“I could smell it after you used it.” She appeared bemused. “Did I get it wrong? Don’t you like it?”
“Aye, lass, I just didn’t think about it after we left.”
She turned back to the sink, saying, “That’s what you have me for. To think about those things for you.”
Fuck.
Fuck.
She was something.
She was lathering up a brush.
He decided to leave her to it and exited the bathroom to go make dinner.
As if sensing food might soon be spilled on the ground, as it was her job to clean that up, Sorcha came with him.
But Dair stopped in the bedroom again.
He’d always liked his bedroom. It was simple, uncluttered, and therefore, restful.
But now, on his side of the bed, there was that photo, framed, of Blake and Sorcha on their day in the park.
He’d put that there.
And on her side of the bed, there was a picture of her and him, Ned and Marlo, Alex and Rix, all in a line with their arms around each other under the arch of flowers around the doorway that led into Marlo and Ned’s reception. This sat along with a white pot with a white orchid coming out of it.
It was not much, but it made a house a home.
As such, Dair was humming as he and his dog jogged down the stairs to the kitchen so he could make his woman dinner.
Several days later, Dair walked by his office in their townhouse and saw Blake in there, pacing, her phone to one ear, his dog doing the pacing with her, another bloody binder open and cradled in her arm in front of her.
“No, poinsettias are too…on the nose. Holly as well. Though we should stick with the berries and Amaryllis,” she was saying.
She’d decided which charities she was to be patron for, and unsurprisingly, one was the SPCA.
So now, along with all the other stuff she was neck deep in, she was neck deep in some function she and his mother were planning.
The writing was on the wall that he was going to share his life with a bevy of binders.
And he couldn’t say he was upset about it.
He went to the lounge, stretched out on the couch, flicked on the telly, found a golf tournament to watch, and his dog abandoned her mum to stretch out on the floor beside her dad.
Sorcha wasn’t fond of the binders either.
He was idly stroking her fur when Blake came in, plopped her book down on the ottoman and then did the same with her body on Dair.
He grunted with no small amount of exaggeration and wrapped his arms around her.
“Talk Mum down from poinsettias?” he asked, not giving that first shite about her answer, but she did, so he’d listen.
“No. She says they’re traditional. And I suppose she’s right.”
“Aye, lass, she is.”
She puffed out a breath to get some hair out of her eyes.
