Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 120838 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 604(@200wpm)___ 483(@250wpm)___ 403(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120838 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 604(@200wpm)___ 483(@250wpm)___ 403(@300wpm)
Blake thought Dair was a filthy, obnoxious, little boy bully.
Dair thought Blake was a spoiled, prissy wee miss.
Then Blake grew up to be a beautiful, loving woman who took care of everyone and made amazing pistachio muffins. And Dair grew up to be a protective, fun-loving, hard-living professional rugby player.
In the meantime, they’d both been deeply betrayed by lovers.
When their paths cross again, Blake is still reeling from her fiancé’s treachery and what she learned about herself during it.
Dair thinks he’s recovered from a marriage to a woman who was not at all what she seemed, and now he’s smitten by the woman Blake has become.
So smitten, he has every intention of exploring what they can grow to be together.
But their combined family history is filled with secrets and lies. Secrets and lies that explode in their faces.
And while they deal with that, ghosts from the past rise up and threaten to haunt their future.
Is what they built together strong enough to hold true?
Or will their personal demons tear them apart?
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Chapter 1
Tally Sheet
Blake
* * *
“You need to be nicer to Wallace, dear.”
I turned at my mother’s voice.
“They’re an important family,” Mum went on when I caught her gaze. “And he’s the heir.”
This was so Mum.
Thus, of course, I rolled my eyes.
“Don’t roll your eyes at me, Blake Charlotte Sharp,” Mum snapped.
“Alasdair Wallace is a bully,” I snapped back and looked across the bar at the man in question.
He was standing with the groom-to-be (tomorrow) Rix and Rix’s best friend, Judge.
They looked like a craft beer advertisement.
A very successful one where every man who saw it would want to be them and therefore run right out and buy that beer. Whereupon they’d drink it and think the next day, even after they’d over imbibed, they’d be prepared go on a ten-mile hike that included a bracing swim in a snow-fed lake, get home and still have enough energy to mow the lawn and fuck their woman.
Blech.
Some women might think Dair Wallace was sinfully attractive.
I was not one of those women.
Okay, so he had thick, dark hair and rugged outdoorsman features hewn from centuries of his ancestors being, well…rugged outdoorsmen (along with rebels, warriors and pains in the asses of any English ruler that came along). He was tall and built like a rugby player (because he played rugby).
All my life, when we’d go to England for our visits to Mum, for a week during their summer holidays, the Wallaces would come down from their sprawling estate in Scotland to visit us in her townhome in London, or our family’s country seat in Somerset, or worst of this lot, we’d go up north and visit them.
Dair Wallace was the epitome of “oh, he’s pulling your hair and teasing you relentlessly because he likes you,” when everyone knew that wasn’t the case.
No, it was because little boys like that were assholes who weren’t taught better.
And Mum was the kind of woman who gave little boys like that as much leeway as possible, because that was the way of her world, but also because his daddy was rich.
And because she was fucking him.
Dair’s daddy that was.
As far as I knew, I was the only one who held this knowledge, outside Mum and Balfour Wallace. We’ll not get into how I discovered this because I didn’t need the resurgence of that particular trauma. We could just say it was not conjecture in the slightest.
We could also say that this affair had lasted forever, and as far as I knew (considering the covert glances they’d been sharing since the Wallace family showed at the party, not to mention, them being at Genny and Duncan’s last night), it was still going strong.
Certainly Kenna Wallace, Balfour’s wife, didn’t know it. Nor did Dair and Davina, their children.
The very fact the Wallace family were here, at this bar, for the rehearsal dinner for my sister Alex’s and her fiancé Rix’s wedding tomorrow said it all.
They were not family.
Dair nor Davina were in the wedding party.
Rix hadn’t even met any of them until yesterday.
This was one thousand percent not some formal celebration where “important” out-of-town guests needed to be catered to.
Alex didn’t even have a single flower in her wedding décor. Not one. It was all grass.
So it was pretty grass. Really pretty. I made sure that was so.
But it was grass, and this was an Arizona mountain bar that was one step up from a honkytonk (all right, I didn’t know that for certain, I’d never been to a honkytonk—and I never wanted to go to one—but this place was one step up from what I would suspect a honkytonk would be like).
They were serving a buffet out of tinfoil trays, for God’s sake. And it was barbeque. Totally messy. (However, also delicious.)
Dad was pissed Mum had invited them. I could tell.
Maybe he knew Mum was sleeping with Balfour, though I doubted, if he did know, he cared. They were so over. They were so very over, they were that before they even began. Something me and Alex lived our whole lives in numerous and vastly unpleasant ways.
Still, even if it was lowkey, laidback and happening in a private area sectioned off in a bar, this was a planned function. One where I finalized the numbers with the owners two weeks ago. And those numbers did not include Balfour, Kenna, Dair and Davina.
That was why Dad was pissed. Because Mum did this kind of crap all the time. And it drove him up the wall.
As it should.
It was rude as hell.
Of course, I inflated the numbers because one of the greatest sins of entertaining was running out of food. That said, I’d allotted for two more people, not four.
And Dair ate like a rugby player too. He’d been to the buffet three times (yes, I counted).
Once, he had nothing on his plate but a massive pile of meat covered in barbeque sauce.