Read Online Wishful Thinking (a journey that will change lives forever) by Melissa Hill - Free Book Online

they would be together for good.
    To this day, she still couldn’t figure out why she’d pushed the self-destruct button.
    Of course, she could see why it happened, but at the time she’d had no idea what she was really doing.
    It had all started when Clodagh Thompson, Dara’s best friend at the time, became engaged to her boyfriend Simon. The girls were in their late twenties then, and although she and Noah had been together for some time, and shared a flat in Dublin together, before then Dara had never properly considered marrying or settling down with him.  They were having lots of fun going out weekends with the gang, taking life as it came, just enjoying being together. And because none of the others had gone down the marriage road, it hadn’t really been an issue.  Because they’d been together for so long, and they were so much in love, somewhere in the back of her mind she’d assumed it would happen eventually.  He loved her, she loved him, they were a perfect match, so why wouldn’t they end up together?
    But as Dara became more and more involved in Clodagh’s preparations for the wedding, she – almost unconsciously – became more and more interested in the dresses Clodagh tried on, in her choice of wedding cake, the flowers, the hotel – all the fun stuff.  Before Dara knew it she’d been bitten by the wedding bug, totally enthralled by the fairytale.
    Then, hardly aware that she was doing it, she began dropping tiny wedding-related hints to Noah.
    Dara cringed when she thought about it afterwards – how she kept filling him in on every detail of Clodagh’s wedding preparations, about how Simon was so looking forward to their buying a house and starting a family. 
    Before she knew it, she’d somehow got into the habit of picking up bridal magazines with her weekly shopping, and getting estate agent brochures sent to the flat.  And then, to top it all off, while on supposedly fun nights out in town, she’d taken to not-so-subtly dragging Noah to jewellery store windows and pointing out expensive diamond rings glittering attractively in the darkness.  Within a few months of her best friend’s engagement, Dara had turned from a fun, easy-going, take-things-as-they came girlfriend, to a desperate wannabe bride.
    Noticing that her best friend was by now on first-name terms with the city’s best bridal designers and that her typical topic of discussion was how many high-street shops they’d get through on any given Saturday, Clodagh had no choice but to eventually pass comment. 
    “Have you and Noah talked about getting married, too?” she asked one day when Dara was at Clodagh and Simon’s new house.
    “Nope, why?” Dara replied absently, all the while flicking through one of Clodagh’s bridal magazines.  God, that colour would look amazing on Serena, she thought.  With her fabulous sallow skin, Dara’s sister could wear any colour she wanted.  But it wouldn’t look too bad on Amy either – although her younger sister couldn’t seem to lose her teenage puppy fat.  Hmm, it would be tough to get them to agree really, but –
    “Then why do you keep marking pages on my bridal magazines?” Clodagh picked up an article entitled ‘ Top Ten Beauty Tips for the Big Day ’.
    Dara shrugged guiltily. “I dunno, I’m just keeping up to date with things – for you.  I know you can’t do everything, so like any good best friend should, I’m making sure I know as much as I can, so I can help as much as I can.” She wouldn’t meet her friend’s eye. “And I happen to find all this wedding stuff very interesting, you know. Considering I’ve never really thought about it before and all that.”
    “Dara,” Clodagh began carefully, “I appreciate all your help, you know I do, but if I were you, I wouldn’t go on to Noah about how ‘interesting’ all this is.  Simon is bad enough when I talk about it, and he’s the one who suggested this wedding in the first place, so if