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When Tess arranges a weekend love trip back to husband Steve’s hometown, her secret plan to make a baby is not the only trap that he is walking into…
Tess and Steve are a dysfunctional couple in a rocky marriage. Despite this Tess yearns for a baby more than a divorce and plans a secret conception during a trip to her husband’s hometown of Harlech. But when they get there Steve is anything but horny. Instead, he begins to remember his supposed halcyon days of childhood with horrible clarity. He wasn’t the popular sports hero he thought he was. Now it seems his friends don’t want to know and he has no memory of the enthusiastic locals who greet him.
A young girl comes to Tess in her dreams, is this her child trying to warn her? Or the child of the mysterious Anwen who has lent them the cottage? With her hopes for pregnancy fading, she longs for a different future without her domineering husband, but can she survive without him?
And can Steve survive his return to Harlech as the locals seek retribution for the crimes of his past.
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Extract
She could see she would have to make an effort to get involved in these things eventually, if only just to appease Dorothy who considered herself an environmental activist and would be joining the rebels on the march shortly. Tess was secretly annoyed that her friend was doing this instead of spending the day with her, considering she knew how important having a baby was to her. She fancied sitting on a bench in Green Park and talking about babies for the whole afternoon, instead of which she would have to go home alone. She stopped herself getting too wound up though. The fact was since it was a fertility appointment she should be getting that support from Steve. Unfortunately, that was out of the question.
Tess thought back to the time six months ago when she found condoms in her husband’s work trousers pocket. What a despicable cheat he was, while all the time he had insisted that the pill was the best method of birth control for them. It obviously wasn’t the best method for everyone was it! She hadn’t wasted any time tackling him like she had the previous year. It never got her anywhere. She just resolved there and then to come off the pill and get pregnant whether he liked it or not. He had promised her babies, in fact, he asked her to be the mother of his children when he proposed to her. And that was the main reason she said yes. But ever since then he had used one excuse after another. Well, it was too bad. Since finding those condoms her mind was made up. Perhaps if she was more like a ‘normal’ person she would leave him and try and meet someone else, but the thought of starting the dating game again filled her with dread. No, she wanted nothing more than to become a mother and she just wanted to get on with it.
As they arrived at Victoria Station to get the train home to Crystal Palace, the XR protestors were chanting and cheering all around them. Although Dorothy stopped to talk to people, Tess’s mind was on one thing and one thing only. A Harley Street expert had just told her that next weekend she would be fertile. So all she had to do was have sex and she would be pregnant.
And that baby would go some way to filling the bottomless pit of yearning inside her.
Thank you, Ruth Torjussen and Love Books Group
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About the Author
Ruth Torjussen grew up in Stoke but now lives and works in Brighton as a Shared Lives Carer.
She is a passionate advocate of eating local food grown through regenerative farming as the answer to climate change.
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Author Links
Twitter @RTorjussen,
Instagram @ruth_torjussen
YouTube Torjussen Ruth
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Book Link
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B for Bookreview 