I’d like to thank everyone at Mills & Boon, especially Anna Baggaley, my very patient editor, and the lovely Victoria Oundjian, especially as it took quite some time to help this author see the wood of this book through the trees of her wayward imagination. I also want to say a huge thank you to all of M&B’s marketing and promotion team, for their enthusiasm and hard work from day one.

Big thanks to my amazing agent Lizzy Kremer and also to Harriet Moore at David Higham Associates, for her calm encouragement in the midst of a deadline panic and her insightful suggestions.

My family definitely deserve my gratitude, especially my husband, Andy, who patiently listens to me warble on about difficult plot matters so I can get things straight in my head, even though he hardly ever knows who these people I’m talking about are, and to my lovely daughters, Sian and Rose, who cheer me on all the way, and who didn’t moan (much) when I hogged the TV for months, watching every film of Doris’s I could get my hands on.

Thanks to all my Facebook friends who helped me with football-related stuff. Sorry, those scenes ended up on the cutting room floor, but at least you have educated this football dunce a little.

Lastly, and most importantly, I want to thank Doris Day, for her captivating and charismatic performances that have charmed generations and continue to bring us joy and happiness, but also for her strength of character and resilience. The true story of the woman behind the Hollywood icon was the inspiration for this book.

Chapter One

Nobody’s Sweetheart

When Claire Bixby was nine, she decided that one day she’d like to live in Hollywood, because she wanted to be in movies. Not that she wanted to be an actress. Far from it. No, Claire wanted to actually be in the movies, to live there, a place where the sun always shone, everything was Technicolor bright and families lived happily ever after together. There would be no more shouting, no more crying. No hearing the front door slam, one parent leaving never to return – even if she’d discovered she could breathe out more easily after he’d left.

However, as all little girls do, Claire grew up, and she came to understand that nothing was what it seemed in Hollywood. The houses weren’t real. The outsides were just false fronts and the insides built on a sound stage, made up of plywood flats that could be wheeled around depending on where the camera needed to go. And while the sun might shine pretty regularly in California, she suspected that once the actors took off their make-up, they probably went home and shouted at the dog, or discovered their wife was cheating on them with her plastic surgeon, or maybe just went back to their mansion to sit there with the curtains drawn, wondering why their fabulous lives weren’t really that fabulous and if even one of the hangers-on who buzzed around them knew what their real name was.

So by the time Claire had turned thirty-four, she’d never once visited Hollywood, preferring to keep it a dim and distant bubble of fantasy she wasn’t quite yet ready to pop. As a travel agent, however, she did plan trips to Tinseltown for others, which was why on one sunny and rather muggy May morning, she hopped off the number fifty-six bus, thinking not only about the work of the day ahead but smiling slightly at the memory of her childhood naïvety.

She’d slowly been growing her business over the last two years and recently she’d taken the plunge and hired proper office space. It was only a couple of miles from where she lived in Highbury, North London. She’d moved into the premises two months ago, but she still loved turning the corner into an alley that led into a forgotten gem of a courtyard. Whilst most of the surrounding area had been levelled by the Blitz and had been reimagined into vast modern estates by some of Britain’s top architects during the sixties and seventies, a few narrow streets had survived and tiny pockets of nineteenth-century buildings nestled amongst the landscape of grey concrete and geometrical shapes.

Evidence of the old workshops and shopfronts still remained in Old Carter’s Yard. A couple of units were boarded up, yet to be renovated, but the others were filled with small businesses, many of which were wedding-related. It had started with a proposal-planning agency, of all things, and had grown from there. Now there was a bakery that did the most amazing five-tiered creations, a photographer’s studio, a stationer’s and even a wedding accessories shop, which did everything from garters and stockings to waterproof mascara for the big day and plastic tiaras for rowdy hen nights.

Claire walked across the cobbles carefully in her heels and smiled to herself as she saw the sign above the window. Far, Far Away. She

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Chapter One Nobody’s Sweetheart

Chapter One

Nobody’s Sweetheart