12 Months to ' I Do ', Victoria Fenn [read aloud books .txt] 📗

About the author

Born in Hammersmith, West London, but I moved to Clacton-on-Sea in Essex where I was raised. I am now settled in Ipswich, Suffolk with my husband, James, our Tabby cat, Tabitha, and son, Hudson, our little miracle baby boy who is the greatest of all my achievements. I have a very close and supportive mum, dad, sister and two brothers.

12 Months to ‘ I Do ‘

Victoria Fenn

12 Months to ‘ I Do ‘

Vanguard Press

VANGUARD PAPERBACK

© Copyright 2021

Victoria Fenn

The right of Victoria Fenn to be identified as author of

this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All Rights Reserved

No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication

may be made without written permission.

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced,

copied or transmitted save with the written permission of the publisher, or in accordance with the provisions

of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended).

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to

this publication may be liable to criminal

prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is

available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-80016-050-7

Vanguard Press is an imprint of

Pegasus Elliot MacKenzie Publishers Ltd.

www.pegasuspublishers.com

First Published in 2021

Vanguard Press

Sheraton House Castle Park

Cambridge England

Printed & Bound in Great Britain

Dedication

For all abused children, it was not your fault.

Love

I have had boyfriends in the past, but no one has made me feel like Edward James. I knew from the first time I actually had a proper conversation with him he was the one, cheesy as it sounds. But when you know you just know, and if you have not had that feeling yet you obviously haven’t met that special someone. The sort of person that makes you a better version of yourself, makes you see yourself in a different light, encourages your dreams and is by your side through everything. Real love.

I think back to the first time I felt love for someone other than my family. I was eleven, he was thirteen. I lived on a road in a small town by the sea where all the kids from neighbouring houses played out the front after school and at the weekend. It was safe back then and the roads were quiet, so our parents weren’t concerned about us getting run over or being kidnapped; we just got left to it.

There was a playing field near our three-bed semi where we would play until it got dark with water balloons and water guns, playing IT and hide and seek. That’s what we did for fun. We did have basic computer games, but why play with them when we could be outside in the fresh air? Weather seemed to be better back then, too. We used to have a summer that seemed to last for weeks rather than days. Mobile phones were non-existent. You must be thinking I am ancient, but I was born in the eighties. Your friends had to knock for you or call the land line, as that’s all there was back then. Not like nowadays when you can text so easily. These were the sorts of times where if you wanted a question answered you couldn’t just look online on your phone. You had to either go the library and get a book on it, or use dial up internet which seemed to take forever to connect. You couldn’t just download a film, or a box set on the TV, either. You had to wait until it was released from the cinema unless you bought a dodgy pirate copy, or wait until it was available to rent or buy from the video store or video man that used to come round once a week. These were different times to what we are living through right now. Technology has come on so much in the last few years, it’s scary to think that if I have children what life will be like for them growing up in a generation where social media is already taking over, and nothing is private any more. It’s like living in a world where your mobile phone is a spy and listens and remembers anything you say or look up on the internet.

There was this one boy. He went to a different school to me, but he lived on the same road. He was cool, tall and good looking and his name was Spence Egerton. All the girls fancied him, might have had something to do with his curtained blonde hair, blue eyes and chiselled features, but he wouldn’t look twice at me, because 1.) I was two years younger and 2.) I was short, kind of dumpy, had dark features and boring brown hair and was spotty. I had a strange sense of dressing for a child too. For some reason I loved a pair of black trousers and would pair this with a suit jacket. Yes, you heard right. I was an eleven-year-old girl who liked to dress smartly in a suit. I was not popular and didn’t have golden hair like the girls the boys seemed to fancy at school.

But he was friendly and nice to me, even came to birthday parties for my younger siblings. The moment I knew it was love was when one day he stood up for me. There was another boy who lived around the corner who would always make fun of me. Push me off of my bike when I would ride past him. He was a little shit, to be polite. I kind of got used to him bullying me, but one day he actually spat at me when I walked past him, Spence saw what happened