—AN ADVERTISEMENT FROM TRUE LOVE MAGAZINE—

What has love stolen from you?

Is there anything? Then
let’s turn this on its
boatless with a
whole lifetime to
something you
head. Ask yourself fill. I’m going on
always wanted to
the following a quest, a Love-
do but stopped
questions: Stolen Dreams
pursuing it when
‘If you knew you quest, to take
you fell in love? A
were going to back what love
hobby or dream?
spend the rest of stole. So, are you
What negative
your life alone, with me? Do you
effects did falling
you would never want to join my
in love have on
fall in love, never ship?
Pirate
your life? What
settle down, never
love advice do you
Kate xx
have children,
have for
me?
Perhaps
some of
you are
what would you
interested in going
want to do? What
on your own Love
would make you
Quests, taking
happy? What
back what love
would fill up your
has stolen.
time, your heart,
It doesn’t matter if
your soul for the
you are in love, out to:
rest of your days?’ t ers s,
of love, searching se
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The answers p on en D
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the dreams we Eto arad W9 1
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need to get back. 18 chmo
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wants to hear from
I have missed
you.
my own love boat.
Can’t think of
I am loveless and
 LOVE
IS A

THIEF
Claire Garber

Untitled-2 1 17/04/13 5:35 PM

 DID YOU PURCHASE THIS BOOK WITHOUT A COVER?
If you did, you should be aware it is stolen property as it was
reported ‘unsold and destroyed’ by a retailer.
Neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment
for this book.

First Published 2013

First Australian Paperback Edition 2013
ISBN 978 174356043 3

LOVE IS A THIEF
© 2013 by Claire Garber
Philippine Copyright 2013
Australian Copyright 2013
New Zealand Copyright 2013

Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilisation of this work in whole
or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known
or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the permission
of the publisher, Harlequin® Mira®, Locked Bag 7002, Chatswood D.C. N.S.W.,
Australia 2067.

This book is sold subject to the condition that shall not, by way of trade or
otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the prior
consent of the publisher in any form of binding or cover other than that in which
it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any
form. This edition is published in arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A..

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the
product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is
entirely coincidental.

Published by
Harlequin® Mira®
An imprint of Harlequin Enterprises (Aust) Pty Ltd.
Level 5, 15 Help Street
CHATSWOOD NSW 2067
AUSTRALIA
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® and TM are trademarks of Harlequin Enterprises Limited or its corporate
affiliates. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in Australia, New Zealand,
the United States Patent & Trademark Office and in other countries.

Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

 prologue

The bog standard public display of being over your last relation-
ship is when you get yourself into a new one. It’s like holding a giant
banner in the air that reads:

‘Look at me, everyone! I have found someone else. I am OK. Someone

else wants me. Someone else needs me. Someone else chooses to be with
me. My last relationship was insignificant, barely noticeable in fact, like
bellybutton fluff. My ex-girlfriend is just like the fluff from my belly.’

I think it’s all crap. I think the public sign you are over your last
relationship is when you don’t care about the public sign. That said,
I do have feelings, and Gabriel starting a new relationship just a few
weeks after we broke up, well, that was emotional pain on a level I’d
never previously known. Whether or not I believed in the validity of
his stupid relationship with an emaciated French girl with fake tits
and limited intellectual abilities, he had found someone else, they
were on holiday together, and they were taking photos, lots of pho-
tos, and putting them on Facebook in an album entitled True Love
while I was, well, I was bellybutton fluff.

But it wasn’t just that I had lost Gabriel, it was that I was so god-
damn sad about breaking up with him that even the thought of being
8 Love is a Thief

with someone else made me feel sick. I didn’t want to kiss anyone
else. I didn’t want to have sex with anyone else. I didn’t want to share
my home with anyone else. I wanted him. So as I couldn’t cope with
replacing him, and I couldn’t speed up the process of healing from
him, I just needed to fill up the time.

