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.
