A Hopeless Romantic Read Online Free PDF

true love for as long as she could remember. This year, it was going to happen. She just had to make it happen.
    So, shivering on that cold balcony on New Year’s Eve, as Jo and Chris kissed each other, and Yorky danced crazily inappropriately with a scared-looking cousin of Chris’s, and Simon charmed the pants off the brunette—literally—Laura clenched her fist, and she went to bed that night with a new resolve of iron. Three weeks after her “thing” with Dan had begun, but months after she had realized that he was the one for her, she knew she was the one who had to do something about it. Even now, nearly two months later, she remembered it clearly; it kept coming back into her head like a drumbeat.
    She had to know, she had to sort this thing out, because somewhere in her lovesick, crazy brain was a small voice telling her that this wasn’t how normal people behaved, fell in love, lived together; and that small voice had been getting louder and louder since before Christmas till now it was like a foghorn in her ear. She and Dan had to take the next step. Well, Dan had to take the next step and finish with Amy; then Laura and Dan had to take the step after that, which was to work out if they could be together.
    So they would go to Kenwood House on this cold February Saturday, with the hot chocolate/ gloves/yew trees, and during that time they would talk, and Laura would explain, calmly and clearly, that Dan had to sort out his situation, otherwise they couldn’t be together anymore.
    “Talk,” Dan said. “Yes, talk.” He looked at her, their fingers still entwined. Laura smiled at him, took the toast out of his mouth, put the tray down on the floor, and reached for him, and they crawled back under the duvet, muffling their laughter and then, a while later, their moans as they came together again and any further discussion was put aside for the moment.
     
    An hour later, Laura emerged from her room carrying the teapot and padded into the kitchen in her bare feet. Yorky was sitting at the little table by the French windows, gazing out at the view. Their flat was in a slightly cramped, dodgy Victorian mansion and had interesting design features—the French windows, for example, opened not onto a charming balcony with pots of geraniums and basil, but onto a sheer drop down four floors. The boiler was in Yorky’s bedroom, and the sitting room had three electrical sockets, but all right next to each other by the door, nowhere near anywhere helpful like underneath the bay window where the television was. It was Yorky’s flat, bought with some help from his elderly parents, since he was a teacher at a school nearby and earned in a year what most bankers earn in a month; and he and Laura were very happy there, though the water frequently turned itself off, the windows rattled, and the linoleum was curling, because they had laid it themselves, not very well. Added to which, Yorky had a mania for collecting interesting things from around the world, so the flat was stuffed with: a) painted gypsy floral watering cans, buckets, etc.; b) elephants made of wicker he’d picked up traveling through Africa; and c) comic books.
    Yorky didn’t look up as Laura came into the kitchen, humming to herself. “Morning,” she said brightly. “How are you today, love?”
    “Fine,” muttered Yorky bitterly. “Oh, just fine.”
    “Oh, right,” said Laura, nonplussed. “Er. Are you, though?”
    “Oh, don’t worry about me,” Yorky spluttered into his tea. “I’ll survive.” He stared moodily out the window. Since he spent quite a lot of his leisure time doing this, Laura ignored him and put the mugs down on the counter.
    “What are you eating?” she asked curiously.
    “I made scrambled eggs with tomatoes,” said Yorky shortly. He gestured to the plate, which looked like pink brains. Yorky was an enthusiastic but disconcerting chef.
    “Oh. It looks nice,” Laura lied. She ran the mugs under the tap.
    “It’s not