What happens when you meet Mr Right, then find out that someone else has got there first? Do you:

a)bury your feelings, convince yourself that nothing can ever happen between the two of you and try to move on?

Or

b) fail miserably to bury your feelings and repeatedly act like an incompetent fool in front of said Mr Right?

In Lulu's case, it's a bit of both. When she meets Charles, a handsome and sophisticated actor, he seems like the perfect catch - until she finds out about the wife and children. But when Lulu and Charles end up away on location together, sparks fly and suddenly everything gets complicated…

Lulu tries to confide in Alice, her twin sister and best friend, but she's too distracted by her new relationship with gorgeous but rage-filled Richard. When will she learn that sexy bad boys do not make good boyfriends? And for Lulu, can love conquer all, or is she just a walk-on part in the oldest story in the book?

» Read the opening pages of Mr Almost Right by downloading the Penguin Taster here

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Chapter One

‘Chris de Burgh?’

‘Yes, Alice, Chris de Burgh. It actually suggested I might want to download “Lady In Red”. Am I wrong to feel this affronted by iTunes? I thought being dumped was insulting, but this might be worse.’

‘You must’ve done something to encourage it though. Led it on. Have you been pigging out on Phil Collins to get through the heartbreak?’

She gives me a crooked smile as she says it, letting me know how aware she is that I’ve been utterly crushed by Steve’s unexpected rejection. Eyes back on the road, Alice expertly spins the enormous white van round a tight corner, simultaneously shaking a Minstrel into her mouth from the bag that’s lying between us. Sometimes it’s hard to believe we’re related, let alone identical twins. If I were in charge of this lumbering vehicle, all our worldly goods would be splayed across the pavement by now. She’s been on the planet eight minutes longer of our thirty-two years, but sometimes it feels more like eight years. She’s the responsible one, the one with the answers. Whereas me, I’m a little bit of a flake.

We’re moving out of our poky two-bedder in Hackney and into a little mews house in Barnsbury. It’s going to be a stretch, but Alice has been promoted and I’ve got three months’ work on ‘Last Carriage to Avon’, a soapy period drama for TV. I go wherever Zelda – the stately costume designer I work with – takes me. She’s not been too well recently and I’m worried she hasn’t taken on board how impossibly tight the budget is. Cut-price crinolines aren’t really her thing.

Alice’s nifty driving means we’re on the doorstep in double-quick time. The street feels like it could almost be a location for the drama, what with the old-fashioned street lamps and poplar trees that punctuate it. We stand on the pavement taking it in. It’s a world away from the bustling high street we’ve moved from.

‘It’s so quiet!’ says Alice.

‘We’re going to love it,’ I say fervently, suddenly feeling a profound sense of relief that we’ve got out of Brecon Road. I’m hoping that leaving it behind will help me leave Steve behind, and the stinging disappointment will start to ease. We begin to haul our dining table out of the back, knocking over our grandmother’s standard lamp in the process.

‘Sod it!’ says Alice. ‘We definitely need some man muscle.’

‘Rufus promised he’d come straight after work.’

‘God, Lulu, you know what he’s like. He’ll start cybertalking with some troglodyte in Wisconsin about operating systems and totally forget we exist.’

Rufus is our uber-geek half-brother. Tall and gangly, with a long, insistent monobrow, we’re convinced he’s a virgin, even though he’s pushing twenty. The fact that he works in computer gaming, an industry dominated by lovelorn workaholics with testicles, is hardly aiding his prospects. Alice and I are determined to find a woman who’ll appreciate how great he is, but so far we’ve drawn a blank. We’re inelegantly lugging our sofa out of the back of the van when a booming voice rings out behind us.

‘You must be the new tenants.’

Startled, I drop the sofa on my foot. The voice belongs to a tall, crooked pensioner, who’s leaning on a stick.

‘Um, yes,’ I say, trying my best not to swear, despite the agonizing pain that’s shooting through my big toe.

‘Twins, eh. What are your names?’

‘Alice and Lulu,’ stutters Alice, looking uncharacteristically cowed.

‘Surname?’ he demands.

‘Godwin,’ I squeak, suddenly feeling like it’s our first day in the army.

