He shouldn’t have.
In the intervening time, she’d become the woman she was meant to be.
Still snooty.
Still uppity.
Still gorgeous.
But the raw warmth wasn’t stifled by a need to please, or, at least, the need to please someone who didn’t matter.
And Dair wanted all of it.
One thing he got from his father that he didn’t mind having, the only thing, was when Alasdair Wallace knew what he wanted, he went balls to the wall to get it.
And from the moment she’d glared at him when he’d walked into Genny and Duncan’s bonny house by a lake, he knew he wanted her.
He left Blake frowning, went to his mother’s room and knocked.
She didn’t answer.
So he pulled out his phone and called her.
She answered that. “Are ye and Davi back?”
“Aye, Mum. I’m outside your door. Can I come in?”
“I need some time, love,” she replied. “We’ll talk at breakfast. All right?”
“I just want to see ye. Give ye a quick peck. And I’ll leave ye alone.”
She didn’t reply, but the door opened.
She was in her dressing gown. Her thick dark hair with silvery strands was scraped back from her face. Her makeup was gone, her face shiny from her nighttime ritual. But it was swollen, especially her eyes, which were also red.
Taking her in, Dair growled, “I could kill him.”
His mum reached up and patted him on the cheek. “Sleep, son. We’ll talk with fresh heads tomorrow.”
“Blake is with me.”
She tipped her head to the side and hid her reaction from him.
She was good at that.
A lifetime with a philandering husband led to it, he supposed.
“She got rat-arsed after Alex and Rix left,” he explained. “And I dinnae ken where Ned’s staying.”
“Does she not have a phone with her father’s number in it?”
It was not lost on Dair that Blake was the daughter of the woman who was fucking her husband.
But he had Blake in his room, and that was where she was staying.
“I’m not sure she’s capable of operating it.”
That made a ghost of a smile coast over his mother’s lips.
