Rix hadn’t even met any of them until yesterday.
This was one thousand percent not some formal celebration where “important” out-of-town guests needed to be catered to.
Alex didn’t even have a single flower in her wedding décor. Not one. It was all grass.
So it was pretty grass. Really pretty. I made sure that was so.
But it was grass, and this was an Arizona mountain bar that was one step up from a honkytonk (all right, I didn’t know that for certain, I’d never been to a honkytonk—and I never wanted to go to one—but this place was one step up from what I would suspect a honkytonk would be like).
They were serving a buffet out of tinfoil trays, for God’s sake. And it was barbeque. Totally messy. (However, also delicious.)
Dad was pissed Mum had invited them. I could tell.
Maybe he knew Mum was sleeping with Balfour, though I doubted, if he did know, he cared. They were so over. They were so very over, they were that before they even began. Something me and Alex lived our whole lives in numerous and vastly unpleasant ways.
Still, even if it was lowkey, laidback and happening in a private area sectioned off in a bar, this was a planned function. One where I finalized the numbers with the owners two weeks ago. And those numbers did not include Balfour, Kenna, Dair and Davina.
That was why Dad was pissed. Because Mum did this kind of crap all the time. And it drove him up the wall.
As it should.
It was rude as hell.
Of course, I inflated the numbers because one of the greatest sins of entertaining was running out of food. That said, I’d allotted for two more people, not four.
And Dair ate like a rugby player too. He’d been to the buffet three times (yes, I counted).
Once, he had nothing on his plate but a massive pile of meat covered in barbeque sauce.
If we ran out of food, I was going to kill Mum.
Though, as usual, it looked like Dair and Davina were fitting right in. Gal and Katie, Alex’s best friends, were sizing up Dair like he was a mountain they were determined to climb (and both of them were taken, he was just that sinful to women). And they’d made besties with Davina in what seemed like seconds.
Whereas I’d been regularly coming out to Prescott now for ages and it seemed they could barely tolerate me.
Sure, they were nice…ish.
But they’d been cackling with Davina for the last hour.
They’d never cackled with me.
So, I didn’t cackle. I was too…me to cackle.
But that didn’t mean I didn’t want to be a part of cackling, even if I didn’t cackle myself.
“You’ve barely said two words to him,” Mum kept at me.
I refocused on her. “Not true. I said five. They were, ‘What are you doing here?’”
Her eyes grew big and horrified.
They then turned to annoyed slits.
“Blake,” she bit. “Please tell me you did not.”
I got closer to her and lowered my voice. “Mum, they weren’t invited.”
“An oversight I’ll take you to task for since you cast yourself as your sister’s wedding planner,” Mum retorted.
