Page 1 of Fit for Love
Chapter One
Cora
The room spun on its axis and I daren’t open my eyes for fear of what I might see. Nausea washed over me and I tried to right my body before the contents of my stomach made an unwelcome reappearance.
My whole body hurt: my stomach was in knots, my head was pounding and my mouth felt as if something had crawled in there and died. Even trying to prise open my eyelids hurt.
And that was before I even thought about my heart.
The image I’d seen the previous evening was burned into my memory and I could now never un-see it.
Orlando Weare. The playboy with the sky-rocketing TV career, darling of the gossip columns, worshipped by thousands, maybe even millions. Archetypal cheeky chappy.
Liar. Cheat. Charlatan.
We’d been together a few months, setting the tabloids alight with our relationship: the actor and the social-media star. We complemented each other perfectly.
He had the potential to be The One.
Except it had all been built on a web of deceit.
I’d been taken for a fool.
Now it turns out he wasn’t The One at all. At least not for me. Or any other woman, as it turned out.
I dry-retched as I thought of him all over the guy I’d found him with. I’d been out for dinner with my best friend, Louise, and thought it was a good idea to surprise him afterwards. Yes, he’d been that committed to have given me a key to his flat. Orlando had told me he was feeling under the weather, and wasn’t up for going out.
I didn’t know the guy’s name was ‘under the weather’.
Sex with Orlando had been nothing more than a clumsy fumble under the covers with the lights off. Less than satisfactory. And now I knew why.
God only knows what I might have seen if I’d arrived a few moments later. My stomach heaved again at the thought.
Orlando’s parting comment—after I’d screamed and raged at him and his red-faced partner in crime—had been “you won’t tell anyone about this, will you, sweetheart?”
As if I could. I was humiliated beyond belief.
Not knowing what to do, I had checked into the nearest hotel. Then everything became, well, a bit hazy.
My gaze swept across the room as I propped myself up on my elbows: there were two empty bottles of white wine; the mini bar had been cleared, the empty, tiny bottles of gin and vodka strewn across the carpet as testimony. Then there was the room-service tray with the evidence of a massive burger and chips, macaroni cheese and an untouched bowl of ice cream that had melted overnight and pooled into a sticky, unappetising mess.
It looked exactly how I felt.
It had been years since I’d drunk anything more than one spritzer in a night, maybe the occasional glass of champagne if I was at a wedding or a really special occasion. But two bottles of wine and spirits in one go? I never drank that much, even at university.
And the burger? Cheese? Sugar?Shit.
What the hell had Orlando made me do?
The aroma emanating from the leftovers made the churning in my stomach more intense and I dashed to the bathroom, only just making it in time. As I vomited, my eyes filled with tears, my nose got blocked, making it difficult to breathe. I sank to the floor, the cool tiles welcoming as I hiccuped and threw up some more, repeating the cycle until I was sure there couldn’t possibly be anything left.
I wiped my eyes, and caught sight of my reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirror, handily placed on the opposite wall.Ugh.This definitely wasn’t the Cora Appleby I presented to the outside world. Make-up streaked my face, black mascara traces under my eyes, competing with the red puffiness from crying so much. The long-lasting lip gloss I favoured appeared to still be in place—that was an endorsement I would be able to make, although now wasn’t the time for a selfie. My skin looked grey and pallid, made even worse by the stark, unflattering strip lighting in the bathroom.
Lifestyle guru.
Teetotal and vegan.
And everything that I represented had been destroyed in one night by one man and his lies.
