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)
Since then, he’d texted her several times and called twice.
She didn’t take either call, but the texts she returned, only to put him off.
He let her be, sensing she needed it.
He shouldn’t have.
In the intervening time, she’d become the woman she was meant to be.
Still snooty.
Still uppity.
Still gorgeous.
But the raw warmth wasn’t stifled by a need to please, or, at least, the need to please someone who didn’t matter.
And Dair wanted all of it.
One thing he got from his father that he didn’t mind having, the only thing, was when Alasdair Wallace knew what he wanted, he went balls to the wall to get it.
And from the moment she’d glared at him when he’d walked into Genny and Duncan’s bonny house by a lake, he knew he wanted her.
He left Blake frowning, went to his mother’s room and knocked.
She didn’t answer.
So he pulled out his phone and called her.
She answered that. “Are ye and Davi back?”
“Aye, Mum. I’m outside your door. Can I come in?”
“I need some time, love,” she replied. “We’ll talk at breakfast. All right?”
“I just want to see ye. Give ye a quick peck. And I’ll leave ye alone.”
She didn’t reply, but the door opened.
She was in her dressing gown. Her thick dark hair with silvery strands was scraped back from her face. Her makeup was gone, her face shiny from her nighttime ritual. But it was swollen, especially her eyes, which were also red.
Taking her in, Dair growled, “I could kill him.”
His mum reached up and patted him on the cheek. “Sleep, son. We’ll talk with fresh heads tomorrow.”
“Blake is with me.”
She tipped her head to the side and hid her reaction from him.
She was good at that.
A lifetime with a philandering husband led to it, he supposed.
“She got rat-arsed after Alex and Rix left,” he explained. “And I dinnae ken where Ned’s staying.”
“Does she not have a phone with her father’s number in it?”
It was not lost on Dair that Blake was the daughter of the woman who was fucking her husband.
But he had Blake in his room, and that was where she was staying.
“I’m not sure she’s capable of operating it.”
That made a ghost of a smile coast over his mother’s lips.
But it died before she said, “In all Helena did to me, to us, the way she treated her girls…ye ken I dinnae condone violence.”
Dair becoming a professional rugby player was not high on his mother’s list of career choices.
Dair enjoying his drink like any good Scotsman would, and sometimes brawling in pubs was categorically not something his mother approved of.
“Aye. I ken.”
“But I was pleased she was able to share even a little of the pain Helena forced her to endure her entire life.”
That was Kenna Wallace.
She’d been gutted that night.
But she had a mind to someone else.
“She put so much force into it, the woman might have a black eye,” Dair noted.
Another ghost of a smile drifted over his mother’s lips.
“Kiss. Then bed, son,” she said words he’d heard thousands of times in his life.
He bent to buss her cheek and lifted away.
“Ye going to be able to sleep?” he asked.
“We’ll see,” she replied.
There wasn’t much more he could do but nod. So that’s what he did.
She gazed on him with the love she always gave him as she closed the door.
He returned to his room.
And found Blake sprawled on her stomach in his bed still wearing her bridesmaid dress.
He grinned, took off his jacket, shoes, socks, watch and shirt. He brushed his teeth and spied the bouquet sitting on the nightstand. He took it to the sink in the bathroom, filled the basin, and set it in.
He went back to the bedroom and rearranged her, yanking at the bedclothes so he could get in beside her and pull the covers over them.
She didn’t even twitch as he did this.
Which set him to grinning again.
Not long later, he was passed out right beside her.
How she got her body on his without waking him, he didn’t have a clue. He’d stopped drinking when she started. Though, Davi hadn’t let the glass of whisky he’d had to abandon for the bouquet toss go to waste.
He wasn’t a light sleeper; he wasn’t a heavy sleeper.
What he was, was a man who would wake up when a beautiful woman draped herself over him in a bed or anywhere.
He stared at her head.
He was dying to take the pins out of her hair.
She had the most extraordinary head of hair. Thick. Raven. Shining with health.
However, every time he’d seen her since he came to Prescott, she had it up.
He wanted it down.
But first, they had to face the day after the scene with their parents.
And then they had to have a chat about what she said to him at the rehearsal dinner about being a bully.
After that, he’d get her on the same page he was on.