The Decoy Girlfriend - Softcover

Vale, Lillie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593422023 ISBN 13: 9780593422021

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A laugh-out-loud funny and whip-smart romantic comedy from the author of The Shaadi Set-Up, about a young woman who takes the place of her celebrity doppelgänger, and must fake-date the actress’s sexy costar boyfriend.

Writer Freya Lal has a huge secret: she's a dead ringer for It-girl actress Mandi Roy. Her second novel is due in a month, but inspiration is nowhere to be found. Desperate to shake off her writer's block, Freya leans into her look-alike abilities and indulges in some mistaken identity for simple perks, like scoring a free mimosa or getting into a trendy nightclub. 
 
Actor Taft Bamber appears to have it all: gorgeous, talented, and Mandi's love interest both on- and off-screen. But what nobody knows is that their relationship is a PR stunt, and after years of playing make-believe, he's yearning for something real. 
 
When Freya's latest impersonation of Mandi goes viral thanks to Taft's accidental interference, rumors of a breakup threaten Hollywood's golden couple. To make amends, Freya is forced to give Mandi a little time off: she'll pretend to be the actress for a month, move in with Taft, and squash the rumors by acting completely in love. But as Freya and Taft play house, it becomes impossible to ignore that their instant chemistry isn't just for the cameras. While faking it, they might have just found the real thing. 

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lillie Vale is the author of The Shaadi Set-Up and the young adult novels Beauty and the Besharam and Small Town Hearts. She writes about secrets and yearning, complicated and ambitious girls who know what they want, the places we call home and people we find our way back to, and the magic we make. Born in Mumbai, she grew up in Mississippi, Texas, and North Dakota, and now lives in an Indiana college town.  
 

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Chapter One

With two huge secrets, Freya Lal is the exact opposite of the open book she always considered herself to be.

She stares at the laptop on the counter of her aunt's bookshop, Books & Brambles. The blinking cursor at the end of the page mocks her. Grimly, she rereads her words until she has no choice but to come to the conclusion that she is, in fact, a one-hit wonder who will never be published again.

She holds down the Delete key until every single awful word is obliterated. The pinching band of tightness around her chest eases the moment the Word doc is blank again. Yesterday's words are gone, and she already can't remember what they said. It feels like Freya's chased away a bogeyman, one that's been Frankensteined together with ugly words stitched into unflattering sentences.

The more she thinks about it, not only does her imposter syndrome become more plausible, it becomes more obvious: her first book deal-when she was a teenage wunderkind-was obviously a fluke. How the hell is she supposed to turn in a first draft of her second book to her publisher when she can't even write two paragraphs before self-doubt creeps in? She's been keeping her lack of progress a secret from everyone for so long that the only thing that will help her now is to-

No. That's secret number two, and she swore that she was cutting back.

After throwing her long brown hair into a high ponytail, she shoves her oversize electric-blue plastic-framed glasses up her nose and holds back a groan. The only thing she has going for her right now is the fact that absolutely no one in Books & Brambles knows that the twenty-three-year-old girl slumped next to the register is in the throes of an existential crisis.

The indie bookshop is a few minutes away from its 9:00 a.m. opening, and two other employees are putting the finishing touches on the themed window display. Freya can catch snippets of conversation regaling all the gory details of her coworkers' terrible Tinder dates drifting down the aisle, too quiet and far away for her to take part in, even if she were dating right now (which she isn't) and even if she wanted to (which she doesn't).

"Are we sure these should be here?" Cliff's voice is strained, like he's lifting a tall stack of books.

With a confidence far greater than her few weeks of working here, Emma authoritatively replies, "If Stori left them up here, then yeah. Left window is for summer swoons, and right window is for summer slashers."

"I know that." Cliff's words are punctuated with a solid thump that Freya can only imagine is him setting down the books until the confusion is cleared up. "I meant are we sure because it's an old title."

"That can't be right. Let me see that- Oh. Just put them there."

"Should we double-check with Stori?"

"You mean Freya's aunt? Of course not," Emma snorts. "Didn't the name on the cover ring a bell?"

