Not About Love (This Love Book 2) by Hilaria Alexander

happy to stay here in Washington with you, Ally. I believe this is what’s supposed to be, otherwise I would have gotten into Harvard Law, don’t you think?”
    I believed what he said. I truly loved him.
    When it was decided that both of us would be attending Georgetown’s law school, we started making plans for the future.
    Shane was the one to convince me we should move in together.
    So we did. We moved into a small apartment at the beginning of law school.
    My girlfriends wouldn’t shut up, telling me all the time how lucky I was to have gotten one of the few good guys. They said he was the whole package. In a way, he was.
    Shane was handsome in an all-American kind of way. He was tall with sandy blond hair, green eyes, and a smile that knocked the breath out of me. His face had beautiful, strong features, and he had the physique of a basketball player, which made sense because he had played in high school. Shane wasn’t just handsome, though. He was smart, and on top of that, he was funny and kind, always ready to help any of our friends.
    Every guy wanted to be him, every girl wanted to be with him, and he was in love with me. I couldn’t believe my luck.
    I felt like the luckiest person at Georgetown.
    We were young, and despite living together, I didn’t ask him anything, didn’t ask him what his plans were. I was happy to live life with him day by day.
    My parents weren’t too thrilled when I told them we had moved in together, but they trusted my judgement. As for Shane’s parents…they weren’t happy. His father liked me just fine, but his mother…that was another story.
    The woman hated me.
    She told her son he should steer clear of redheads. “Redheads are the work of the devil,” she said. I had overheard her say those exact words.
    Lucky me.
    Shane wasn’t too worried about his mother’s disapproval, though. In fact, a couple months before I left for London, he started talking about his plans for us.
    He wanted to get married, possibly in the next couple years.
    His confession about us sparked a proposal he hadn’t really planned out, meaning he didn’t have a ring yet.
    It didn’t matter. I had never cared less for jewelry than when he confessed he wanted to marry me. I was so happy, I felt as if I were on cloud nine.
    When I left for England, we decided we’d email and message, but because we would be in different timezones and he had a summer internship at a prestigious law firm in Washington, DC, we decided we wouldn’t make a fuss about calling each other.
    We promised to Skype when possible, but other than that, we acted like grownups. It was just a few weeks. We’d go back to sharing a bed in no time.
    We sent each other long emails at first, but with my homework load growing and his internship keeping him busy until late, we switched to messaging throughout the day. His texts were funny and always made me smile. Mine would mostly involve a tidbit about what I was studying or something I had just seen or learned about London.
    One weekend, I was traveling to Paris during a short break between two of my courses. I was traveling with two other girls who were in my class, but at some point before we reached our destination, they revealed to me that they were a couple.
    In other words, we wouldn’t be sharing a hostel room as originally planned.
    On top of that, I ended up spending most of the weekend alone.
    I was alone. In the most romantic city in Europe.
    I missed my boyfriend. Suddenly the need to hear his voice was stronger than anything else. I wanted to email him to try to see if we could set up a time to talk on the phone. I went to a café to use the internet access, and I found that he’d sent me an email the night before.
    Shane missed me. My heart ached for him, and when I saw an email from him in my inbox, I realized just how much I did miss him. We hadn’t spent this many days away from each other since becoming an item. I had been fine so far—always studying or with