“This is a woman’s lot,” she rejoined.
God!
She wasn’t to be believed.
“Maybe it was in 1567, when women had no power,” I stated. “Now a woman can tell a man who can’t keep his dick in his pants to go fuck himself.”
Mum opened her mouth, her eyes flicked over my shoulder, she jolted, then her entire countenance changed from infuriated to obsequious.
“Wallace, dear, how are you enjoying the party?” she asked.
Oh hell.
I turned.
And yes, there he was. All six foot four, muscled mass of him wearing a nice, chestnut-colored button down and jeans. If the damned man didn’t open his mouth, you’d think he’d been born in the desert mountains we were currently inhabiting.
By the by, Mum had always called him Wallace, and I didn’t know why. It felt like some nod to old aristocracy or something, even though her (yes, my) family were aristocrats, and the Wallaces were not. They were just filthy rich.
I sensed Dair wasn’t a fan of it, but he’d never said anything.
I took him in up close.
He wasn’t carrying another plate of food, thank God.
But those perfectly full lips in his tanned, rugged outdoorsman face were twitching like he was fighting a smile.
He’d heard what I’d said about Chad.
And it amused him.
God, I wanted to punch him.
I’d been wanting to punch him since I was six, and he was nine, and he’d taken me to that awful room in that horrible building on his family’s estate where they skinned all the deer they’d hunted that day, making me cry and gag and go screaming to my mother, who’d then forced me to eat venison that night.
I had avoided meat as much as I could since then.
I did not count myself as a vegetarian, because that was way too hippie for me (shudder). But I’d never forgotten those beautiful, sad carcasses. And it had been decades.
“Food is great. Rix is a good lad,” Dair replied to Mum.
Mum’s gaze drifted to where Rix was now standing, talking to his brother, Josh, along with Judge and Judge’s dad, Jamie.
And she mumbled, “I suppose.”
Dair made a noise like a grunt, and my attention turned to him.
His gray-blue eyes were narrowed on my mother, and he was wearing an expression of distaste easily visible on his features.
“Salt of the earth,” he continued, his rich Scottish burr vibrating naturally, but doing it on those words firm to inflexible.
Mum’s gaze raced back to Dair, and pure Dair Wallace, he didn’t bother to adjust his expression.
“Yes, of course,” she said. “Good man. Perfect for my little girl.”
Her little girl.
Like she gave that first shit about Alex…or me.