"Oh shit." Cliff's voice drops. "This is actually her? I thought she was a writer in the same way that you're a model."

Like Freya, Emma was another East Coast transplant who came to Los Angeles with big dreams. She had yet to book a modeling gig but had added influencer to her Instagram bio after her third DM from a brand that didn't care she hadn't cracked a thousand followers.

"I am a model." Emma's indignant and forgets to whisper. "She hasn't published a new book in years."

Mortification stings like fire ants down Freya's neck. They haven't said anything that isn't true, but it still hurts to hear the confirmation that she's already considered a has-been. In a city that makes dreams as often as it crushes them, it's not a lonely club, but it's not the life she'd envisioned for herself, either.

Compared to her debut novel, writing book two has been a completely different experience in every way. In high school, Freya-a self-professed neutral evil on the alignment chart-was entirely consumed by her writing. She woke up thinking about her characters, went to bed excited to write the next day's words, and jolted awake at 3:00 a.m. to jot down fragments of dialogue or scene ideas in her iPhone's Notes app. She spent every study hall reading the latest YA novel and asked for writing books and summer workshops every birthday and Christmas to level up on her craft.

The difference is Freya's mom had been around to cheerlead back then. Anjali Lal had a fierce optimism in all things but especially in this: if her daughter wanted to publish a book, she had every faith that it was a when, not an if. As Freya's first beta reader, her mother knew this was the one with a certainty Freya doubts she herself has had about anything in her entire life.

Freya never had to look for her own inner validation because she knew she always had her mom's.

Until she didn't anymore.

"Look, forget about it. It's Stori's call, and we're opening in, like, five minutes," Emma says finally. "Take the new Riley Sager novel and finish the other window before she notices we're running behind."

"Seriously?" Cliff complains, voice back to normal. "I helped you unbox the new Tessa Bailey, set up the sandbox, and used my superior stamina to inflate the beach ball and flamingo floatie."

Emma makes a bad joke about blowing, but Freya's already tuning them out.

The blank white page on her screen stares damningly back at her, so she fixes her gaze on the mountain of Steph Kirkland books on the display stand closest to the register. All Freya has to do is get through the rest of the day, then it will all be better. Her best friends, who started as Twitter critique partners and turned into real-life besties, are all flying out to celebrate Steph's book signing at Books & Brambles tonight.

They're the only ones who know her second secret.

Even the best writer can have a bad writing day—or, in Freya's case, bad writing years—but this is the one thing she is always, always good at: impersonating the actress Mandini Roy.

The first time it happened was back in New York a year after her mother had passed, and it had been a complete coincidence while she was out on a date (back when she actually dated). It was with a guy from her building, and they didn't have a reservation for the trendy new rooftop bar he thought he could schmooze his way into. But by some strange stroke of luck, simply because Freya had parted her hair a certain way and worn a dress that looked kind of like one Mandi had worn to Cannes Film Festival, security had waved them through without even a blink.

That first time had been a total accident.

But every time after that hadn't been.

A free mimosa at a trendy new bistro off Madison Square Park; skipping the queue at an upscale lounge in Chelsea, the kind of venue where they wouldn't let you in if you were wearing sneakers, shorts, or sandals; rooftop bars frequented by the Wall Street crowd, offering sweeping skyline views.

Since her mother's death, Freya had lost all motivation to write. None of her usual tricks-people-watching, rereading her dog-eared and well-thumbed favorite books, taking up a new hobby-worked.

But the first time she was mistaken for Mandi, she couldn't wait to end the date so she could go home and write. Freya couldn't justify doing it often enough to finish her second book, but when she did, the novelty and, frankly, danger of it all fed her writing inspiration like nothing else could.

Maybe she wouldn't feel the temptation if she were good at something else, but after college, getting that external validation proved a lot harder. But studying was always an area where she excelled, and it didn't take much to talk herself into just one more experiment. She devoured every picture and interview of Mandi's until...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593422023
• ISBN 13: 9780593422021
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland