“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.
