Seph: I wasn't sulking.
Payton: You were sulking. But moving on, you're properly back together now, aren't you?
Seph: Yes, we’re properly back together now.
Marie: Praise the Lord for that. I might end the year with all of my children married off.
Payton: You sound like Mrs Bennett from Pride and Prejudice, and I'm not sure how I feel about being ‘married off’.
Owen: Do any of your daughters come with a dowry?
Marie: I think it's the sons that should come with a dowry, if I'm honest. They’re the biggest pains in the arse.
Claire: And there we have it; straight from the horse’s mouth. Is this why Georgia is here? Did you bribe her, Mum?
Marie: I wouldn't need to bribe anyone to be with my Joseph, just a small payment to ensure that they can tolerate the amount of time he spends in the shower and staring in a mirror doing his hair.
Seph: I do not spend that much time in the shower. You're confusing me with Callum.
Callum: Given that I'm usually washing off ten tonnes of animal shit, I do need to spend quite a lot of time in there.
Payton: So Seph, what happened then? How did you persuade Georgia not to friend-zone you?
Seph: I was just my usual charming, handsome self.
Maxwell: So you flashed your bank statements at her?
Seph: Does no one actually think that someone would fall for me without my bank balance?
Claire: Well, I suppose you're not bad looking. Not on the same level as Callum though.
Seph: I'm so surprised I haven't got a complex given the amount of crap you spew at me. At some point a lot of you are going to get one big therapy bill.
Maxwell: Just the one? You need to sleep with one eye open, by the way. I didn't appreciate being dunked in the water before.
Callum: No, but everyone else did. The look on your face was priceless.
Claire: How’s Wren? She looked really tired before.
Callum: She's fine. Just really tired. We're going to need a bigger Chateau for Seph’s wedding, with all these kids materialising.
Payton: Lainey’s boyfriend seems nice. That’ll be another wedding coming up at some point.
Marie: Your father is already cursing the amount we're going to be spending on Christmas presents in the future. His suggestion is that we start in a Secret Santa with the adults.
Seph: Tell him if he does that, we'll start calling him Ebenezer Scrooge. And why the hell are we talking about Christmas when it's thirty-two degrees?
Jackson: Which begs the question why the hell are we all texting each other when we're all in the same hundred metre radius. Who's up for a beer?
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Georgia
Any fears I had about Seph’s family being angry with me evaporated like spilled water on a hot day. It felt as if I had been here from the start; I was briefly introduced to Lainey Green and her new boyfriend, then Eli’s sisters, their partners and children and once those formalities were done, we just got on with it.
Rose had spent a lot of time on her own with being an only child, and one of the things I'd often worried about was how she would go about forming friendships and maintaining them with other children. When she was younger, she had found it difficult to share, both her toys and adults’ attention. Now though, after spending time with Elspeth and at school she was much more sociable. Apart from tonight.
She had played with the other children up until dinnertime, when all of a sudden she'd glued herself to Seph’s side. All the way through dinner, which had been a big outdoors affair, catered by the Chateau staff for the whole family, she’d refused to move from next to him. Even when he got up to go to the bathroom, she clung on to him, pretty much following him to the door.
