A Partridge and a Pregnancy (Holiday Brothers, #3)

by Willa Nash

I didn’t know shit about pregnancy. I didn’t know shit about babies. I didn’t know shit about being a mother. How was I supposed to raise a child when I couldn’t even traverse a sidewalk, ring a doorbell and spit out two words?

That must have been before the condom broke and his sperm had freestyled through my vagina and into my fallopian tubes where one of them had dominated an egg. Fucking sperm.

“On the third day of Christmas, my true love sent to me.” Tobias had always loved it in college when I’d make up stupid songs in the shower. He’d sneak into the bathroom and sit on the toilet to listen. He’d often scared the hell out of me when I’d pulled back the curtain and there he’d been, those blue eyes dancing at my ridiculous lyrics. “Eva, what the hell is⁠—” I held up a finger. “Three French hens. Two turtle doves.” I opened my eyes, slid my hand out of my pocket and threw the stick at him. Tobias snagged it from the air. “And a partridge and a pregnancy.”

Mom’s only request had been bedrooms. Lots and lots of bedrooms. One was for Violet. And the others for her future grandbabies. I guess she could earmark another room soon. For my baby.

She dropped her gaze to her lap. “I don’t know if I’ll be a good mother.” She would. Maybe she didn’t have confidence in herself, especially given her own mother. But Eva would be a great mom. Her heart was too full of love. “You will be,” I said. She looked up to me with tears in her eyes. “I’d like the chance to try.” The air rushed from my lungs. “So would I.”

“I forgot how stubborn you are.” “No, you didn’t.” I chuckled. “You just forgot that you liked it.”

“It’s my identity,” I told him. “I’m not sure who I am without it anymore. It saved me when I was at my lowest. And it’s more than the money, it’s my pride.”

I was clinging to a foolish hope that my life wouldn’t have to change. But nothing about my life was normal. I couldn’t drag a baby around with me from city to city. I couldn’t keep my job and be a mother.