Page 65 of Dare to Love Me

Oh shit. This isn’t about eggplant sashes. This is serious.

“Soph?” I bolt upright, nearly headbutting the headboard. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s . . . Great Uncle Bernard!” she chokes out between hiccupping sobs. “He’s . . . he’s dead.” A loud, honking nose-blow blasts through the speaker.

“Oh thank god,” I blurt, my sleep-deprived mouth sprinting ahead of my brain.

The line goes dead silent. I glance at the screen to make sure the call didn’t drop.

“No! I mean—” My voice rockets three octaves. “I thought you meant someone else! Like your mum, or Giles, or—I don’t know—that you had terminal cancer!” The words spill out in a verbal landslide. “Not that this isn’t awful. It’s awful. Totally devastating.”

Her wailing kicks back up, so loud I yank the phone from my ear. Fair. I deserve every decibel. Between sobs, Sophia launches into a tear-soaked ramble: how no one saw this coming, how he was the life of every family party, how he had so much energy.

I press a hand to my forehead, as if I can physically hold back the thoughts fighting to break free.

The man was ninety-three years old. Kept alive solely by whiskey, wildly inappropriate jokes, and—I’d bet my life savings if I had any—Viagra. The real shocker isn’t that he’s dead; it’s that he didn’t croak mid-thrust into a stack of vintagePlayboysyears ago.

Obviously, I do not say this out loud. I’m not a complete monster.

Instead, I let out a series of appropriately sympathetic noises—“oh,” “hmm,” “nooo.”

I’m definitely going to hell, but comeon.

Sure, Sir Bernard Cavendish was a neurosurgery legend in the ’70s, saved countless lives, blah blah blah. But lately? His main hobby was being a creepy old perv, cornering me at family gatherings to rave about the “impressive thrust” of pressure washers while waggling his eyebrows.

“How did it happen?” I ask, forcing my voice into something somber.

“A heart attack,” she sobs. “In front of the TV at three in the morning. All alone, poor thing.”

I bite my tonguehardto stop myself asking which channel.

Because I really, really don’t need to know if Great Uncle Bernard’s final earthly vision was of me prancing around in that Union Jack mini.

“That’s . . . awful,” I manage. “Really awful. I’m so sorry, sweetie.”

“The funeral’s in three days.” Sophia sniffs. “I’ll send you the details.”

Fuck. I . . . have to attend?

“Oh . . . Hmmm.”

“Daisy?”

“Oh nothing! Just send me the details,” I say, already bracing for the effort it will take to fake devastation over the passing of aman whose last major scientific study was the gravitational pull of my cleavage.

“Thank you. I need one of your hugs.”

Now I feel like a total cow. Sophialovedthat old lech, and here she is, dissolving into hiccupping sobs, while my brain’s already spiraling somewhere else entirely: how the hell am I going to afford another last-minute train ticket home?

Those things aren’t cheap, and my bank account’s already battered from the endless wedding obligation conga line. And now, apparently, I’ve got funeral expenses to add to the mix.

Speaking of which, what the hell am I supposed to wear?

The black dress from Sophia’s engagement party? Absolutely not. That thing practically screams seduction. Might as well slap on red lipstick and aFuneral Floozysign across my tits. I mentally rummage through my closet for anything remotely mournful. It’s a wasteland. Looks like Zara’s getting my money again.

This is all my own stupid fault.

I’m a big believer in karma. The whole “what goes around comes around” thing, as taught by Hinduism, Buddhism, and basically every self-help book ever written.