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From the desk of

Margaret Rex

Hudson, New York

Dear you,

Hi, I’m Margaret. I live in Hudson, upstate New York with my 2 dogs, a husband I’m probably going to keep, and a 1964 Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter that I write LOTS of books about love on

(for all the typewriter lovers out there it’s the blue-grey one. Mine is scratched around the edges, with a cigarette burn somewhere on the case.)

And I want to give you Book #1 in my bestselling Romance Noir series, My Wedding Nightmare, 100% free - right here, right now. No credit card required, no shenanigans.

It's called I Married The Wrong Man, and I came up with that title because I wanted it to connect with every women I have ever met.

It's the story of an ordinary woman who finds herself married to the wrong man, trapped in a world she doesn't understand, and dangerously attracted to the one person who might make everything worse.

The wedding was a mistake

Falling in love with him could be fatal.

But before we do that, and before we can even think about becoming friends, there’s one thing that you should probably know about me.

I don't like weak women.

There. I said it.

I don't mean women who are scared. Or heartbroken. Or trapped. Or women who've had terrible things happen to them.

That’s not weak, that’s Monday for most of us.

I mean I don't particularly want to spend 300 pages with a woman who sits around waiting for somebody else to decide what happens to her.

Give me the woman who does something. Maybe it's the wrong thing. (actually, it's usually more interesting when it's the wrong thing)

She sleeps with the man she absolutely shouldn't sleep with. She marries him. Leaves him. Goes back to him.

Lies to him. Saves him. Tells him to go fuck himself and then lies awake until four in the morning wishing she hadn't. Whatever.

But she does something. That's my kind of woman. A bad bitch.

I don't mean a woman who belongs to some man. Quite the fucking opposite. I mean a woman who belongs to herself.

She can be twenty-five or sixty-five Married. Divorced. Single. Widowed. Rich. Broke. A mother.

A CEO. A waitress. A housewife. Or a woman standing in the middle of the wreckage wondering how the hell her perfectly normal

Tuesday turned into this.

She doesn't have to be fearless. She doesn't have to have her shit together. She just needs to have some fight in her.

Because here's the thing people forget about strong women. They still want love. They get lonely. They want sex. They get jealous.

They want romance. They get horny. They want to be wanted. They get their hearts broken. They make spectacularly bad decisions about men.

And sometimes, when the whole fucking world has gone to hell, they want somebody to put their arms around them and say, I've got you.

Being strong doesn't make you immune to any of that.

Bad bitches need love too.

At twenty-five, I started an advice column called Dear Maggie for a small newspaper in upstate New York. I was absolutely convinced I was going to be the next Dear Abby and, despite having very little evidence that I knew what I was talking about, had an opinion on absolutely everything.

Marriage. Dating. Jealousy. Affairs. Mothers-in-law. Men who suddenly stopped calling.

Then life happened.

I worked at Vogue, wrote copy for the J. Peterman catalog, spent years at Ogilvy & Mather, covered crime for a newspaper, got married, had children and, somewhere along the way, became a bestselling novelist.

But the strangest thing happened.

The letters never really stopped.

Women still found me. They still wrote about husbands, boyfriends, affairs, heartbreak, sex, secrets and all the wonderfully complicated mess we make of loving one another.

And somewhere along the way, I realised most of them weren't really asking me for an answer.

They just wanted somewhere to say it out loud.

So after all these years, I've started sharing and talking about the letters again — one most days.

I don't pretend to know the answers anymore.

But I still have opinions.

I Think You're Going To Like This Next Bit

These are the women I write about.

Ordinary women who find themselves in extraordinary situations.

Dangerous marriages. Forbidden rooms. Strange cities. Men they can't trust. Beds they probably shouldn't be in.

Sometimes they make good decisions.

Sometimes spectacularly bad ones.

But they're always their decisions.

I've been called The Queen of Romance Noir.

I don't know about that.

It sounds like I should own a crown.

I don't.

I own a lot of books, several ashtrays and two dogs who ignore almost everything I say.

But I've written a lot of love stories.

And people seem to still read them.

And like every writer who's ever sat alone in a room making shit up for a living, I want more people to read mine.

So I had an idea.

Why don't I give you one for free?

And I don't mean give you three chapters and then, just as somebody's taking their clothes off, stick a credit-card form in front of you.

I mean give you the whole damn book.

Beginning to end.

The complete first book from one of my bestselling series (yes, I know I sound conceited writing that, but I can't help it if everybody loves me :)

75,421 words.

Twenty-five chapters.

The whole shebang.

Completely 100% free.

My evil plan was that if you like it, then maybe when I write the next one you might consider buying that.

But then I started thinking about how when I was growing up, there was something I loved more than cigarettes and tongue kissing.

Serialized stories.

I'd follow a story in a magazine and wait for the next part to come out.

Obsessively.

You couldn't just press NEXT EPISODE.

You couldn't stay up until three in the morning and binge the entire damn thing.

You had to wait.

And during that wait, something wonderful happened.

You thought about it.

You wondered what she was going to do.

Whether he was lying.

Whether she'd go back.

Whether she'd finally sleep with him.

Whether that terrible thing you suspected was about to happen was actually going to happen.

And then you'd get one of those endings.

You know the kind.

Something terrible has just happened.

You know there's a shitstorm coming.

And...

That's it.

See you next week.

Fucking torture.

I loved it.

Because for the next few days, the story lived in your head.

And I think we've lost a little of that.

Everything is instant now.

Every episode.

Every song.

Every book.

Every answer.

Everything we want, the second we want it.

And I'm not convinced that's made everything better.

Because anticipation is delicious.

Sometimes wanting something is almost as pleasurable as having it.

Maybe more.

So I thought... let's bring that feeling back.

And that's how we're doing this.

One chapter.

Twice a week.

Tuesday and Friday.

Delivered to you, privately via email ('cause some bits are raunchy as hell).

Twenty-five chapters over twelve weeks.

You get Tuesday's chapter.

And then you wait.

You think about it.

You wonder.

Then Friday comes.

And we do it all over again.

And something interesting happened when I started doing this.

People liked the stories.

At least they tell me they do.

Obviously I'm hardly an impartial judge.

But what they really started talking about was the feeling.

Waiting for Tuesday.

Wondering what happens Friday.

Messaging somebody else who's reading it.

Being furious with me for ending an episode where I did.

Thinking about a character while they're driving to work.

Knowing there's a shitstorm coming and having three whole days to imagine just how bad it's going to be.

That's what we're doing here.

It's not just about you reading a love story.

It's about you having one to look forward to.

And I fucking love that.

So here's the deal.

I'm giving you the complete first book from my bestselling My Wedding Nightmare series.

All twenty-five episodes.

Emailed personally to you every Tuesday and Friday for the next twelve weeks.

Beginning to end.

Completely 100% free. On me.

And I'll also write a friendly little email to you every day about all the things that go into writing these books.

Love.

Sex.

Marriage.

Heartbreak.

Men.

Women.

All the ridiculous, wonderful, occasionally catastrophic things we do to each other because we don't want to go through life alone.

That's free too.

Why?

Because love is like cigarettes.

We know it'll kill us. But we do it anyway. Because somehow, it makes everything better.

Who Am I?

Praise for The Love Secret

★★★★★

"Imagine if Carrie Bradshaw, Fleabag and Killing Eve had an older sister who'd just got out of prison, that's Margaret Rex"— sraha47

★★★★★

“Margaret makes me feel like I’m not crazy. Or at least not the only one."

— biitchz#19

★★★★★

“I haven't waited for Friday this badly since I was 17.”