Because the reality is, I might just be ‘that’ girl. You know the one.
The girl who, for no particular reason, doesn’t get the guy, doesn’t
have children, doesn’t get the romantic happy ever after. So I needed
to come up with a plan. I needed to get back to basics. I needed to
ask myself a few important questions:

What did I like doing?

What didn’t I get to do because I was with Gabriel?
What didn’t I get to do because I fell in love?
More importantly, what would I be happy spending the rest of my
life doing if love never showed up again?

Now that was a starting point I was interested in.

 the beginning

‘H
  i, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave
a message I will call you back.’

In 1990 a man called Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide

Web. He was trying to find a way for particle physicists to access the
same information at the same time from wherever they were work-
ing in the world.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you
leave a message I will call you back.’

As with so many things in life, the end result turned out to be a

little different from the initial objective. The seed he planted grew
into something so far-reaching it touched every single one of us in
an infinite number of different ways.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you
leave a message I will call you back.’

The Internet now provides us with free accessible education. It can

teach you a second language, how to cobble a shoe, how to install a
new kitchen or build a satellite that will orbit the moon.
10 Love is a Thief

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you
leave a message I will call you back.’

You can run your business off it, meet the love of your life on it,
find the recipe for a mushroom risotto before fixing your own kettle
then learning the origins of the word ‘broken’.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you
leave a message I will call you back.’

You can also see images of just about anything you want. I’ve
seen the inside of an atom; the surface of Mars; the expression on
Mandela’s face the day he was released from prison.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you
leave a message I will call you back.’

But what the Internet has most recently shown me, its greatest gift
of all, is a set of photos of my ex-fiancé on holiday with what I can
only assume is his new girlfriend. And in these photos, although I’m
no Tim Berners-Lee, I’m pretty sure I can see his fully functioning,
fully operational, Internet-connected mobile phone. The very same
phone he currently seems unable to answer.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you
leave a message I will call you back.’

‘Well, she’s obviously not going to get off the floor,’ Federico said,
to my grandma. They’d stopped speaking to me about 45 minutes
earlier. They spoke about me, around me, over me, across me, but
never actually to me. My grandma reached down and tried to take
the phone from my hand but my fingers were stuck around it like
a human claw or a strange device that unconventional men might
purchase in Soho.
 Claire Garber 11

‘Darling Kate, you need to give me the phone,’ she said, trying
once again to prise it away. I gripped on as if it were my only remain-
ing portal back home. A small circle of people had formed around
us. Apparently it’s not commonplace for a 30-year-old woman to sit
in the middle of Heathrow Terminal Five, surround herself with her
own luggage and start weeping.
‘Just one more try?’ I pleaded with Grandma while Federico wan-
dered from person to person regaling them with stories of the ori-
gins of my tears.
‘Well, I told her that, yes, I did. I told her when she moved there.
I said, “You can’t trust the French,” and not on account of their po-
litical history, of which I am a great great fan, especially that ador-
able Marie Antoinette—have you seen the film? Fabulous costumes,
fabulous, although terribly restrictive of the female form. No, I mean
on account of the language barrier. Because how do you ever know
if you are truly understanding one another? Who, for example, de-
cided that a pomme was an apple? And what if they were pointing
to a tree when they said pomme, but we were looking at an apple
because we were a little bit hungry so we called a tree an apple, and
now the French are confused by Tesco’s obsession with stocking as
many different varieties of edible tree as is genetically modifiably
possible to create? Well, it’s a complete disaster is what it is!’
‘How can he be with someone else?’ I pleaded to my audience of 19
women of varying different ages and a security guard called Albert.
The other security guard, Jim, had gone to speak with UK Border
Control, who were concerned I was a suitcase-laden bomber. ‘How?’
I asked them again. ‘If one person is meant for one person then he
must be feeling incomplete and restricted, like a piece in the wrong
puzzle. He’s in the wrong puzzle!’ I said, getting high-pitched and
red-faced. And I don’t think anyone thought Gabriel was in a puzzle,
unless a puzzle was a dirty great metaphor. ‘So? What should I do?’
‘Perhaps she could try him one more time?’ one lady nervously
suggested to Grandma. I looked around the human fence surround-
ing me and they all nodded confirmation. My grandma sighed and
12 Love is a Thief

