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)
“Fuck you,” Jeff spat at Rix.
“Thanks, no,” Rix muttered.
“Fuck you all!” Jeff shouted with a swing of his arm.
“Ye done?” Dair asked.
“Fuck you too,” Jeff snapped unnecessarily, but then he stormed out of the room.
“Can you see to the wee horse, lass?” Dair asked his sister.
“No worries,” she replied.
As Dair followed Rix, who had followed Jeff, he didn’t miss Christine grinning madly.
So he wasn’t the only one thinking that was superb.
Unfortunately for Jeff, he had a lot of stuff.
Also unfortunately for Jeff, he didn’t have many mates who were okay to come get him and all of his shite, dragging it to their place and letting him crash there.
In the end, his mum came and got him.
Which, as they discussed it over dinner that night, they all found hilarious.
Standing in the doorway to their bathroom the next morning, Dair asked his woman, “You’re doing what?”
“You don’t have to go,” she replied, releasing a lock of her hair from a curling iron.
“Maybe ye need to think more on this, love.”
She turned from the mirror to look at him. “Why?”
Dair moved into the room, rested a hip against the basin and a hand on her waist.
“This will be a lot for ye.”
“I know.”
“Ye dinnae have to put yourself through it.”
“I know that too.” She turned back to the mirror and lifted the iron.
“Blake.”
She put the iron on the counter and again turned to him.
“Alex and I agree. We have to go.”
“You never met the wee lass,” he said gently.
Some bloody way, Blake had learned that the funeral of the two-year-old girl was that day, and she was getting ready right then to haul her arse into a car with her sister and go to it.
“You know, I’m glad Mum had Jeff,” she announced. “He was a dick, and he didn’t care about her, just her money, but she was Mum. She didn’t care about anyone. She probably knew that, and it didn’t matter in the slightest to her. She was a woman who wanted what she wanted and got it however she needed to get it. Including him.”
“All right,” he said when she stopped speaking.
“I’ve been through all the paperwork with Dad. She had a massive allowance. That was probably why she had a ton of designer clothes in her closet. Expensive perfume on her vanity. And a jewelry box that would make most women weep.”
“Aye,” he said on another prompt when she said no more.
“I’m sure when we get there, we’ll find the same in the London house. She vacationed in Cannes and Capri. She skied in Switzerland. She had two lovers, that we know of. She delighted in making her daughters’ lives living hell, and she enjoyed that pastime copiously.”
“Darling—”
“She lived her life, Dair,” she said, her tone suddenly harsh.
No, grating.
And it grated right over Dair’s heart.
“Baby,” he whispered.
“And that little girl didn’t get the chance to,” she went on.
Her eyes were getting bright with tears, so he used his hand on her, engaged the other one, and pulled her to his body.
“I’m not over it. I’m not okay with it. Mom dying,” she announced, her voice having turned husky. “It feels weird to laugh and enjoy time with family and friends when the flowers on my mother’s grave are still fresh.”
“Aye, it would,” he soothed, rubbing a hand up and down her back.
The tears were threatening to spill. “I don’t feel sad. I don’t not feel sad. I don’t know how I feel. Except, I struck her the last time I was in her presence. I can’t think about it without cringing. Physically.”
“I wish I could help you with that,” he told her. “But just to say, words would never reach her, if you tried to explain what she did to you. But that made its mark, and you deserve that, Blake.” He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her tighter to him. “Even if it didnae penetrate, all ye had pent up that you needed to say to her, you deserved to have that moment where ye let it be known.”
“That’s certainly a way to pretty it up, Dair.”
“Makes it no less true, right?”
She looked to his shoulder and took a shaky breath into her nose.
When she came back to him, she said, “I just need to be with that family. I don’t know why. I’m not going to make a big deal about it. I’m not going to introduce myself or intrude on their grief. I just have to…be there. And when I talked to Alex about it, she said she was feeling the same thing. I think it’ll give us closure Mum’s funeral couldn’t. To be around the love that little girl had. To be around love…and loss that isn’t conflicted. Loss that’s just loss. Am I making sense?”
Aye, she was, and he felt for her at how confusing Helena’s passing was emotionally.