Jessica Hart - The Honeymoon Prize

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We’re constantly striving to bring you the best romance fiction by the most exciting authors… and in Harlequin Romance® we’re especially keen to feature fresh, sparkling, warmly emotional novels. Modern love stories to suit your every mood: poignant, deeply moving stories; lively, upbeat romances with sparks flying; or sophisticated, edgy novels with an international flavor.

All our authors are special, and we hope you continue to enjoy each month’s new selection of Harlequin Romance novels. This month, we’re delighted to feature a novel with extra fizz! Jessica Hart has a vibrant writing style and loves to create colorful characters. In The Honeymoon Prize she brings to life a thoroughly modern heroine with a lively outlook on life…and men! It’s fun, flirty and feel-good!

We hope you enjoy this book by Jessica Hart—and look out for future sparkling stories in Harlequin Romance. If you’d like to share your thoughts and comments with us, do please write to:

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Happy reading!

The Editors

Jessica Hart had a haphazard career before she began writing to finance a degree in history. Her experience ranged from waitress, theater production assistant and outback cook to newsdesk secretary, expedition PA and English teacher. And she has worked in countries as different as France and Indonesia, Australia and Cameroon. She now lives in the north of England, where her hobbies are limited to eating and drinking and traveling when she can, preferably to places where she’ll find good food or desert or tropical rain.

If you’d like to find out more about Jessica Hart, you can visit her Web site www.jessicahart.co.uk

HARLEQUIN ROMANCE ®

3638—BABY AT BUSHMAN’S CREEK*

3646—WEDDING AT WAVERLEY CREEK*

3654—A BRIDE FOR BARRA CREEK*

3688—ASSIGNMENT: BABY

3701—INHERITED: TWINS!

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CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

‘I’M GOING to have an affair.’

Pel had been running on the treadmill next to hers at an enviable pace, and with an extremely irritating lack of effort, but Freya was delighted to see that he missed his step at that. ‘You’re going to do what?’ he demanded as he recovered.

Freya grinned, pleased at the impact of her deliberately casual announcement. ‘You heard.’

‘Who with?’

‘Dan Freer,’ she said as nonchalantly as she could between gasps for breath. She was new to the gym and had yet to master the art of using any of the machines without puffing and panting and generally teetering on the verge of collapse.

‘No!’ Pel stared at her, flatteringly impressed. ‘Not Dan Freer, as in ace reporter and owner of the coolest leather jacket on television?’

‘That’s the one.’

He whistled soundlessly. ‘Well! When did all this happen?’

‘It hasn’t yet,’ Freya had to confess. ‘But it’s going to! I’ve decided that you and Lucy are right. It’s time to change my life, and seducing Dan Freer is the first step.’

‘What brought this on?’ asked Pel curiously, and Freya adjusted her speed to a walk so that she could talk properly.

Of course, she knew she was supposed to be pushing herself to the limit, but it was a question of priorities, and she had to balance convincing Pel to support her new mission in life against the trim, taut, toned body she had been promised by the instructor who had set her the torture otherwise known as a fitness programme.

‘It’s my birthday next week,’ she told Pel, who was obsessive about keeping fit, and had barely broken into a sweat after running for twenty minutes. ‘I’m going to be twenty-seven. Only three more years and I’ll be thirty!’ she added melodramatically. ‘What’s going to happen to me after that?’

‘You’ll be thirty-one?’ suggested Pel. ‘Just a wild guess, of course!’

Freya stuck out her tongue. ‘You know what I mean. It’ll be downhill all the way into middle age and before I know where I am I’ll be wearing a felt hat and keeping cats. I want to live a little before then! I’m stuck in a rut,’ she complained. ‘I never go anywhere. I never do anything. I never meet any men.’

‘You do meet men. Lucy and I are always trailing eligible types under your nose.’

‘Like who?’

‘Like Dominic. I know he’s an estate agent, but he couldn’t help that. He was clean and solvent, and he really liked you.’

She stared at him. ‘How many estate agents called Dominic do you know, Pel? The one I met wasn’t the slightest bit interested in me!’

‘Yes, he was, but you never gave him any encouragement.’ Pel shook his head knowingly. ‘Your trouble is, you don’t read the signals right.’

‘So you and Lucy keep telling me,’ said Freya crossly. It was an old argument. ‘Anyway, he wasn’t my type. I know I said I was going to wait for Ben Affleck, but there’s no saying when he’ll be free, and in the meantime I want someone more exciting than an estate agent from Chigwell. I’m tired of being a good girl. I want to live dangerously for a change, and I’ve decided that Dan would be perfect for me.’

Pel looked a little dubious. ‘You don’t think he’s just the teensiest bit out of your league?’

‘Well, thank you for that vote of confidence!’

‘You were the one who told me he’d been on the cover of People,’ Pel pointed out. ‘He sounds seriously cool.’

‘And I’m not, I suppose?’

Pel looked at his friend. She was labouring on the treadmill, puffing with exertion, her face bright red and her fringe sticking sweatily to her forehead. ‘I hate to be the one to break this to you, pet,’ he said affectionately, ‘but you are never going to be cool!’

Freya sighed. She hadn’t needed Pel to tell her that. ‘I know.’

‘It’s not that you’re not a pretty girl,’ he went on hastily. ‘In fact, you could be very pretty if you made a bit of an effort.’

‘I am making an effort,’ she objected. ‘I’m at the gym, aren’t I?’

‘In body, but not in spirit,’ said Pel austerely. ‘Look at you now, moving at the pace of a lethargic slug! If you really want to change your life, you’re going to have to lift your game.’

Grumbling under her breath, Freya increased the speed on the treadmill by a fraction. Pel watched her with beady blue eyes until she grudgingly upped it another three levels.

‘The point is, you’re too nice,’ he went on, having sniffed his disapproval at her lack of enthusiasm but settled for the compromise. ‘We all adore you, and we know that you’re not nearly as tough as you seem beneath that spiky exterior of yours. I don’t want you to get hurt, that’s all.’