Nothing New for Sophie Drew: a heart-warming romantic comedy - Katey Lovell (best english novels for beginners .txt) 📗

be surrounded by people he knows and trusts right now. He’s vulnerable. I’m doing you both a favour here.”

There wasn’t an ounce of shame in her voice. What right did she think she had to try to push me and Darius back together?

After the lovely evening I’d had with Max and his friends, I was fuming at her meddling. “It’s not your place to set us up. This is real life, not Blind bloody Date.” I was so close to telling her about mine and Darius’s recent conversations. “Why do you always think you know what’s best for me? I’m a big girl, I can make my own decisions, and I don’t want to see him right now.”

“Please, Soph,” she begged, widening her eyes until she looked like bloody Bambi. “Come in and have a drink and a chat. It’s only a dinner party.”

I shook my head. “You should have told me he was here.”

“But then you’d never have come. When he tried to talk to you at Johnny’s party you literally ran out on him.”

“Exactly! That should tell you everything you need to know! I can’t say it any plainer than this – I’m not coming in.”

She shrugged, and I realised there was no point arguing on her doorstep. This was just the latest in a long line of things that Tawna did without fully thinking them through.

I turned to leave before I said something I might later regret, either about the money predicament or Tawna herself.

“What am I going to tell Darius?” she called after me. I was already halfway down the drive.

“Say whatever you want, I don’t care.” I was shouting, but it didn’t really matter. No one was going to hear me from Tawna and Johnny’s sprawling garden which could do a good job of masquerading as a country estate. “And for fuck’s sake, stop interfering in my life!”

I upped my pace to a run, furious at Tawna’s audacity. How dare she lull me to her dinner party under false pretences? How dare she?

I pulled my phone from my pocket to call the only person who’d understand how frustrating Tawna’s insistence that she knew best was.

Eve answered on the second ring and only when she suggested meeting the following day because she couldn’t make head nor tail of my incoherent rantings did I finally begin to calm down. Good old Eve. At least I could rely on her.

“Hiya.”

Eve bundled me into a hug and I was overwhelmed by how grateful I was to have her to lean on. The combination of stress and lack of sleep had left me overwrought, and I fought back my tears by burying my head into the scratchy fabric of her jacket.

When she’d suggested meeting at the small, squat, ugly building from the 1960s that doubled as our local library I’d been less than impressed. I’d got so used to walking straight into Waterstone’s and buying the books I wanted that when I thought of libraries I imagined falling-apart paperbacks smelling of stale cigarette smoke and librarians dressed in tweed.

It had been years since I borrowed anything. Could library memberships lapse? I didn’t even know if the plastic card they’d given me was buried in amongst all the crap I carried around in my wallet anymore. I’d probably chucked it to make room for another coffee shop loyalty card.

“Thanks for meeting me. I really needed to talk to someone who’d understand.”

“You’ve been there for me, and you know I’ll always be here for you,” she said, “and I didn’t have anything planned today other than returning these.”

She pointed at the stuffed tote bag slung over her shoulder. The natural cotton strap strained at the seams under the weight of the contents.

“You weren’t wrong when you said you had a few books to return.”

“Oh, you know how it is… you go in for one book and come out with a dozen.” She smiled an embarrassed smile as we entered the foyer.

“I’m not exactly a regular here,” I confessed.

Eve stared blankly, as though I was speaking a foreign language. “But you should be! Libraries have been closing all over the city – if we don’t use them, we’ll lose them.”

“I don’t read as much as you.” Understatement of the century.

“Even if you only borrow one book every three weeks it shows the demand is there, plus they loan out DVDs too. And they’ve got computers, free for members to use.”

“I don’t need computers. I’ve got the laptop at home, and I only use that for Netflix.”

She gave me a pithy look as she placed her books into the mouth-like space of the scanning machine before stacking them neatly onto a trolley ready for reshelving.

“I’m going to be a while,” she said, “I’ve reservations to collect and there’s a biochemistry book I was hoping to find too. It’s supposed to be groundbreaking.”

Her enthusiasm made me smile. “Don’t worry, you take your time. I’ll browse.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“Meet you out the front in fifteen minutes, and then we can go for coffee? Then you’ll have my full attention and you can tell me all about Tawna and her meddling.”

I nodded, before heading to the fiction section. Eve might be all about facts, but for me reading was about escapism. The books I’d enjoyed most were set in exotic places far away from Newcastle – I’d loved The Beach, and The Island, and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. A hot-pink spine grabbed my attention, the swirling script of the title written in a bold, bright yellow. It stood out from the others on the shelf and I silently applauded the cover designer’s choices. The title rang a bell, and I wondered if it was the book Anna told me she’d enjoyed on the plane journey back to Austria after my birthday party.

Using my index finger, I pulled the book out from where it was wedged and turned to the back cover to read the blurb. It was about a woman who left her husband to run a vineyard