How to Write a Love Story Read online

  Praise for

  AND THEN WE RAN:

  “Delightful, sweet, fun road-trip romance, perfectly pitched and very warm-hearted.”

  Robin Stevens, author of MURDER MOST UNLADYLIKE

  “Friendship, soul-searching and romance.”

  Bookseller

  “An absolute breath of air. Realistic. Swoony. Exciting.”

  Maximum Pop!

  “An excellent example of genuine, unique and current YA. 100% recommend.”

  Mile Long Bookshelf

  “Perfect holiday reading.”

  South Wales Evening Post

  “A truly irresistible read.”

  Book Lover Jo

  “A brilliant book about going for what you want in life, even when there are obstacles in the way.”

  Words From a Reader

  “[Cannon’s] writing about things that are both terrifying and exhilarating but her book is engaging and comforting and kind.”

  The Bookbag

  Praise for

  LOVE, LIES AND LEMON PIES:

  “Emotionally charged YA romance.”

  LoveReading4Kids

  “A delightful, delicious and feather-light YA romance that still manages to deal beautifully with some deep issues.”

  Robin Stevens, author of MURDER MOST UNLADYLIKE

  “Cannon has a light touch and the result is delicious. The friendships feel real, the situations authentic. Teen girls will devour this, and come back for more.”

  Books for Keeps

  “A perfect sunshine read for all recipe and romance fans. Baking is the new craze sweeping across the country and this tasty, teasing tale of a girl with a family secret who finds solace in cake-making presses all the right chocolate buttons.”

  Lancashire Evening Post

  “Thoroughly entertaining and filled with many heart-warming moments, Love, Lies and Lemon Pies delivers in every way!”

  Book Passion for Life

  “Love, Lies and Lemon Pies is a delicious young adult contemporary novel to devour.”

  Pretty Books

  For Simon

  Every day is a new Happy Ever After, with you x

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Katy Cannon

  About the Author

  Copyright

  “St Valentine was martyred – beaten, stoned and beheaded. Do you really think he’s an appropriate symbol for true love?” Matias asked.

  “Sounds about right to me, actually,” Hope replied.

  The Gardens at Dawn (2017), Juanita Cabrera

  Love is the Frost family business.

  I guess a lot of people have talents that run in the family. My friend Rohan, for instance. His parents are both music teachers, and he’s going to be a musician (either playing trombone in a world-famous orchestra or lead guitar in a band, depending on whether he or his parents win the battle for his future). I know people in school whose families have run a restaurant or shop forever, or who have fathers and mothers and aunts and grandparents who are all teachers.

  But my family always likes to be a little bit different. We don’t have a company to be handed down from father to daughter or mother to son. Instead, in my family, we handed down a talent for Love. Yes, with a capital L.

  Sadly, this doesn’t mean we all fall in love at first sight and never argue again. (Grandma Bea has been married four times, so clearly Forever Love is still a work in progress. And she’s considered the Queen of Romance.) But it does mean that everything in our family tends to come back to Love.

  When your whole family is obsessed with Love and Romance it sets some pretty high expectations, believe me.

  Which is why I was choosing to ignore the whole concept for now – at least, in the real world. After all, the boys at school couldn’t possibly compare to the heroes in Gran’s books.

  The only problem was, it’s impossible to ignore Love on Valentine’s Day. Fortunately, I had something else to distract me this February 14th.

  St Stephen’s School was festooned in scarlet hearts, pink bunting and red roses stuck in some truly random places. I rolled my eyes as I walked past the decorations, still focused on the phone in my hand as the browser struggled to open the webpage. Today was the release day for Gran’s latest novel – the last in the incredibly romantic Aurora series – and there was a lot riding on it. The first reviews would be going up at any moment and I desperately needed to know what they said.

  Except my phone didn’t seem to be cooperating.

  Sighing, I made my way through the crowded corridors, heading for the common room and the corner table where you could sometimes pick up better reception.

  Everyone I swerved past appeared to be either looking for someone to give a card to, hiding from someone who had a card for them or being humiliated in the middle of the corridor by someone making a Valentine’s Day fuss. I winced as I imagined being caught up in all that – avoiding deathly embarrassment was another good reason to skip out on the whole love idea for now. I had a feeling that any conversation between me and a guy I actually liked wouldn’t go as smoothly as the carefully edited banter in Gran’s books – or even the conversations I scripted in my head, when I tried to imagine actually falling for someone one day.

  So far, it hadn’t happened and I was OK with that. I mean, St Stephen’s was fine, as far as schools go. But it wasn’t exactly full to the brim with potential romance heroes, if you know what I mean. Mostly because the oldest guys there were only eighteen (if you don’t count the teachers – and I really, really didn’t) and I guess that part of the appeal (for me, anyway) in a potential date was life experience. Things to talk about outside the usual school stuff – who’s dating who, who said what about someone else, what the homework was last week.

  I wanted someone more than just a schoolboy. And I was willing to wait for that.

  Which meant I also got to avoid the humiliation-fest of Valentine’s Day at St Stephen’s.

