The Doris Day Vintage Film Club. Fiona Harper

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Chapter Thirty: Between Friends

       Chapter Thirty-One: The Party’s Over

       Chapter Thirty-Two: It’s Better to Conceal Than Reveal

       Chapter Thirty-Three: I Love the Way You Say Goodnight

       Chapter Thirty-Four: The Thrill of It All

       Chapter Thirty-Five: The Man Who Knew Too Much

       Chapter Thirty-Six: I’m Not At All In Love

       Chapter Thirty-Seven: Love Me or Leave Me

       Chapter Thirty-Eight: Quiet Night of Quiet Stars

       Chapter Thirty-Nine: You Should Have Told Me

       Chapter Forty: Do Not Disturb

       Chapter Forty-One: I Didn’t Slip, I Wasn’t Pushed, I Fell

       Chapter Forty-Two: I’ve Only Myself to Blame

       Chapter Forty-Three: Foolishly Yours

       Chapter Forty-Four: My Kinda Love

       Chapter Forty-Five: The Game of Broken Hearts

       Chapter Forty-Six: (Now and Then There’s) A Fool Such As I

       Chapter Forty-Seven: Softly, As I Leave You

       Chapter Forty-Eight: It’s Magic

       Chapter Forty-Nine: Sentimental Journey

       Chapter Fifty: I Don’t Want to Be Kissed By Anyone But You

       Chapter Fifty-One: Hooray for Hollywood

       Chapter Fifty-Two: He’ll Have to Cross the Atlantic

       Chapter Fifty-Three: Que Sera, Sera

       Endpages

       Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      I’d like to thank everyone at Mills & Boon, especially Anna Baggaley, my very patient editor, and the lovely Victoria Oundjian, especially as it took quite some time to help this author see the wood of this book through the trees of her wayward imagination. I also want to say a huge thank you to all of M&B’s marketing and promotion team, for their enthusiasm and hard work from day one.

      Big thanks to my amazing agent Lizzy Kremer and also to Harriet Moore at David Higham Associates, for her calm encouragement in the midst of a deadline panic and her insightful suggestions.

      My family definitely deserve my gratitude, especially my husband, Andy, who patiently listens to me warble on about difficult plot matters so I can get things straight in my head, even though he hardly ever knows who these people I’m talking about are, and to my lovely daughters, Sian and Rose, who cheer me on all the way, and who didn’t moan (much) when I hogged the TV for months, watching every film of Doris’s I could get my hands on.

      Thanks to all my Facebook friends who helped me with football-related stuff. Sorry, those scenes ended up on the cutting room floor, but at least you have educated this football dunce a little.

      Lastly, and most importantly, I want to thank Doris Day, for her captivating and charismatic performances that have charmed generations and continue to bring us joy and happiness, but also for her strength of character and resilience. The true story of the woman behind the Hollywood icon was the inspiration for this book.

Chapter One

       Nobody’s Sweetheart

      When Claire Bixby was nine, she decided that one day she’d like to live in Hollywood, because she wanted to be in movies. Not that she wanted to be an actress. Far from it. No, Claire wanted to actually be in the movies, to live there, a place where the sun always shone, everything was Technicolor bright and families lived happily ever after together. There would be no more shouting, no more crying. No hearing the front door slam, one parent leaving never to return – even if she’d discovered she could breathe out more easily after he’d left.

      However, as all little girls do, Claire grew up, and she came to understand that nothing was what it seemed in Hollywood. The houses weren’t real. The outsides were just false fronts and the insides built on a sound stage, made up of plywood flats that could be wheeled around depending on where the camera needed to go. And while the sun might shine pretty regularly in California, she suspected that once the actors took off their make-up, they probably went home and shouted at the dog, or discovered their wife was cheating on them with her plastic surgeon, or maybe just went back to their mansion to sit there with the curtains drawn, wondering why their fabulous lives weren’t really that fabulous and if even one of the hangers-on who buzzed around them knew what their real name was.

      So by the time Claire had turned thirty-four, she’d never once visited Hollywood, preferring to keep it a dim and distant bubble of fantasy she wasn’t quite yet ready to pop. As a travel agent, however, she did plan trips to Tinseltown for others, which was why on one sunny and rather muggy May morning, she hopped off the number СКАЧАТЬ