rolled her eyes. So I switched my phone to speakerphone and pressed

redial for one final try. I held the phone in the air so everyone could
hear. I looked at everyone. Everyone looked at me. Then we all looked
at the phone.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel,’ the phone said. ‘I can’t come to the phone right
now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’
Then everyone went a little bit silent. Actually I don’t think you
can be a little bit silent. It’s an either/or sort of thing. We were silent.
And no one would look me in the eyes. So I switched off my French
mobile for the last and final time and I handed it to my grandma,
who put it straight in the nearest bin.
Then I just sat there, on the highly polished floor of Heathrow
Terminal Five, I just sat there, surrounded by every single one of my
possessions, and I wept, and I wept, and then I wept some more. If
every teardrop were a piece of my soul they would never be able to
put me back together.
 six months later…

It’s the thing I hate most in the world, after eating noises. First place
definitely goes to the noises people make when they eat; mostly it’s
the chewing-swallowing noises I hate, but also the preparation noises:
the chinking of knives and forks against plates in a quiet room; the
noise as someone opens their saliva-filled mouth; and Lord forbid
if someone actually clinks their fork against their teeth when plac-
ing food into their noisy gob. But after that, after the food-noise
thing, the thing I hate most in the world is heartbreak, and I am
surrounded by it every single day at work, because after the ‘inci-
dent’ at Heathrow Terminal Five my friend Federico invited me to
work with him at True Love magazine.
It was Grandma Josephine’s idea originally. She’d said it was im-
portant to keep oneself busy when one was feeling broken and empty
on the inside. Then she’d said something about paying one’s own
rent and there were mutterings about inflation and pints of milk. So
now I go to work every day, Federico by my side, and once there I am
exposed to a multitude of grotesque eating noises and bucketloads of
daily heartbreak, although we never let our readers know about the
heartbreak. No, True Love makes everything look love-covered and
golden, and I hate that. I hate the love-covered golden heartbreak.
‘Well, it’s a twatting mystery is what it is,’ Chad said, pacing
around the huge heart-shaped table in the middle of the huge heart-
14 Love is a Thief

shaped boardroom. ‘When was the last time we had this much
post?’ he said on his second circuit of the room. Loosie, his officious
24-year-old American assistant, strode after him flicking through
her notebook like an obnoxious linesman.
‘Two thousand and one, Chad,’ she said, flipping to the correct
page. ‘Just after 9/11.’
‘So what the fuck am I missing?’ Chad said, looking to everyone
in the room. ‘Why are there 27 sackfuls of post? What the fuck did
we write about last month?’ It was common knowledge that Chad
never read his own magazine. He didn’t even check the copy be-
fore sending it to print. ‘Well? What did we advertise?’ he asked the
room. ‘Have Royal Mail fucked up and forgotten to deliver the post
for the last 11 years?’ He looked from face to face. ‘What-the-twat
was so exciting about last month’s edition?’
Every face in the room turned to me. It was like white-faced
choreographed mime at its most terrifying. I say every face turned;
Chad’s didn’t. He’d started on his third circuit of the room, tearing
around the enormous table, which was bright pink, glass-topped
and viciously sharp-edged. In fact that table was more unexpected
than the postal situation and had injured 11 members of staff in the
last week alone: nine on the jagged edge of its glass top; the tip of
the glass heart had drawn blood twice, and Mark from Marketing
cracked his knee on it two weeks ago and still walked with a no-
ticeable limp.
‘It’s not just the post, Chad,’ Loosie said, scowling at me, flipping
over another page of her notebook as Federico emitted a strange
squeaking noise from the other side of the room. If he could have
climbed inside his Nespresso machine and drowned himself he would
have done. I knew the minute the postman arrived we were in
27 sackfuls of trouble and I’d deliberately positioned myself next to
the boardroom exit. And excuse me, but I’m not one of those girls
who’s ashamed of running away. I’m not ashamed of anything after
being forcefully removed from Heathrow Airport by mental health
professionals.
 Claire Garber 15

