The Wish List
Jane Costello was a newspaper journalist before she became an author, working on the
Liverpool Echo
, the
Daily Mail
, and the
Liverpool Daily Post
, where she was Editor. Jane’s first novel,
Bridesmaids
, was an instant bestseller.
The Nearly-Weds
won Romantic Comedy of the Year 2010,
Girl on the Run
was shortlisted for the Melissa Nathan Award for Romantic Comedy 2012, and her latest novel,
All The Single Ladies
is yet another bestseller. Jane lives in
Liverpool with her boyfriend Mark and three young sons. Find out more at www.janecostello.com, and follow her on Twitter @janecostello
Also by Jane Costello
Bridesmaids
The Nearly-Weds
My Single Friend
Girl on the Run
All the Single Ladies
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2013
A CBS COMPANY
This paperback edition published 2013
Copyright © Jane Costello 2013
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
The right of Jane Costello to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
PB ISBN: 978-0-85720-556-8
EBOOK ISBN: 978-0-85720-557-5
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual people, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Typeset by M Rules
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
For my brother Stephen
There are so many talented people at Simon & Schuster working behind the scenes on my books that I could easily fill more than a page with their names. But I’d like
to say a special thanks to just a few of those – Suzanne Baboneau, Ian Chapman, Kerr MacRae, Clare Hey, Maxine Hitchcock, Emma Harrow, Dawn Burnett, Sara-Jade Virtue, Alice Murphy, Ally Grant
and Lizzie Gardiner. I’m so grateful to you all.
Thank you, as ever, to my brilliant agent Darley Anderson and his Angels – Clare Wallace, Rosanna Bellingham, Camilla Wray and Andrea Messant.
Finally, thanks to my parents Jean and Phil Wolstenholme, my lovely children, and my boyfriend Mark O’Hanlon.
Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you did not do than by the things you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away
from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
Mark Twain
Prologue
Opening my eyes has never been so excruciating. I can manage but a tiny slit, one that involves a degree of movement as painful as it is infinitesimal.
Don’t let me give you the impression it’s only my optic system that’s troubling me, though. I’ve been awake but immobile for several minutes wondering what hideous
torture device has been used to peel the lining from my guts. I’m cheek down on a pillow, contemplating why my tongue feels three times its usual size and is holding what can be no more than
a quarter of its normal water content.
‘Urghhh . . .’
My fetid groan sounds like that of a recently exhumed corpse attempting to come back to life. Then I feel it beside me. Movement.
My eyes spring open, sending a slice of pain through my frontal cortex. I take in my surroundings and two horrible facts become instantly apparent:
I am in a bedroom.
And it’s not mine.
I squint through evil shafts of sunlight that stream through grubby vertical blinds and bounce off a snowstorm of dust particles.
The floor boasts the sort of swirly carpet fashionable in public houses of the 1970s – only this one doesn’t have the benefit of the dirty ash of several thousand discarded fags
trodden into it. It is psychedelic to a nauseating degree: an angry clash of paisley patterns in orange-brown shades that range from tartrazine to dog poo.
In the corner is a greying Formica dressing table with intermittent gilt edging, next to it is a faux-teak chest of drawers, and the main door looks as though the only possible thing it can lead
to is a basement full of dead bodies.
The flicker of a red LED drags my attention to the bedside table, where a solitary item sits entirely out of place: an Alessi alarm clock, straight out of the design pages in
GQ
. It
reads 08.26.
I feel the quilt slide slowly across my back, as if someone’s pulling it sleepily towards them. I freeze again, my chest hammering.
There is a living, breathing person next to me, of that there is no doubt. Who that person is, is quite another question.
My mind starts whirring while I attempt to piece together the events of our girls’ night out. I remember chatting to the barman . . . then the guy who looked like Ryan Gosling . . . then
there was that paramedic – oh God, I’ve come home with the paramedic! He was supposed to be helping that poor woman in labour in the restaurant above the bar. The swine! She
could’ve been stuck there, swimming in her recently broken waters, while that guy was downstairs picking
me
up!
Then it hits me. There was someone
after
the paramedic. I think.
There’s only one thing for this.
Painfully slowly, I attempt to move my head to the other side so I can get a look at exactly who I’m sharing these bedclothes with.
It takes several seconds, not only because I don’t want to wake him up, but also because my mouth appears to be stuck to the pillow with an adhesive of similar quality to No More
Nails.
My bed partner has his back to me.
A broad, muscular back with a small mole on his shoulder and a faint tan line round the neck. I carefully push myself up, freezing each time he stirs, until I have a side view of his face.
He has long, dark eyelashes with a tiny blob of sleep in the corner, a straight nose and soft, parted lips from which he’s snoring lightly. He’s handsome, if dishevelled, and
I’d put him in his early thirties, though he could be younger. Then it comes back to me.
It’s the guy who looks a bit like Tom Hardy!
The guy with the lovely . . . I breathe in
his smell and have my first and only positive experience of the day.
He moves again, pulling the duvet over himself. Adrenalin rushes through me as my immediate priority slaps me in the face: I’ve got to get out of here.
I manoeuvre myself to a sitting position, making absolutely sure that the bedding touching him doesn’t move, and realise I’m wearing my clothes from the night before. I’m torn
between revulsion and relief.
I slowly swing my legs out of bed, fully expecting to see my Karen Millen jeans, but I am confronted instead by something that makes me gasp. My legs. Not my jean-clad legs, you understand.
Just
my legs.
Struggling to breathe, I manage to stand and at that point spot something that confirms categorically that I did something very, very bad last night. My knickers. Only, they’re a long way
from the piece of anatomy they’re supposed to cover – and are caught around the toes of my right foot.
‘Oh. My. God,’ I whisper.
The implications of this engulf and appal me.
Not only have I breached my no-more-than-four-drinks rule – the one that’s remained unbreached since 2001 – but I have had
a one-night stand
. The thought sends a wave
of nausea through me. The closest I’ve ever got to recklessness before this was leaving my antibacterial hand gel at home.
With my heart racing, I drag my tangled underwear up my legs, silently tug on the jeans – which I locate on the other side of the room – and, after three or four minutes of silent
but hysterical surveillance, throw on my high heels, one of which had somehow made its way behind a maroon velour curtain.
I creep to the door from hell, not risking a backwards glance, and step out of the room into a hallway. Then I realise I’m in a flat, not a house, although that doesn’t alter the
decor, which is even more retina-burning here than in the bedroom.