How to Find Love in a Book Shop by Veronica Henry Read Free Book Online Page A

baby.’
    Julius wasn’t sure what to think or feel. This was an eventuality he hadn’t prepared for. He didn’t really know anyone else who’d been in this situation. He knew a couple of girls who’d been caught out, but they’d sorted things quickly and quietly and learned their lesson. He certainly didn’t know anyone who’d gone ahead and had a baby. But he wasn’t going to force Rebecca into anything she didn’t want to do.
    ‘What are you going to tell your parents?’
    She gave a heavy sigh. She didn’t answer for a moment.
    ‘I’ll tell them when I go home for Thanksgiving. At the end of the month.’ She sat up, and to his surprise, she was smiling. ‘A baby, Julius. I knew when I saw you, you were going to be the father of my children.’
    ‘Well, that’s lovely,’ said Julius, thinking that was all very well but he would have liked to wait a little longer. He didn’t say that, though. ‘We’re going to have to find somewhere better to live. And I’ll have to get a decent job.’
    Bugger, he thought. It was his own stupid fault. It was his responsibility as much as hers. He should never have assumed.
    Rebecca got up to be sick again. And Julius looked around the room that had been their home for the past few months and thought: I’m going to be a father.
    Rebecca didn’t tell her family when she flew back to New England for Thanksgiving. She was still as slim as a reed, because she wasn’t even three months gone, and she had thrown up every morning and every evening like clockwork, despite devouring sugary, fatty lardy cakes Julius brought her from the bakery.
    ‘There just wasn’t a good time. I wasn’t there for long enough, and there were so many visitors. I’ll tell them at Christmas.’
    By Christmas, she was putting on weight, but it was cold, so she was able to wrap herself in swathes of baggy clothing. She still didn’t reveal her secret.
    ‘I didn’t tell them. I didn’t want to ruin the holiday.’
    ‘It’s getting a bit late.’ Julius was anxious. He had told his mother, who had expressed no surprise. But nothing surprised or shocked Debra, who’d been there and seen it and done it all.
    ‘Just don’t expect me to babysit,’ was all she told him, and he laughed, but didn’t say she was the last person he would leave a child with.
    By the time Rebecca was four months pregnant, she found out she had got a place at Oxford and finally told her family. Julius realised it was because before then she’d been afraid they might force her into something she didn’t want to do. She had a will of iron, but pregnancy had made her vulnerable and pliable and she’d feared that on home territory she might be brainwashed.
    ‘You? Brainwashed?’ Julius was disbelieving.
    ‘I’m not as tough as I make out,’ she told him. ‘And you don’t know my family.’ She made a face. ‘Daddy’s flying over.’
    ‘I thought you had your dad wrapped around your little finger?’
    ‘There’s a difference,’ she said, ‘between wanting to study at the best university in the world, and having a baby at nineteen.’
    ‘It’ll be fine,’ Julius told her. ‘I’m here to back you up.’
    She was frightened, Julius realised, despite her fighting talk. And he thought perhaps she feared she might capitulate, because it would be the easy option. How awful, he thought, to fear manipulation by your own family. Debra might be on her own planet, but she was never interfering or controlling. In that moment, he swore to himself that he would never try and control his own child. That he would be supportive without being manipulative.
    He wondered if Thomas Quinn was going to turn up with a shotgun. He was ready for him, if so. Julius didn’t much care about how Thomas Quinn felt – he was only concerned for Rebecca and his unborn child. There was a limit, in certain situations, as to how many people’s sensibilities you could address.

    Thomas Quinn was surprisingly measured and calm about