Loosie opened her mouth to speak and Federico crouched down

as if he were expecting an explosion. I leant forward and rested my
forehead on the cool surface of the dangerous glass heart. There was
absolutely no way we were going to get away with it.
You see, my job at True Love was supposed to be the easiest at the
magazine, and by that I mean it should in theory be impossible to
mess it up. All I have to do is read the letters our readers send us then
rewrite them into something more interesting. That’s it. Our read-
ers write in (normally in their hundreds) and share stories with us:
stories of how they met their one true love; or how much they gave
up to save their one true love; or perhaps how they reignited their
one true love. I then pick the best ones, call them up, interview them,
then rewrite their special intimate moment into a thousand words
of tear-jerking genius for an insubstantial salary and absolutely no
writing credit. In the writing world I am the lowest of the low. They
call me the ghost-writer. I’m a ghost, in the literary sense of course.
Now before we go any further I just want to state, for the record,
that I am a hopeless romantic. I am a love lover. I am a princess
waiting patiently for her Prince Charming to arrive, on a horse, or
a donkey, or even in a London black cab. Or at least I was. Prince
Charming was supposed to whisk me off my feet, take me some-
where super and tell me not to worry about the impossibly high house
prices or how I will fund my retirement. He was also supposed to
be handsome, funny, an emotional mind-reader and have an aver-
age to large penis. But the readers of True Love kept telling me that
getting Prince to turn up at all was pretty difficult, and only the
beginning of your prince-related troubles. Because Princey may not
possess the above clearly defined characteristics; in fact some readers
told me their prince didn’t possess any at all. But they fall in love
regardless only to discover love involves focus; love involves com-
promise; love involves sacrifice. It’s hard to maintain it, difficult to
look after, impossible to control. Eventually, almost all our readers
lost the bloody thing and became Waiting Princesses again.
Not that we let the public know this. We only showed them the
16 Love is a Thief

end result, when all the pieces were perfectly back in place. But I saw
the void in between. I heard about ‘the time I lost him’ or ‘why wasn’t
I enough for him?’ or ‘I gave up 15 years of my life for him; he didn’t
want kids; I gave up my place at university; delayed something; didn’t
travel somewhere; he doesn’t eat spicy food so I haven’t eaten Indian
for 12 years; he prefers me blonde, skinny, fat, tanned, waxed, hairy.’
Women seemed to be constantly subjecting themselves to men,
not that the men asked them to, I never heard that, just that women
seemed to do it anyway.
My grandma always says, ‘Don’t subject yourself to a man, Kate,
subject them to you!’ and I think what she means by that is decide
what you want in life and get the man to fit to that, not focus on
the man’s needs and try to accommodate, mould, shape, change,
compromise yourself to please him. I always found it a bit confus-
ing because I thought subjects were things we studied at school. But
subjects or rather subjecting yourself is apparently a universal force,
like some kind of giant whip, or invisible force field that humans can
apply to one another. My grandma knows this stuff because she’s a
world-renowned feminist, and a prolifically productive one at that.
She’s written books and papers on just about everything to do to with
women, and men, and force fields of oppression. Living with her as
a child, I was constantly surrounded by paper towers of manuscripts
and books. I ran around them with my best friend, Peter, and we
pretended the towers were actually paper trees in paper forests, which
was odd because they were trees before they were chopped down by
a burger company wanting to graze cattle on the newly deforested
land, then made into paper for us to build paper trees with…
And that’s what I wanted True Love to write about—not the cows
and the trees and global deforestation; that’s more Time Magazine
than True Love. No, I wanted True Love to write about the things
love took away. I wanted to help women go out and get those things
back. I wanted to help them reclaim all the things that love had
stolen. And I wanted to ask what they’d do if they were me, a
30-year-old girl who found herself at relationship and life Ground
 Claire Garber 17