  Our school was pretty much like any other school, as far as I knew. There were the universally unflattering uniforms (including blazers with the school crest on them), canteen food that varied from ‘disgusting but possibly healthy’ to ‘probably tasty but also likely to induce a heart attack’, and all the usual groups and cliques, gathered in their corners of the upper school common room, or the canteen, or outside on the field. But we also had a lot of fun stuff going on and the teachers encouraged us to run with whatever interested us. Unsurprisingly, this week, someone was very interested in love – if the quotes from sonnets that had been pasted up on the walls and the decorations everywhere were anything to go by. I even spotted a quote from one of Gran’s books, printed out in swirly font and stuck to one of the doors, as I pushed it open and walked through to the English corridor – and almost into Justin, a guy in my form.

  I smiled sympathetically at him as I spotted the crumpled card in his hand. He stood still, watching Jana, a girl from the year above us walking away from him, her fishtail plait swinging. Then he turned to me and shrugged philosophically. “It was a long shot,” he said.

  “Always worth taking a chance on love,” I replied. Although he
was right – it was a very long shot. I liked Justin, but I didn’t think his interests (designing an app that would automatically scan and identify bugs and minibeasts, last time we spoke) necessarily corresponded with Jana’s (being the star of the girl’s hockey team). Not to mention the fact that Jana had been dating her boyfriend Ian for six months now.

  “Yeah?” He raised his eyebrows. “So when are you going to give it a try?”

  I laughed. “Maybe next year.”

  “Are you sure? I heard we’re getting a new boy in our year…”

  The key word there was ‘boy’. “I wouldn’t hold your breath,” I said as I carried on walking.

  My views on love weren’t exactly secret. It was a well-known fact at St Stephen’s that I didn’t date – much to my grandmother’s disappointment. For a while there’d been a rumour that my father was scarily strict and wouldn’t let me go out with boys. Then my dad came in to do a talk on career’s day about being a maths professor, and demonstrated probability – his area of speciality – by playing rock, paper, scissors (and getting embarrassingly competitive about it). After that, it was blindingly obvious to everyone that the ‘scary dad’ story was just that – a story. Which was a shame, actually. It was a great excuse.

  The upper school common room was packed but I managed to grab some seats near the window between the music students (all clustered around a single phone to listen to a recording of someone playing a guitar though the tinny speakers) and half of the boys rugby team who were laughing at cards they’d received – mostly from girls in the lower school. I rolled my eyes and looked down at my phone, trying to load the webpage again. Still nothing.

  “Checking for love notes?” Rohan fell into the chair next to me, his own red envelope in his hand.

  Anja, our other best friend, laughed as she took the seat on my other side. “More likely avoiding the gaze of anyone trying to hand her one.” She glanced up at the rugby boys as they all fell about laughing at a particularly unfortunate rhyme for ‘Roses are red, in a vase made of glass.’ Hard to believe she’d actually dated one of them for a few weeks last year. What had she been thinking?

  “Neither, actually.” I stuck my phone back in my bag. “Looking for reviews of Gran’s latest book but I can’t get any reception.”

  “Of course! It’s out today, right?” Anja looked concerned. “Is she worried about it?”

  “Why would she be worried?” Rohan asked. “I can tell you now what they’ll all say. Same thing Mum always says when she finishes reading one of them.” He put on a high voice that sounded nothing like his mum. “‘Oh, that Beatrix Frost does know how to tell a story. If only your dad was more like one of her heroes…’”

  I laughed, despite myself. The truth was, Gran was worried – I could tell, even if she’d never admit it. “She’s bought three hats in the last week,” I told Anja, who understood about nervous compulsive shopping.

  Anja pulled a face. “That’s not good. It’s not even like your gran needs any more hats.” No one needed as many hats as my gran already owned.

  “But why is she worried?” Rohan asked, looking totally bemused. “She’s, like, famous. How bad can it be?” As if fame solved everything.

  I tried for a nonchalant shrug, not wanting them to see my own nerves. Trying to explain why I was even more worried than Gran about this particular book would be even harder than trying to explain Gran’s penchant for hats to Rohan.

  “This is the book she was writing when she got sick.” Just saying the words made me mentally flashback to that awful day, walking beside her as the paramedics helped her into the ambulance, telling her not to worry about the stack of handwritten notes clutched in her fingers. “She almost didn’t get to finish it. I guess she feels this one matters more because of that, somehow.”

  Ever since I could read and write, Gran had included me in her work. When I was twelve, Mum and Dad separated (told you that love was still a work in progress for my family) and while they were apart, Dad and I moved in with Gran (then a year later when Mum came back we sort of, well, stayed). That was when I read my first Beatrix Frost book – the first in the Aurora series, as it happened – and I’d been hooked ever since. Gran agreed to let me help her soon after – typing up notes, compiling research, brainstorming ideas and eventually even reading her early drafts and giving her critiques. But in four years, I’d never seen her as nervous about a book as this one.

