Total pages in book: 132
Estimated words: 128742 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 644(@200wpm)___ 515(@250wpm)___ 429(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 128742 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 644(@200wpm)___ 515(@250wpm)___ 429(@300wpm)
When nineteen-year-old Abbey Bly gets the opportunity to study abroad for a year in London, it's the perfect chance to finally slip out from under the thumb of her beloved but overbearing retired rock star father. She's ready to be free, to discover herself - but first off, to meet the girls she's rooming with. That is, until she arrives at her gorgeous new flat to discover those roommates are actually all boys. Charming, funny, insufferably attractive boys. And off-limits, with a rule against fraternizing between housemates after unwanted drama with the previous girl.
Abbey has never considered herself a rulebreaker. But soon, she's lying to her father about her living situation and falling for not one, but two men she can't have: her rugby-player roommate and a broody musician with a girlfriend. Not to mention, her research for school has gotten her tangled in a deeply hidden scandal of a high nobility family, surrounding her in secrets on all sides.
If there's any hope of Abbey finding love, answers, or a future in London, she'll have to decide which rules - and hearts - might be worth breaking
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
AUGUST
1
HE FOLLOWS ME EVERYWHERE. I THOUGHT I’D DITCHED HIM WHEN I climbed through my bedroom window and doubled back around the pool deck to the laundry room—only to be confronted by my father’s disembodied voice telling me about the latest stabbing near a London Tube station. Via the Echo speaker on the counter, he proceeds to cite crime statistics at me from somewhere in this house.
But nope. Not listening. I tune him out as I gather clothes from the dryer, then haul them back to my room, where a sizable fort of suitcases and boxes has overtaken much of the floor. I’ve had weeks to pack. Yet somehow, I’ve managed to delay the most time-consuming tasks until barely an hour before my ride to the airport arrives.
“Knife crimes have risen to more than six thousand— ”
I mute the Echo in my room when my father starts up again. Once I’m safely out of the zip code, I’m talking to someone about having his internet cut off. He’s going to give himself a heart attack.
My phone buzzes. I expect to see Dad’s name on the screen, but it’s my best friend, Eliza, so I put it on speaker and toss it on my bed.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t make it,” she says in lieu of hello. “We were supposed to be back by now, but my mom had to get into a huge fight with the valet about a dent I’m pretty sure she put in her own bumper backing into the landscaper’s truck again, so we’re still not— ”
“It’s fine. Really. Not a big deal at all.”
I start folding shirts and leggings, stuffing them hastily into packing cubes in a frantic race against the clock that begins to negate the point of folding them at all. Everything becomes a crumpled act of desperation to make forty pounds of clothing fit inside my bursting suitcase. The vision I had a few days ago of a well-organized departure is now slipping through my fingers.
“But you’re leaving me,” she mock whines in the dry, reluctantly invested way she has. Every day she’s ever woken up and the world hasn’t ended yet is a complete drag, but I’m one of the few people in it she doesn’t entirely despise. It’s endearing. “I won’t see you again for a year. I’ll miss you.”
I snort out a laugh. “That sounded painful.”
“It was,” she sighs. Fact is, Eliza’s never needed or missed anyone in her life.
“I appreciate the effort.” It’s how I know she cares.
Truthfully, I envy her self-reliance. Her general comfort with herself and indifference to things like anxiety, doubt, or fear. She could be dropped anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice, and as long as she could find a decent cup of coffee, she’d be content.
My phone beeps with an incoming call. I promise to call Eliza before I get on my plane and answer the other line without looking at the screen, expecting my future roommates’ call. With the time difference and travel time between Nashville and London, this will likely be the last chance I have to speak with them before I arrive at the doorstep of my new flat.
“Hello?”
“In London, women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine are eight times more likely to be the victims of— ”
“Dad, seriously? Did you talk with Dr. Wu about your raging paranoia and separation anxiety?”
“Baby girl, listen. London can be a dangerous place for a young woman. I lived there for six months, you know.”
Yes. Everyone knows. He was there while he wrote and then recorded his third album at Abbey Road, for which the Beatles titled their eleventh studio album and, thirty-two years later, I was named.
“You do realize that in much of the rest of the world,” I tell him, struggling to zip another suitcase, “the U.S. is seen as a violent and barbaric society overrun by crime, right?”
“This isn’t like going to the movies in downtown Nashville,” he returns, ignoring my argument. “London is a major international city. You can get into a cab and never be seen or heard from again.”
“I don’t think Dr. Wu would consider bingeing the Taken series before your daughter’s semester abroad a healthy coping mechanism.”
“Abbey.”
“Dad.”
“You’re nineteen years old. That’s old enough to drink in the UK. I can’t help if I’m not thrilled at the idea of my little girl on a different continent with people I don’t know, at some nightclub, getting drinks shoved in her face by a bunch of English assholes.”
“As opposed to American assholes.”
“Abbey.”
Now I know he’s careened right over the ledge. My dad never curses in front of me. He’ll barely sip a glass of wine at dinner if I’m there. Since the day he retired from touring when I was eleven years old, he’s gone to extreme lengths to neuter the rock star persona of Gunner Bly and fashion himself into the perfect father figure. I still think those tabloid photos of him carrying me as a toddler off a tour bus at four in the morning, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, a bottle of Jack in one hand and me in the other, sent a shock wave through his very being. Scared him straight. Made him afraid I’d grow up to be one of those burnt-out, degenerate celebrity offspring who does alternating stints on reality TV and rehab before a crying jag on The View, only communicating with him in the pages of the gossip section.