Thanks Natalie!
Men In Love by Natalie Martin
I’m a true, hopeless romantic at heart, so getting to put two people in a situation where love conquers all is my idea of heaven - especially when it comes to the idea of men in love.
I tend to think that when a man falls in love, he falls much harder than a woman. I may be wrong of course, but as men are usually perceived as the alpha male, hunter-gatherer types, going gooey over a girl is a big thing. And, this is why I chose to write Together Apart.
The story is told mainly from Adam’s point of view. Adam, the man with a heart of gold, a dash of the alpha, good looks and a protective edge – who wouldn’t love him? (I do, very much so!) I wanted to write about a man who falls blindly in love with someone, who puts their bachelor lifestyle behind them and wants to settle down. Unfortunately for Adam, it turns out he didn’t really know Sarah at all and ends up broken hearted as he finds out who she really is.
And yet, he still loves her. Through his heartbreak, he chases her, he tries to move on, he gives her chance after chance. He was an absolute pleasure to write, even more so because men like this actually do exist. A man in love is always a beautiful thing to see. I hope you fall in love with him as much as I did.
From the Blurb:
When Adam proposes to Sarah, the last thing he expects is to be single and heartbroken less than forty-eight hours later. But Sarah has a secret - and she's willing to sacrifice everything to keep it.
Going through a break-up is hard enough but having to live together afterwards is even worse, especially when it's a break-up neither person wants. For Adam, there are only three ways to deal with it: sex, drugs and alcohol. For Sarah, its keeping her distance and closely guarding the lengths she's gone to in order to keep her secret safe for the past fifteen years. And she succeeds until Adam finds a box of her teenage diaries.
Against a backdrop of lies, secrecy, passion and teenage rebellion, the delicate threads holding Sarah's secret begin to unravel and when her first love is brutally murdered, her past and present collide in a way that makes it impossible to keep them apart.
Adam thought he knew everything about Sarah. He was wrong.
Excerpt from Together Apart:
The cool air rushing through the cab window onto Adam’s face did nothing to take the sting out of his cheeks. Tamsin had never given him the impression that she wanted anything more than he was willing to give, which was just as well, because giving anything to anyone was the last thing on his mind. They were both adults and actually, it was one of the more amicable parting of ways he’d had, but even still, he felt like a prick.
Carl had said the best way to get over someone was to get inside someone else, but it wasn’t true. It was a distraction, that was for sure, but he was nowhere near getting over Sarah and the sour taste at the back of his throat was down to more than just the coke. The day after reading her diary and finding out the things he had, he’d called Tamsin because he’d wanted an epiphany: he didn’t need Sarah and he didn’t want her. He could move on. So why was he feeling the exact opposite?
He shook his head and looked out of the window as they sped along the North Circular. London was still asleep and it seemed like he and the cab driver were the only people left in the city, like the morning after a zombie apocalypse in a film. He’d been so fed up of the melancholic cloud he’d been under since Santorini and for a while, it seemed as though he was starting to feel better, like he was getting over Sarah. But now? Well, now he was back at square one.
As they turned off the North Circular, the familiar streets of North Finchley came into view, and he asked the cab driver to let him out at the bottom of his street. The fresh air and walk might do him some good and drive away the millions of pins digging into his brain.
When he unlocked the front door, he breathed a sigh of relief. He’d made it home without chucking up in the street. He made his way to the kitchen, dropped a vitamin-c tablet into a glass of water and listened to it fizz as he walked back to his bedroom. He sat on his bed and looked into the fizzing water.
The anger he’d felt yesterday had been firmly replaced with a heavy weight of sadness. It was all bullshit. Sarah still loved him. She just couldn’t be with him. Why? And why, after everything, did he even still care? Why wasn’t he able to just forget it all and move on?
He’d known all along that there was more to the story, that was why. He’d known from the minute she’d turned him down that there was something holding her back – something she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell him. What was it? And who was this Claire he’d read about? He’d never heard of her before, but she was clearly someone important.
He frowned. He could get the box of diaries he’d found in the storage cupboard, read them and get it over and done with. After all, it wasn’t like things could get any worse and his curiosity about the big conspiracy keeping them apart was more intense than ever.
Screw it.
He went to get the box, barely even trying to be quiet in the otherwise silent flat. With the box in his hands, he went back to bed and sifted through the notepads to find the one with the earliest entry.
About the Author:After five years of endless rewrites and a glowing editorial review from a HarperCollins editor, Natalie Martin published Together Apart. Never one to take the easy route, she chose to do so while backpacking in India. Now back in London, Natalie is working on her second novel and choosing which country to launch it from.
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Together Apart by Natalie Martin was published on February 16, 2014 and is available from Amazon.
