Getting Over Mr. Right

by Chrissie Manby

  Getting Over Mr. Right is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Bantam Books eBook Edition

  Copyright © 2010 by Chrissie Manby

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in the United Kingdom by Hodder & Stoughton, a Hachette UK company, in 2010.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Manby, Chrissie.

  Getting over Mr. Right : a novel / Chrissie Manby.

  p. cm.

  “A Bantam Book trade paperback original”—T.p. verso.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-52903-9

  1. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. 2. Revenge—Fiction. I. Title.

  II. Title: Getting over Mister Right.

  PR6063. A3695G48 2012

  823’.914—dc23 2011035900

  www.bantamdell.com

  Cover design and illustration: Thomas Beck Stvan

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Dedication

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  It goes without saying that there is no nice way to be dumped, but there are some ways that cause less toe-curling anguish than others. A face-to-face conversation, or a phone call if you’re dating long-distance, seem to be the best of a bad bunch. A handwritten letter would show some respect, but ever since eighties pop star (and very unlikely heartthrob) Phil Collins dumped his second wife by fax, standards of etiquette have been dropping dramatically. From Phil’s fax to the horror of email to Britney dumping K-Fed by SMS—oh, how I wish my ex had had the old-fashioned decency to dump me by text message! You see, I, Ashleigh Prince, found out that I had been dumped via Facebook.

  My love life was and always had been a disaster. It started badly and it went downhill from there.

  I had my first kiss at age eight, during a game of “kiss chase” in my primary-school playground. When it was my turn to do the chasing, I knew exactly which hapless lad I was going for and poor Justin Ashford didn’t stand a chance. When someone shouted “Go,” Justin was in the middle of tying a shoelace (he was eleven before he cracked bows), but I showed no mercy. While he was still on the ground, I pounced on him like a vampire bat on a squirrel and my passionate lips squashed the words “not fair” right back into his gorgeous pouting mouth. Later that day he pinned me against a wall by the school gym and stuck chewing gum in my hair. I had to have both my pigtails cut off.

  The next three years flew by in a haze of similarly rebuffed advances and Chinese burns. When I was nine, Justin Ashford sent me a Valentine’s card with the charming message “Drop dead” written rather neatly inside. For my eleventh birthday he gave me three de-winged bluebottles in a matchbox. You have to admit that shows imagination, but it’s not exactly Tiffany … Things didn’t pick up when I went to secondary school. It was an all-girls school and the only opportunity for mixing with the opposite sex during term time came via doing handstands at the far edge of the playing field to incite the local flasher.

  At the age of fourteen I did manage to get my second kiss from a boy named Malcolm who lived at the top of my street, and that blossomed into my first “relationship.” We spent every moment we could together. But while our parents assumed we were up to no good and I received lectures on the perils of teenage motherhood at least twice a week, our romance was much more chaste than that. It was largely based on a mutual appreciation of horror comics. And when I say “mutual appreciation,” what I actually mean is that Malcolm was obsessed with horror comics and I pretended to be interested so that I could tell Lucy Jones, the hardest girl in my class, that I had a boyfriend and therefore she had no need to scratch LEZZER on the lid of my brand-new metal pencil case.

  Alas, Malcolm and I parted ways as soon as hormones reared their ugly heads. One Saturday afternoon, when my parents were at Sainsbury’s and we had the house to ourselves, I asked him if he’d like to take my virginity. We were both seventeen, after all. He went quite pale and said, “No.” He wouldn’t. And he didn’t. Our romance had reached its end.

  Instead I lost the virginity that seemed to weigh so heavily to the first chap I dated at college. His name was Steve. He was a chemistry student. We shared almost three years of baked potatoes and the missionary position. Steve was a big fan of Depeche Mode. I still can’t hear “Just Can’t Get Enough” without remembering those lost afternoons when Steve ground away like the Duracell bunny and I worried he might be wearing a hole in the condom.

  My relationship with Steve was fairly unremarkable, but it was the first real indication of the more serious trouble I would have with love later in my life. Looking back, I can’t honestly say I even liked him that much. Steve had the looks of Shrek without the personality. When he broke up with me, though, I dedicated my entire life to getting back together. I spent hours and hours, when I should have been studying for my finals, writing poems and letters in an attempt to convince him that ours was a star-crossed love. Steve was not swayed and I had to resit my final exams, while he took first class honors, found a top consulting job, and married a model less than a year after graduating. “Sorted” was one of Steve’s favorite words. When it came to love and relationships, “hopeless” was rapidly becoming mine.