  The pneumonia that had struck her down could have been fatal, the doctors said later. It was touch and go for a while as it was. A horrible reminder that Gran wasn’t getting any younger. She’d never say it, and I hated to even think it, but at a certain point, every book could be her last.

  And this book … well, this one mattered more than the others to me, too. For all sorts of reasons.

  In the lull in the conversation, I listened to the song playing on the phone at the next table come to an end, before someone cued up another one.

  “I heard he can play piano and guitar and sing,” one of the music kids said.

  “Yeah, but I bet they autotuned him for TV,” another replied. “He won’t get that here at St Stephen’s.”

  My ears pricked up for a moment. Was this the new boy Justin had mentioned? Not that I cared, of course. I wasn’t interested in boys.

  I turned my attention back to my friends.

  “Never mind Gran.” I pointed to the card in Rohan’s hand. “Who is that for?”

  “Miss Viola Edwards,” Rohan said with a grin. “The new teaching assistant in Year 8.”

  I rolled my eyes. Miss Edwards was tall, slim, gorgeous – and wore a huge engagement ring on her left hand. Rohan had even less chance than Justin. “Good luck with that.”

  Rohan shrugged. “I figure it can’t be worse than last Valentine’s, right?”

  “Very true.” Last year, Rohan managed to break up with his girlfriend the day before Valentine’s, only to discover (too late) that she’d bought him tickets to his favourite band the following month. Worse still, they actually got back together again for a few more months, but she’d already sold the tickets by then. Anja said it served him right for having such rubbish timing. Either way, he’d been single ever since they broke up again in the summer holidays.

  If Gran were to write the romantic adventures of my friends, it could put readers off romance for life.

  “Tilly?” Lola, a girl I sat next to in history, approached me from the door of the common room. She had three red envelopes in her hand, and was flanked by a few of the other girls in our year – her usual entourage. (Lola was nice enough, I supposed, but I always got the impression that she only spoke to me because my gran was famous.) “The librarian was looking for you again. Just a heads up in case you wanted to make a run for it.”

  I grabbed my bag and got to my feet. “Thanks, Lola. But it’s fine. I was actually headed there next anyway.”

  Lola rolled her eyes. Few of my classmates understood why I’d chosen to spend my Free Choice afternoon working in the school library, instead of taking up a sport or joining the drama club, or choir, or whatever. I’d pointed out that, given my heritage, it was basically inevitable. (I didn’t mention the fact that I’m tone deaf and loathe our school PE kit. I preferred to seem quirky than a bit rubbish.)

  As it turned out, though, I’d made a good choice. Rachel Maskelyne, our school librarian, loved all kind of books – not just the ones we were supposed to read for class or for self-improvement – and she was on the committee for the prestigious local Westerbury Literary Festival, so she organized all kinds of events for us, too. So while I did spend some of my time re-shelving books and such, actually I got to do a lot more fun stuff, too – like assisting with the lower school Book Club, and helping set up for any author events in the school hall. Of course, there were always going to be people who came in just to read out the raunchy bits of one of Gran’s books to try and embarrass me – it was basically a right of passage for the Year Nines at one point. But
I’d learned to laugh it off back in Year Seven. I was proud of my gran and I didn’t care who knew it.

  “I’ll see you guys later,” I told Anja and Rohan, and headed for the library and its superior internet connection.

  I said hi to half a dozen more people as I made my way through the school, and pulled a face at a particularly ostentatious display of public affection (Jana and Ian, putting on a show for the crowds that involved the reading of a very bad poem he’d stolen from some website. I didn’t mind the romance as much as the bad poetry choice). It was a relief to push through the heavy library doors to a place where the only romance was fictional, and every love interest – despite their flaws – was perfect for their true love in the end.

  “Tilly!” Rachel looked delighted to see me, which could be good or bad – either she had some really dull job she wanted to palm off on me or something exciting was happening. Oh well, too late to run now. I shut the library door behind me and hoped for the latter.

  “Lola said you were looking for me?” I pulled my phone from my bag and checked my signal. Still rubbish – and it didn’t seem to want to connect to the library Wi-Fi for some reason. Why hadn’t I brought my laptop with me today? I’d have to try to commandeer one of the library computers at lunch if I couldn’t get a signal before then. I shoved my phone into my blazer pocket.

  “Yes! I imagined you were probably off collecting Valentine’s cards from your adoring masses, but—”

  An amused snort from across the room cut Rachel off. Oh good. Drew was there.

  Drew Farrow, ever since he started at St Stephen’s at the beginning of the school year, had been hanging out in the library pretty much full-time – although I had no idea why. He rarely checked out any books, preferring to sit for hours staring at his laptop (in the spot with the best Wi-Fi, of course). But he obviously did read, even if our opinions on literature were very different. We only had one class together – English literature – but that was plenty. For our teachers as well as us, I was sure. Usually, the lesson tended to spiral into an argument between Drew and me about whatever book we were currently studying. We were both people with opinions, our teacher Mr Emerson always said. (And he said it like it was a bad thing.)