Enemies to Lovers - Softcover

Williams, Laura Jane

 
9780593719473: Enemies to Lovers
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593719476 ISBN 13: 9780593719473
Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

From international bestselling author Laura Jane Williams, the queen of the "meet cute," comes a riotous, trope lover’s dream: an enemies-to-lovers romance with a brother's best friend, set during a summer vacation in Greece.

The best way to get over a crush? Get to know them better...


Ever since The Embarrassing Meltdown Incident, Flo has been on an enforced break from life. Namely, her over-achieving, high-strung ways. And the timing couldn’t be better, as her family sets off to Greece for their summer vacation. 

Enter Jamie Kramer…literally. Jamie is Flo’s brother's best friend. Also known as a pain in her backside. And her family’s "adopted" son after he lost his parents. Sure, she has empathy for the guy, but does that mean he always has to tag along?

Flo and Jamie hate each other. Except, they don't. Flo actually has a mortifying crush on her mortal enemy, only made infuriatingly stronger after The Christmas Incident. And nobody—absolutely nobody, least of all her bonkers family, and certainly not Jamie himself—can know about The Christmas Incident. But she has a plan. With two weeks of sharing boat trips and sun-loungers on the horizon, Flo is going to have to remedy herself the only way she can think of: by spending time with him. What could possibly go wrong?

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Laura Jane Williams (she/her) is known as the queen of the “meet cute”. She is the author of seven novels and a novella, as well as several non-fiction titles. The rights to Laura’s international bestseller Our Stop have been sold for television, and her books have been translated into languages all over the world. When she's not telling stories, Laura loves being a parent, romance, and throwing weights around at the gym. Enemies to Lovers is her US debut.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

I am floating. I am floating on the crystal-clear water of whatever ocean laps around the sandy Greek shores of Preveza. Is it the Aegean Sea? Hmmm. I should probably know that. I'll google it when I'm back near my phone. Obviously I don't have my phone in the water. It's just me and presumably some fish, early afternoon sun bringing my skin-and if I wouldn't get laughed at by my ridiculous family for poetic hyperbole, I'd go as far as to say my very soul-back to life after three long years under gray Scottish skies. Actually, that's not strictly true. The university is under gray Scottish skies, and so for the most part I've been under strip lighting. Either way, this is the first time I've felt any semblance of hope, or freedom, or possibility, in ages. I once read that we're all solar-powered. I get that now. It's like when the sun is out and the water glistens, everything that came before melts away. So much doesn't matter here, unmoored, bobbing about, the sound of my own heart surprisingly good company. Even last Christmas and everything that happened feels far away, and after my breakdown I didn't think anything could be any worse than that. Only I could hit rock bottom and then discover it has a basement. Classic.

Recovery can mean different things for different people. That's what my therapist says. Having a breakdown at twenty-four is part of who I am, and two years on, it's part of what's made me the resilient, hopeful phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes that gets to float in the sea and let her mind drift, happy to be alive. I was a wreck back then. A year into my PhD and I had a depression and anxiety that got worse and worse until I was signed off sick from my course and had to spend a month in a residential care facility. Even after I left, I had to have daily visits from the crisis team-but that's when I met my therapist, and she's changed my life. Well, I have changed my life actually, but she gave me the tools to do it. I've done a lot of work to get better. I had to stop fighting myself. I've journaled, medicated, walked, stretched, got back into running. I've made best friends with Hope, which isn't a joke: Literally, the woman I saw waiting outside my therapist's office three times a week is called Hope. It's not a metaphor. In fact I called her Despair for a while, as we got to know each other. It made her laugh. But after Jamie slipped that note under my door at Christmas, it tested my new tools to the limit. I was so humiliated. I went home for the holidays feeling so in balance, and suddenly there he was-my brother's best friend joining us for the festivities-and the vibe between us had shifted. I was open to it.

"Am I imagining this?" he'd asked, after three days of . . . something.

"No," I'd said. "Knock on my door later," I eventually told him, after a family movie night where his foot ended up pressed against mine under the blanket and the nearness of him almost made me explode.

