“Rix?”
“You’ve known Blake all her life, right?”
Dair nodded.
“So you know she wasn’t…who she is today?”
Dair relaxed. “Aye, I ken.”
“She was a total bitch to Alex.”
Dair tensed again.
That, he didn’t know.
“That mean girl comment yesterday?” Rix asked.
Dair jerked up his chin, indicating he remembered.
“Well, Blake took the cake when it came to mean girls,” Rix told him. “Alex lied about me coming to the wedding as her plus one just so Blake would have one less thing to be shitty to her about.”
Dair felt an unnerving sensation scratching at the back of his throat.
“There’s more,” Rix kept talking. “Alex didn’t even know she was in the wedding until a few weeks before. She wasn’t invited to the shower or the bachelorette party. She was expected to lay out a bunch of cash for her dress and shit, all at the last minute. Not like my woman isn’t loaded, but she doesn’t spend her money on crap like that.”
Dair turned his attention to his tumbler of whisky, fighting that feeling that hadn’t left his throat.
“Saw her throw a tantrum myself, and it wasn’t pretty,” Rix muttered and took a sip of his own whisky. “Night and day, who she is now and who she was then.”
Dair said nothing.
“Anyway,” Rix carried on, “Chloe got wind of Alex sharing that with Blake, and in the end, my woman was going to make excuses for me not attending, but Chloe stepped in and suddenly, I was Alex’s fake fiancé.”
“Right,” Dair forced out.
“Safe to say, I was into her, I just didn’t know it. Not sure even for a friend I’d do something like that. We got deep. I got lost. I almost lost her. I figured my shit out and”—he lifted his glass—“here we are.”
“Here ye are, married with a wife who’s up the duff,” Dair said quietly.
Rix smiled big. “Yup.”
Dair smiled back, but it wasn’t big, before he swirled his scotch and took a drink.
He knew the situation with Chad had sparked change in Blake.
But fucking hell, not telling her sister she was in the wedding party, and if he read between the lines, a sister giving her sister shite for not having a man?
He also knew Blake had been careening down the path of becoming Helena, before she stopped herself.
But that shite had Helena written all over it.
It was ugly.
And even cruel.
“Not sure Chloe has to work hard on the whole get-married-have-babies thing she had going on with you two,” Rix remarked. “Seems you guys are tight. And seems you’re good for her. Never seen her this chill since I’ve known her.”
Dair didn’t have a response to that, though he didn’t like it. He was all in to look after his woman. He was not all in for her to lean on him to be her moral compass, or worse, her acting like she didn’t have one.