Zero having well and truly missed her own love boat. So I’d sug-
gested this to Chad. I’d said, ‘Chad, I want to go out and get back
all the things love stole. It’s going to be like Challenge Anneka1 but
with love and boats and the occasional high five. Please let me do
it, Chad, please. Give me something to believe in after my bed for
two became a bed for one.’
And I had planned to do that every day. I was going to help peo-
ple reclaim their love-stolen dreams until the pain in my heart went
away and the word Gabriel, or Gabe, or on the odd occasion the ‘Ga’
sound no longer brought me to tears. Because as Prince Charmings
go mine turned out to be gut-wrenchingly rubbish, and I don’t think
I’m the first girl in the world to think their allocated prince was a
little bit shit, but Chad had said, ‘No.’
Then I’d starting crying, because since the break-up I’ve become
something of a continuous weeper. Prior to this I thought us Brits
were stoic and watertight, but now the tears come fast, in plentiful
supply and with the most minimal of provocation.
And since then the most controversial thing the magazine had
published was 400 words on the physical effects of heartbreak being
directly comparable to Class A drug withdrawal (which is totally true,
by the way, for any of you feeling violently ill after a recent break-
up). No, True Love had continued to eulogise the positive benefits of
love, teaching readers how to secure as much of it as possible, often
through purchasing one of the many products Chad sold advertis-
ing space for, and, when they finally did get it, encouraging them
to write in and share it with a love-hungry world. Or at least that
was our position until last Friday…
And just for the record, before that Loosie starts speaking again,
1
Challenge Anneka – British television show. Aired in the late 1980s and early
1990s. Anneka (tall, bottom-length hair, wore jumpsuits and used mobile tele-
phones way before the rest of the world) would be set a challenge. Anneka and
her helicopter-flying, mobile-phone-wielding team would then have a limited
amount of time to complete the task. Anneka managed such things as repainting
a ­Romanian ­orphanage, building a seal pool and ‘finding’ 10 double-decker buses
for the National Playbus Association. She was a bit cool, super charitable and also a
really really fast runner.
18 Love is a Thief

you should probably know that she’s had it in for me since I made
fun of her funny American accent, and the fact that she speaks with
the speed and intonation of a concrete-cracking power drill, and the
silly spelling of her name…
‘As I said, Chad, it’s not just the post.’ She glared at me. ‘We’ve re-
ceived an unusual amount of voicemails; three hundred on the main
phone line, a hundred and twenty on the back-up line, and there’s
something called a facsimile machine that keeps ejecting pieces of
paper with what looks like handwritten messages. I’ve called IT and
asked them to take it away. We’ve also received various gift boxes
from motivational speakers; have been contacted by the publish-
ers of almost every self-help author in Europe; and the BBC called,
three times; and Kate, well, Kate seems to have received an awful lot
of messages today too.’ You see, I told you. She hates me. ‘Yes, lots
of people have called saying they want to speak to Pirate Kate.’ Oh
no. ‘And most of the post seems to be addressed to Pirate Kate—’ I
looked across the room but Federico was quietly humming to him-
self and looking the other way ‘—and everyone seems to want to
talk about their love-stolen dreams.’
‘Their what?’ Chad said, spinning on the spot to face me.
‘Their love-stolen dreams, Chad,’ Loosie repeated, even though
Chad had heard perfectly well the first time. At that moment, thank-
fully, Mark from Marketing burst in the room. Actually he hobbled
on account of his knee injury from the giant heart-shaped table, but
that sounds less dramatic, so imagine he burst.
‘The servers are down!’ he yelled, after bursting.
‘The servers are down for what?’ Chad said, super irritated, with
me.
‘For everything, Chad, for everything, the main site, the micro-
sites, client side—everything’s crashed. Too many people are trying
to access them at the same time.’ Mark’s voice sounds as if he’s got
an apple pip stuck up his nostril, if you know what I mean.
Chad looked between me, Federico and Mark.
 Claire Garber 19

‘Everyone, back here, tomorrow, 9 a.m.,’ he yelled before march-

ing out of the boardroom followed by Mark, who, for the sake of
the dramatic content of this scene, also marched out.
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