He never showed. His letter said he'd bottled it. I'd put myself out there and . . . Well, it's a good job I'd had all that therapy, because I needed every trick in the book to pull myself back together. Yeah, it was only a few days of whatever-it-was developing between us, but all my "positive thinking" and "soothing visualizations" had me thinking I'd actually get to have a bit of fun for once. Because, spoiler alert: Nobody wants to date the woman who had a nervous breakdown. I had thought Jamie "got it," what with his own trauma. I thought he understood me. So that's what hit hardest. I know now that I should never have trusted him, because first impressions are nearly always right: He really is a vapid womanizer, and I will never fall for his charms again because I have worked too damned hard for my self-respect.

I've not seen him since then. We've avoided each other. Which is why it pisses me off so much when, standing up, with the seabed squashing sand between my toes, the sun forcing me to squint, I notice a stranger up on the beach who looks exactly like him. There's Mum and Dad and my two brothers, Alex and Laurie, and there's Laurie's wife, Kate, too. We got in an hour ago, the owners of the villa having kindly packed us a picnic basket for an early supper, which we schlepped down here, along with some beach chairs and our towels. Just the six of us. Except . . . I'm here, so that should be five bodies up there on the sand.

I lower my body back into the warmth of the sea and swim as close to the shore as possible, staying submerged so I can surreptitiously dislodge a wedgie. I turn to look again, now I'm closer. It's then that I realize the sixth person up there with my family definitely isn't a passing local or a figment of my imagination.

It is Jamie.

And I am suddenly absolutely furious.

2

I can see, as I climb out of the water, that he's the color of baked earth after six months of sailing yachts across the seven seas for millionaires who like to leave their boats in one place but pick them up in another. He's broad-broader than he deserves to be-and the thick dent of his spine looks like somebody has taken their thumb and smudged down the center of his back: lumps and bumps and pops all around it in, places I didn't even know there could be lumps and bumps and pops. His arms are as thick as my thighs. Jesus, what a show-off. I'm all for keeping fit, but Jamie takes it too far. That time could be spent on other things, like . . . reading . . . or . . . watching The Real Housewives of New York City. You've got to be super-vain to work out so much. But then that's Jamie Kramer: vain as they come.

I take a breath, readying for that look he gives me: blank, unmoved, bored. It was always that way, until it wasn't. Years of ignoring me, then four days of . . . well, whatever Christmas was. The Big Almost. And then I might have egged Jamie's car when he pied me off. So now we're back to not speaking, as if Christmas never even happened. That's useful, really: Nobody else knows what happened, of course. Over my dead body do I want my family's pity. Kate has intuited some sort of dalliance, but even she doesn't know it all.

I will say hello, because he's my brother's best friend, my parents treat him like a son, and I know Kate will be holding her breath to see if I'm going to be polite. Quite frankly I don't want to be the source of any gossip, and let's be clear: My family loves to gossip, about one another most of all. I wring out the seawater from my hair, shake the water off my arms, and make my approach to grab a beer and acknowledge Jamie's stupid arrival.

As I walk up to the cooler that we stashed the drinks in, Jamie turns just enough that I know he knows I'm here, but after an almost imperceptible beat he focuses his attention fully back on Mum, without acknowledging me. I could write the book on how this will go. Mum is in sickening rapture at whatever ridiculous thing he's telling her. She's practically fawning-she finds him delightful and such fun, a really lovely boy-but I will do no such thing. This is how Jamie plays it with everyone. He lets people come to him, flexing his gravitational pull with that smile and that easy laugh. I tried to bring it up with my mother a little while ago, about how he's stealthily manipulative, and she told me not to be so sensitive, that I was reading too much into it. The implication is that I do that because I am a bit unhinged and so I never brought it up again. But I know I'm right. He is manipulative. And vain. And rude. He uses people. He used me.

"Oi, oi!" Laurie hollers in Jamie's direction. "Here he is, flexing his biceps as he drinks, like he's posing for hidden paparazzi."

Laurie suddenly has Jamie in a quasi-headlock, arm looped around his neck and pulling down so that he can rub his hair. Jamie pushes him off easily. I step back so I don't get caught in the...

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Verlag
G.P. Putnam's Sons
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593719476
ISBN 13 
9780593719473
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
303
Kontakt zum Hersteller
G.P. Putnam's Sons
https://www.penguin.com/putnam/

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USA
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Softcover