  Degree belatedly in hand, I set course for London and a shared house with a bunch of the college friends who had been so patient during the Steve years. While they worked diligently on finding a place for themselves in the world of work, I was like a girl straight out of Jane Austen, hell-bent on finding my place as somebody’s missus. My first five years in London were a blur of bad dates and brief, nasty relationships, but somehow I kept my sense of optimism. After each frog I kissed that turned out to be a toad, I managed to convince myself that the very next one would be the prince. Or the next. Or the next. Or the next.

  My optimism remained high as
my friends started to pair off in a serious way. The year I turned twenty-six was the summer of eight weddings. I was almost bankrupted by the hen weekends and the extravagant wedding lists at Peter Jones, but I was grateful and excited to attend each and every one of those ceremonies because I’d read in the Evening Standard that 27 percent of people meet their future spouse at a wedding reception. Eight weddings! Surely I had to get lucky that year.

  I didn’t, needless to say. At one wedding I actually found myself at the children’s table. But my dance card was rarely blank. Five out of seven nights I would be on a date of some description. I believed in making an effort—turning every stone—so I went out with anyone who asked me, from the brother of a girl I’d sat next to in a lecture on Italian futurism to the chap who worked at the dry cleaner’s next to the Tube station. (After two dates at Pizza Hut he refused to pick up the phone and I had to take my cleaning elsewhere.)

  If you were making a movie montage of years six to eight in London, you would definitely have to include the man who brought his own sandwiches to our lunch date in a pub garden (and didn’t offer to share), and the man who asked me to wear his ex-girlfriend’s T-shirt while we were in bed together, since he could only be aroused by her smell, and the man who came with me to a former coworker’s party at the Pitcher and Piano and went home with the birthday girl while I sobbed into my shandy. Then there was the corporate lawyer who told me he couldn’t wait to settle down and start a family. The only problem with him was that he already had a wife and three children in Dulwich. After him came the bodybuilding champion who decided he was in love with his best friend. (Another champion bodybuilder. Male.) And then there was the guy who stood me up after I had dropped everything (including the best part of a grand) to meet him for dinner. In New York.

  Yep, stick me in the corner of any party in any town and I would seek out and start falling for the biggest loser in the room within seconds. I attracted jerks like iron filings to a magnet. I went through pigs faster than swine flu.

  “I just don’t understand why you keep picking such awful men!” my mother exclaimed in despair when I called her from a phone box in Manhattan at the bitter end of my brief NY-Lon romance.

  Back then I didn’t understand it, either. It wasn’t as though I was always going for the same type. I dated actuaries and actors, bakers and bankers. I dated Christian Scientists and cruise-liner captains. There were no obvious similarities in the worlds they inhabited or in the way that they looked. But in the way things turned out? That was a different story. No matter how promisingly things started, after two to three months I was planning a wedding and they were planning a speedy escape. Scratch any one of my princely ex-boyfriends and you would find an amphibian beneath.

  So you probably won’t be surprised to hear that after the Manhattan incident, in which I blew three days’ holiday allowance and nearly a month’s wages on a flight to the mini-break that became a mini-breakup, my confidence suffered a bit of a knock.

  “That’s it,” I said to my best friend, Becky. “I am giving up on men.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” Becky said.

  “Believe it, Becks. This time I’m serious.”

  The following day I went to a thirtieth birthday party at a flat over a nail bar in Balham and met my Mr. Right.

  It had to be fate. I had finally, after almost two decades spent dating for Great Britain, announced I was giving up on my manhunt. At long last, I had decided to try taking the one piece of advice I always found so hard to swallow: “Love will only come when you’re not looking for it.”

  How many times had I heard that irritating maxim (usually from someone who, six months earlier, had been every bit as desperate to pair up as me)? And how many times had I protested that it simply wasn’t true? Well, I had announced that I was no longer looking for love and just twenty-four hours later I found myself in the kitchen at that thirtieth birthday party, discussing the merits of the latest government budget with the most attractive man I had ever seen in my life!

  Okay, so I didn’t actually find him all that attractive at first …

  Romantic that I was, I had always imagined that when love came to me—when it was real, proper, true love—I would know the second I laid eyes on him. I had experienced so many thunderbolts that turned out to herald nothing but emotional drizzle that, surely, when real love walked into my life, the entire earth would shake with the magnitude of the moment. The heavens would open. Long-dead volcanoes would erupt. My personal choir of angels would stop filing their nails and start singing the Hallelujah Chorus with a guest solo from Elvis. But it wasn’t like that at all.

  When Michael—Michael Parker, the man who would turn my world upside down—walked into the kitchen at that party in Balham, he barely registered on my radar. I was busy looking for a clean glass among the jumble of plastic cups and dirty mugs on the draining board. To attract my attention, Michael swilled out the wineglass he had been drinking from and handed it to me.

