bucket.’

      ‘Thank you. Now stop changing the subject. You and Alex, what’s your secret?’

      Tasha sighed. ‘Oh God Leila, I don’t know. We don’t expect too much from each other I guess.’

      ‘That’s romantic.’

      Tasha laughed. ‘I mean, we don’t conjure up ideals that we know the other one can’t live up to. We just get on with it, and have a lovely life, and don’t think too much about the stuff we can’t change.’

      ‘Like what?’

      But that was it. The shutters had come down and Tasha shook her head, ‘Look at me, getting all deep and serious. But you need to move on from Freddie Leila, you’ve been hibernating here since you got back from India and it’s not right or healthy.’

      ‘I have not been hibernating! You don’t see me sat here in tracksuit bottoms and unwashed hair sipping super-strength cider through a straw do you?’

      ‘Well, no, but you missed the last family Sunday roast, and that’s unheard of.’

      The once-a-month family roast dinner was sacrosanct. It had had a strict compulsory attendance order slapped on it for as long as Leila could remember. Making the trek from her university in Bristol down to Dartmouth every month for a slap-up free feed was a welcome respite from her usual daily diet of Super Noodles and breakfast cereals, but now she lived in London, the journey, and the time away from her friends, and boyfriend, when she had one, was a bit annoying sometimes. Not that she needed to worry about having a boyfriend now. Or ever again.

      She knew that it was a cop-out, but heading down to her parents’ hotel in Devon to be guest of honour at a pity-party just a couple of weeks after the Jaipur fiasco was not something Leila wanted to put herself through. Her mother Judy would no doubt have had her head on the side for her entire visit, while repeating the words ‘plenty of fish’ and her dad would simultaneously give her a smile and a wide berth should her emotions suddenly get the better of her. Her brother Marcus would have found it impossible not to make lots of barbed references to her disastrous love life, and while she normally would have batted these back quickly and effortlessly, this latest dating catastrophe had affected her more than any of the others. Not that she was able to say that out loud yet.

      ‘So are you here as Mum’s spy to report back on the state of my sanity then?’ Leila asked.

      ‘No! Not at all! Not really. No. Well, maybe a bit. But mainly I wanted to see my little sister and offer my shoulder, should you need it. It’s ok to show your emotions you know Leila, you don’t need to pretend everything’s alright, when it’s not.’

      Later that afternoon, when the sun had disappeared for the day, two empty champagne bottles were upended in the ice bucket and Tasha had reluctantly left, Leila thought about what her sister had said. She was known amongst her friends as the Bounce Back Queen, never letting anything get her down, being ridiculously cheerful in the face of adversity, but she absolutely never wanted to feel as stupid as she did leaving that hotel in Jaipur again. It was mid-afternoon on Christmas Day in England when she had skyped her parents from India. Her mum, dad, sister, brother, nephew and nieces all squashed their faces onto the small screen, colourful cracker hats adorning each one of them. She should have been there. She should have been working her way through her dad’s wine cellar with them, playing silly board games and listening to Radio Devon’s festive party mix. But instead she spent the day alone, huddled on a grimy corner of the airport praying for a standby ticket to get her home.

      She had stayed awake for every minute of the thirty-hour journey from Freddie’s hotel room in India to her own bed in London, where she slept for almost two days straight. She didn’t cry. She didn’t even drink herself into oblivion with the free booze on board the flight. She just felt numb. And foolish. And she knew that she didn’t want a man to make her feel like that ever again.

       Chapter 2

       A few weeks later…

      ‘I reckon his photo was easily taken twenty years ago.’

      ‘No!’ Jayne cried. ‘Who would do that?’

      ‘What did he think?’ Amanda asked, blowing the froth off her cappuccino. ‘That you wouldn’t notice that he looked nothing like his advert?’

      ‘Profile,’ Shelley sniffed, looking affronted. ‘It’s not an advert, I’m not advertising for dates, like you would a car, it’s a profile. Anyway, thankfully he didn’t see me as I’d chosen a table behind a pillar – thanks to Leila’s suggestion – so I was able to leg it before having to spend an evening with him.’

      Although this time it was her friend Shelley recounting this story of dating woe, it was a carbon copy of numerous blind date disasters Leila had suffered in her time. Brad Pitt morphing into Danny DeVito, Single Solvent Lawyer mutating into Married Bankrupt Loser.

      ‘Do you remember me telling you about that guy who, when the bill came, put down a coupon he’d cut out of the paper for his half of the meal?’ Leila added, to the shrieks of hilarity from her best friends. ‘And he didn’t even know why I didn’t want to see him again!’

      Shelley picked up the baton, ‘What about those twins we met at СКАЧАТЬ