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)
I had avoided meat as much as I could since then.
I did not count myself as a vegetarian, because that was way too hippie for me (shudder). But I’d never forgotten those beautiful, sad carcasses. And it had been decades.
“Food is great. Rix is a good lad,” Dair replied to Mum.
Mum’s gaze drifted to where Rix was now standing, talking to his brother, Josh, along with Judge and Judge’s dad, Jamie.
And she mumbled, “I suppose.”
Dair made a noise like a grunt, and my attention turned to him.
His gray-blue eyes were narrowed on my mother, and he was wearing an expression of distaste easily visible on his features.
“Salt of the earth,” he continued, his rich Scottish burr vibrating naturally, but doing it on those words firm to inflexible.
Mum’s gaze raced back to Dair, and pure Dair Wallace, he didn’t bother to adjust his expression.
“Yes, of course,” she said. “Good man. Perfect for my little girl.”
Her little girl.
Like she gave that first shit about Alex…or me.
God, she made me want to vomit.
Dair dismissed her completely and turned to me.
I was fighting a smirk at how he so obviously shut Mum out, until he spoke.
“Wicked as fuck how ye publicly humiliated that wankstain.”
There it was.
The entire Wallace family had of course been in attendance when I’d left Chad at the altar.
Well, not so much left him there, but instead pulled a huge drama where I exposed him as the cheat he was, something that started a massive brawl in the church. A brawl that Rix and Dad had to rescue me from…physically.
I felt my throat close at the reminder of that particular humiliation, which only Dair would bring up right to my face (well, only Dair and my own mother). Wrestling with the weight of it, I couldn’t hold eye contact with him.
“Chad was young, a little wayward,” Mum again defended my ex…wankstain.
“Ye could be thirteen and courtin’ your first lassie and ken not to fuck her about like that,” Dair retorted.
“Dear, you are in the presence of ladies,” Mum admonished him on a valiant forgiving smile. “Perhaps mind your language,” she suggested.
“Your own daughter just described that twat as a bloke who can’t keep his dick in his pants, and he should go fuck himself.” He again turned to me and smiled a blinding bright smile of strong, white teeth in tanned face. “Reckon he only had that choice for a while after ye gutted him. No woman would touch him after ye got through with him.”
“I try not to think of Chad in that manner, or at all,” I replied.
“Good choice,” Dair approved.
Like I needed his approval.
I nearly rolled my eyes again, but I did not.
And anyone would know not to discuss this at a party…or ever.
After it happened, every once in a while, Alex and Dad checked in to make sure I was doing okay.
But now, I was so over Chad Head.
Even so, I didn’t want to dish about it at my sister’s rehearsal dinner.
“Perhaps I’ll just leave you two young ones to chat,” Mum offered, and before I could stop her (this might be the only time in my life I didn’t want her to leave me), she slipped away.
“Not sure that woman kens the definition of young ones,” Dair muttered.
He was correct.
I was thirty-four.
He was thirty-seven.
We were hardly young.
“How ye farin’?” he asked.
“Busy,” I replied.
For some reason, this made him bark with laughter.
For heaven’s sake, his laughter even sounded Scottish. Thick, rich, warm, manly and so very alive.
But I was confused, and I didn’t hide it.
“That’s funny?” I asked.
“Ye dinnae have a job, lassie,” he pointed out. “How’re ye busy?”
Nope.
Time and maturity hadn’t made Alasdair Finlay Wallace any less insufferable.
“Well,” I started snottily, “even though Alex and Rix wanted something small and intimate, Mum horned in, as usual, and Alex caved to keep the peace, so their seventy-five guests turned into two hundred. And even keeping it at that, rather than the three hundred Mum wanted, was a battle. One I waged so Alex didn’t have to.”
I might have stated this rather pointedly, because I was not going to tell him directly he and his family were not on the first list, but I still just told him he and his family were not on Alex and Rix’s list.
Dair didn’t miss this and it only made him smile his wide, white smile again.
Totally insufferable.
“And since Alex doesn’t like huge gatherings, so she’s not a party planner extraordinaire—”
His attractive, heavy, dark brows winged up. “Extraordinaire?”
I ignored him. “—and I am, I took this wedding off her plate. That means searching for venues. Contracting with them. Catering. Floral arrangements. Music arrangements. Invitations. Tracking RSVPs. Cake tasting.”
He cut in again. “Dinnae need the whole agenda, Blake.”
I ignored him again. “And since one of Dad’s PAs got married and moved to Pennsylvania, I took over managing his properties.”