Sarah Morgan - Moonlight Over Manhattan - A charming, heart-warming and lovely read that won’t disappoint!

Praise for Sarah Morgan

‘The perfect book to curl up with’

Heat

‘Lovers of romance will relish this tale of friendship, fun and flirting set in beautiful New York.’

My Weekly

‘Morgan excels in balancing the sweet and sexy to create the perfect blend.’

Booklist

‘A gorgeously sparkly romance about letting go and learning to love again.’ Julia Williams, bestselling author of Coming Home for Christmas

‘Full of romance and sparkle’

Lovereading

‘Morgan is a magician with words’

RT Book Reviews

‘Definitely looking forward to more from Sarah Morgan’

Smexy Books

‘Morgan’s novel delivers the classic sweep-you-off-your-feet romantic experience.’

Publisher’s Weekly

‘Perfect chick-lit’

BEST Magazine

‘Her dynamic prose like narrative is eloquent, the laugh-out-loud humor lightens the load and both her big-city and small-town settings are perfect’

RT Book Reviews

SARAH MORGANlives near London with her husband and two sons. An international bestseller, her books have been translated into more than 30 languages and she has sold over 15 million copies. For more about Sarah visit her website www.sarahmorgan.com, and sign up to her newsletter. She loves to connect with readers on Facebook ( www.facebook.com/AuthorSarahMorgan), Twitter and Instagram.

Dear Reader

One of my favorite quotes (and I’ve used it in the front of this book) is from Eleanor Roosevelt, who said ‘do one thing every day that scares you’.

That quote is perfect for the heroine of this story. Harriet is a twin, and she is the shy twin. Life wasn’t easy for her growing up and now her confident twin sister has moved out of their apartment, she is forced to make a new life for herself. And it’s hard. She knows she has to push herself out of her comfort zone, and so resolves to do one thing every day that challenges her.

Like most people, Harriet is a mixture of strength and vulnerability and I loved watching her grow in confidence and find her own path.

As some of you know, I wrote a number of medical romances before writing longer books, and I still can’t resist a sexy doctor. So my hero in this story, Dr. Ethan Black, works in the emergency department (as I did, many years ago before I changed careers and started writing stories while wearing my pajamas.) He is my favorite type of hero – strong, kind, smart and patient. I don’t blame Harriet for falling in love with him (I hope you do too!), but in the end loving Ethan becomes her greatest challenge of all.

This is a story about pushing the boundaries. It’s about courage, friendship and of course romance, all against the snowy, sparkly backdrop of New York City.

I hope you love it.

Sarah

xxx

To Nora, Laura, Ruth, Mary, Kat and Janeen for the laughs, friendship and great memories .

“Do one thing every day that scares you.”

Eleanor Roosevelt

Contents

Cover

Praise

About the Author

Title Page

Dear Reader

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

BONUS STORY – A NEW YORK CHRISTMAS FAIRY TALE

THANK YOU

Excerpt from HOW TO KEEP A SECRET

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

THIS WASN’T HOW a date was supposed to end.

If she’d known she was going to have to climb out of the window of the ladies’ room, she wouldn’t have chosen tonight to wear insanely high heels. Why hadn’t she spent more time learning to balance before leaving her apartment?

She’d never been a high heel sort of person, which was exactly why she was now wearing a pair of skyscraper stilettos. Another thing ticked off the list she’d made of Things Harriet Knight Wouldn’t Normally Do.

It was an embarrassingly long list, compiled one lonely October night when she’d realized that the reason she was sitting in the apartment on her own, talking to the animals she fostered, was that she lived her life safely cocooned inside her comfort zone. At this rate she was going to die alone, surrounded by a hundred dogs and cats.

Here lies Harriet, who knew a lot about hair balls, but not a whole lot about the other kind .

A life of sin would have been more exciting, but she’d picked up the wrong rule book when she was born. As a child she’d learned how to hide. How to make herself small, if not exactly invisible. Ever since then she’d trodden the safest path, and she’d done it while wearing sensible shoes. Plenty of people, including her twin sister and her brother, would say she had good reason for that. Whatever reasons lay in her past, she lived a small life and she was uncomfortably aware that she kept it that way through choice.

The F word loomed big in her world.

Not the curse. She wasn’t the sort of person who cursed. For her, the F word was Fear .

Fear of humiliation, fear of failing, fear of what other people thought of her, and all those fears originated from fear of her father.

She was tired of the F word.

She didn’t want to live life alone, which was why she’d decided that for Christmas she was giving herself a new gift.

Courage.

She didn’t want to look back on her life in fifty years’ time and wonder about the things she might have done had she been braver. She didn’t want to feel regret. During a happy Thanksgiving spent with Daniel and his soon-to-be wife, Molly, she’d distilled her fear list to a challenge a day.

Challenge Harriet.

She was going on a quest to find the confidence that eluded her and if she couldn’t find it then she’d fake it.

For the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, she would do one thing every day that scared her, or at least made her uncomfortable. It had to be something that made her think I don’t want to do that .

For one month, she would make a point of doing the opposite of what she would usually do.

A month of putting herself through her own kind of hell.

She was going to emerge from the challenge a new, improved version of herself. Stronger. Bolder. More confident. More—everything.

Which was why she was now hanging out of a bathroom window being supported by her new best friend Natalie. Luckily for her, the restaurant wasn’t on the roof terrace.

“Take your shoes off,” Natalie advised. “I’ll drop them down to you.”

“They’ll impale me or knock me unconscious. It might be safer to keep them on my feet, Natalie.” There were days when she questioned the benefits of being sensible, but right now she wasn’t sure if it stopped her having fun or if it kept her alive.

“Call me Nat. If I’m helping you escape, we might as well drop the formalities. And you can’t keep those shoes on your feet. You’ll injure yourself when you land. And give me your purse.”

Harriet clung to it. This was New York City. She would no more hand her purse to a stranger than she would walk naked through Central Park. It went against every instinct she had. She was the type of person who looked twice before she crossed the road, who checked the lock on her door before she went to sleep. She wasn’t a risk-taker.