Read Online Odd Socks by Ilsa Evans - Free Book Online Page A

to decide, don’t you? After all, I can’t see her talking for a few days at least.’
    â€˜Oh, honey! It’ll take longer than that!’ laughs Mum, shaking her head at my stupidity. ‘Babies don’t start talking for months and months!’
    â€˜Aargh,’ groans Eeyore, rolling over and burying herself beneath her blankets.
    â€˜And don’t forget whose genes she has,’ says Nick, ignoring the other bed’s occupant as he drops a kiss on his daughter’s forehead, ‘so you’ll have to make up your mind quickly, Mil.’
    â€˜Yeah, I’ll get onto it tonight.’ I ignore the ‘Mil’ bit, as I’ve learnt to over the past few months. After they moved in together, Nick decided that calling me Terry was no longer appropriate and rechristened me ‘Mil’, which stands for mother-in-law – despite the fact they aren’t yet married and, indeed, haven’t even started to discuss dates. But Nick seems to have a penchant for changing people’s names. He calls his twin baby sisters ‘Search’ and ‘Destroy’, and has even shortened Bronte’s name to ‘Bron’, which is a nickname I’ve strenuously discouraged over the years.
    â€˜Here you go, Mum.’ Bronte leans around Nick and holds the baby out towards me. ‘Like, isn’t she just gorgeous?’
    â€˜Of course your mother will agree,’ Mum says, with a challenging frown in my direction. ‘ Won’t you, honey?’
    Ignoring my mother, I tuck my hair behind my ears and lean closer. Just as I’m thankfully noting the fact that thechild is considerably cleaner than she was last time I saw her, a really odd thing happens. I’m expecting to feel something – because, after all, this infant happens to be a direct descendant of mine – but babies are babies, so I’m only anticipating a mild frisson of pleasure or some such response. Instead, she opens her slate-grey eyes and looks straight into mine – and I fall in love. Instantly, overwhelmingly, and irrevocably.
    I close my eyes in shock, but when I open them again it hits me even harder. An all-consuming fierce intensity of emotion that wallops me like a piece of two-by-four to the side of the head. The baby herself seems to be perfectly unaware of the emotional turmoil that’s taking place before her, and there are certainly no clues in her appearance as to why I suddenly feel the way I do. She’s the shade, and texture, of a boiled beetroot. Relatively lipless, totally hairless and with eyes the same colour as the barrel of a particularly oily SLR semi-automatic after it’s been fired several times. Yet here I sit, frozen on the outside and completely melted on the inside – sort of like a Choc Wedge that hasn’t been in the freezer very long.
    â€˜Want to hold her, Mum?’ Bronte seems oblivious to the life-changing event that has just taken place. ‘Come on, she won’t bite.’
    â€˜Humph,’ says the mound of blankets on the other bed.
    â€˜Oh, okay, Bronte,’ I attempt to sound nonchalant, ‘if you insist.’
    Bronte passes the baby over and I take her gently, nestling her neatly onto my lap. She looks up at me and yawns, her tiny little mouth stretching to the limit with the effort. And, if anything, I fall in even deeper as I hold her. In fact, if you don’t count the rather distracted glimpse that I got of her last night (and I’m not), then I’ve just fallen in love at first sight for the first time in my life. And I don’t even believe in falling in love atfirst sight. But she is so incredibly little, so soft, so pliable, so perfect, so absolutely superlatively precious.
    â€˜What do you think?’ Bronte interrupts my mental inventory of the baby’s perfections. ‘Isn’t she just gorgeous?’
    â€˜Do you know . . .’ I look up and realise that they are