  “It’s safe,” he said. “I don’t have anything contagious.”

  (That was his first lie.)

  I thanked him for the glass and helped myself to some wine from the bottle I had brought with me. Though it was only nine in the evening, Helen’s birthday party was already shaping up to be the kind of affair where you couldn’t be certain that the yellowish liquid in the bottle on the counter really was Chardonnay. Glass refilled, I was planning to head back into the sitting room, where Becky and her brand-new boyfriend, Henry, had bagged a sofa, but just as I was about to sashay out of the kitchen and out of trouble, Michael attempted to strike up a conversation.

  “How do you know Helen?” he asked. Not a very original opening gambit, but better than “I bet you look good with no clothes on,” which was how the NY-Lon disaster had started.

  “Helen and I were at college together,” I explained.

  “Oh. That’s great. Durham, wasn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “We work in the same office,” said Michael. “Me and Helen.”

  Which must mean he’s an accountant, I said to myself, switching off.

  “Which means I’m an accountant,” he said. “But we’re not all boring!”

  He took the words right out of my head.

  “I don’t think accountants are boring,” I lied.

  At that moment Helen, the birthday girl, lurched into the kitchen. She was certainly doing her best to show her guests that accountants really can be fun. Outrageous, wacky, “dial 999!” amounts of fun. She was wearing a pair of red crotchless knickers to prove it.

  Thank goodness she was wearing them over her jeans.

  “Aren’t these just ker-razy?” she said, pinging the elastic waistband. “They’re a present from Kevin. He said that now I’m officially over the hill I’m going to need help to get the guys going!”

  I made a mental note not to ask if I could be introduced to Kevin. He sounded a perfect charmer.

  “Kevin is one of our coworkers,” Michael explained. “He’s always playing practical jokes.”

  “What a lot of fun it must be to work in your office,” I said.

  “Oh, I see you’ve met Michael,” said Helen, throwing her arm around his shoulders. “He’s such a great guy.” She tickled him under the chin, and he squirmed playfully. “Really sexy,” she added in a stage whisper to me.

  Sexy? Was she joking? I took in the way Michael was dressed. He was at least two inches shorter than I was in my heels and was wearing the kind of clothes more commonly seen on a member of a contemporary mime group. His faded black turtleneck sweater emphasized the soft contours of his torso, and the high waistband of his black jeans was kidding no one about the real length of his legs. I glanced down at his feet. Tasseled loafers. Brown. I was reminded of my first boyfriend, Malcolm, who had to wear his school shoes on the weekend. Michael looked about as sexy as the pope.

  But he was also funny. And funny is my weakness. Trapped as I was by an increasing nu
mber of Helen’s coworkers pouring into the kitchen in search of booze, I had no choice but to get to know Michael better. Half a bottle of wine later, I was finding him very amusing indeed. Hilarious, in fact. His take on the comings and goings at his accountancy firm was as humorous as an episode of The Office. Before I could say, I’m afraid I’m on a man-break, I had given him my phone number and said that I would be very happy to have dinner with him the following week. On Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. Or Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday if the other days didn’t work for him. When he joked that he would rearrange the following evening’s folk dancing practice just for me, I was smitten.

  I was doomed.

  So much for my man-break. And so much for playing by The Rules, which was something else I had promised I would do if I ever found myself in the unlikely position of going on a date again. Having broken half a dozen commandments from that terribly useful book by acting pathetically keen to see Michael once more, I continued my amateur strategy. That’s right. You’ve guessed it. I went to bed with Michael right after our first date.

  The date took place at Bertorelli in Covent Garden. It was certainly a step up from Pizza Hut with the chap from Supa Clean. The evening went beautifully. The conversation flowed. I managed not to spill anything on my dress (Karen Millen, bought in a rush that afternoon), and afterward, though we lived on different Tube lines, Michael insisted on accompanying me home to my Clapham flat. We were having such a lovely conversation that it seemed a shame to part, so I invited him in, I made him a coffee, and he didn’t leave until the following morning.

  Our physical connection was a revelation. And it pretty much sealed my fate. If you had told me that someone who had the watery eyes of a basset hound in a face like a moldy potato would kiss like you imagine Brad Pitt kisses Angelina, I would never have believed it possible. But it was wonderful. My whole body fizzed with excitement from the moment he laid his hand on mine. At the touch of Michael’s lips I crumbled like a chocaholic locked in a room containing nothing but a box of melting Kit Kats. I couldn’t take my hands off the man. I caught his nasty cold as a result.