‘Mm, I see,’ he says, considering us. ‘We’re original residents, bought the house in 1960, brought up four children in it. You’ll find most people in the street have been here for the duration.’

Our eyes swivel involuntarily to the small mews house we’re moving into. Four children?

‘Bunk beds,’ he barks. ‘I’d offer some assistance, but unfortunately my lumbar spine won’t allow it. Anyway, don’t hesitate to knock if there’s anything less physically taxing on the agenda. Mr Simkins, number thirty. We’ll have you round for sherry once you’re settled in.’ With that, he hobbles off , leaving me staring at Alice in mute horror.

‘Oh God, do you think we’ve done the right thing?’ I ask her anxiously, suddenly hit by a wave of guilt. Alice only really agreed to the move because she knew how much I wanted a new start. She loved our ramshackle flat, bang in the middle of the urban sprawl, surrounded by vegetable stalls and artists’ studios. Now we’ll be bankrupt, unable to afford to leave the house, marooned in a sea of octogenarian curtain twitchers.

‘We totally have,’ she reassures me. ‘It’ll be an adventure, a whole new story for the Godwin Twins.’ Our mum used to make up outlandish narratives for us when we were kids, in which we’d travel to exotic destinations and solve mysteries. We’d always race upstairs to bed just so we could hear what happened next. She died when we were ten, and carrying on the conceit somehow makes it feel like we’re still holding on to a fragment of her. At least it does for me.

Rufus’s impeccable timing means that he turns up just as we’ve manhandled the last heavy item up the narrow stairs.

‘Sorry!’ he shouts up after us. ‘I was trying to write a code for a dialogue box and I lost track of time.’ Obviously we don’t pause to ask him what he means, we simply fall on the bottle of cheap white wine he’s brought and flop down on the sofa. ‘Couldn’t you have asked Steve to help?’ he asks innocently, clocking how exhausted we both look. Rufus’s lack of relationship experience is often painfully obvious.

‘Considering he pretty much said, “It’s not you, it’s me,” to end a two-year relationship, I don’t think it would’ve been quite the thing,’ snaps Alice.

I met Steve through a barrister friend of mine from university, who was determined that the two of us were a perfect match. She kept welding us together at parties and organizing elaborate dinners where her agenda was utterly transparent. It became a bit of a running joke between the two of us, which convinced me that he was totally uninterested. Besides, he seemed so sorted and self-sufficient, what with his thriving law practice and circle of scarily successful friends. When he finally made his move, after a drunken cab journey, I went with it. I definitely felt it in the moment, but now I look back on it, I wonder if timing played a bigger part than I realized. I was hurtling towards thirty, a good two years out of my last relationship. Snaring a good-on paper boyfriend felt a bit like passing a test. But although I grew to love him (I think), some of those initial misgivings turned out to have a grain of truth. Do you think there’s a snapshot of what will ultimately drive you apart in the first five minutes of meeting someone? A warning from future history, if only you could grasp it? Even if there is, perhaps it’s better not to know, better to enjoy the moment, however fleeting.

I was in awe of Steve’s zest for life, his determination to get the most out of everything he did, but it did leave me feeling a tiny bit hopeless. I love my work, but it’s Zelda who’s the shining star. Steve always seemed charmed by me, if a bit bemused. I think he found me a total contrast to the kind of sharp-suited power bitches, jostling for partnership, who surrounded him at work. We had a lovely time together, no question, but when I think about it, I can see the writing was on the wall. I had a toothbrush and some tampons in his bathroom, but neither of us was pushing to go the whole hog. The idea of moving away from Alice is too gruesome to contemplate, so I guess I wanted to avoid touching on the territory until it became critical. As we approached the two-year mark, it was inevitable that we needed to start considering if our relationship was a keeper, particularly for someone as goal-orientated as Steve. Even so, the speed and brevity with which he delivered his decision made me realize how untouchable he must be in court. He loved me, but he couldn’t imagine us wanting to build the same life long term. His next couple of years needed to be all about work and he didn’t want to sell me short. I can’t yet decide how much of my pain is hurt pride and how much is a genuine sense of loss. I snap out of my reverie, zeroing in on the ongoing argument that we’ve been having with Rufus.