Page 1 of Finding the One (River Rain #7)

Tally Sheet

Blake

“ Y ou need to be nicer to Wallace, dear.”

I turned at my mother’s voice.

“They’re an important family,” Mum went on when I caught her gaze. “And he’s the heir.”

This was so Mum.

Thus, of course, I rolled my eyes.

“Don’t roll your eyes at me, Blake Charlotte Sharp,” Mum snapped.

“Alasdair Wallace is a bully,” I snapped back and looked across the bar at the man in question.

He was standing with the groom-to-be (tomorrow) Rix and Rix’s best friend, Judge.

They looked like a craft beer advertisement.

A very successful one where every man who saw it would want to be them and therefore run right out and buy that beer.

Whereupon they’d drink it and think the next day, even after they’d over imbibed, they’d be prepared go on a ten-mile hike that included a bracing swim in a snow-fed lake, get home and still have enough energy to mow the lawn and fuck their woman.

Blech.

Some women might think Dair Wallace was sinfully attractive.

I was not one of those women.

Okay, so he had thick, dark hair and rugged outdoorsman features hewn from centuries of his ancestors being, well…rugged outdoorsmen (along with rebels, warriors and pains in the asses of any English ruler that came along). He was tall and built like a rugby player (because he played rugby).

All my life, when we’d go to England for our visits to Mum, for a week during their summer holidays, the Wallaces would come down from their sprawling estate in Scotland to visit us in her townhome in London, or our family’s country seat in Somerset, or worst of this lot, we’d go up north and visit them.

Dair Wallace was the epitome of “oh, he’s pulling your hair and teasing you relentlessly because he likes you,” when everyone knew that wasn’t the case.

No, it was because little boys like that were assholes who weren’t taught better.

And Mum was the kind of woman who gave little boys like that as much leeway as possible, because that was the way of her world, but also because his daddy was rich.

And because she was fucking him.

Dair’s daddy that was.

As far as I knew, I was the only one who held this knowledge, outside Mum and Balfour Wallace. We’ll not get into how I discovered this because I didn’t need the resurgence of that particular trauma. We could just say it was not conjecture in the slightest.

We could also say that this affair had lasted forever, and as far as I knew (considering the covert glances they’d been sharing since the Wallace family showed at the party, not to mention, them being at Genny and Duncan’s last night), it was still going strong.

Certainly Kenna Wallace, Balfour’s wife, didn’t know it. Nor did Dair and Davina, their children.

The very fact the Wallace family were here, at this bar, for the rehearsal dinner for my sister Alex’s and her fiancé Rix’s wedding tomorrow said it all.

They were not family.

Dair nor Davina were in the wedding party.

Rix hadn’t even met any of them until yesterday.

This was one thousand percent not some formal celebration where “important” out-of-town guests needed to be catered to.

Alex didn’t even have a single flower in her wedding décor. Not one. It was all grass .

So it was pretty grass. Really pretty. I made sure that was so.

But it was grass, and this was an Arizona mountain bar that was one step up from a honkytonk (all right, I didn’t know that for certain, I’d never been to a honkytonk—and I never wanted to go to one—but this place was one step up from what I would suspect a honkytonk would be like).

They were serving a buffet out of tinfoil trays , for God’s sake. And it was barbeque. Totally messy. (However, also delicious.)

Dad was pissed Mum had invited them. I could tell.

Maybe he knew Mum was sleeping with Balfour, though I doubted, if he did know, he cared. They were so over. They were so very over, they were that before they even began. Something me and Alex lived our whole lives in numerous and vastly unpleasant ways.

Still, even if it was lowkey, laidback and happening in a private area sectioned off in a bar, this was a planned function. One where I finalized the numbers with the owners two weeks ago. And those numbers did not include Balfour, Kenna, Dair and Davina.

That was why Dad was pissed. Because Mum did this kind of crap all the time. And it drove him up the wall.

As it should.

It was rude as hell.

Of course, I inflated the numbers because one of the greatest sins of entertaining was running out of food. That said, I’d allotted for two more people, not four.

And Dair ate like a rugby player too. He’d been to the buffet three times (yes, I counted).

Once, he had nothing on his plate but a massive pile of meat covered in barbeque sauce.

If we ran out of food, I was going to kill Mum.

Though, as usual, it looked like Dair and Davina were fitting right in.

Gal and Katie, Alex’s best friends, were sizing up Dair like he was a mountain they were determined to climb (and both of them were taken, he was just that sinful to women).

And they’d made besties with Davina in what seemed like seconds.

Whereas I’d been regularly coming out to Prescott now for ages and it seemed they could barely tolerate me.

Sure, they were nice… ish .

But they’d been cackling with Davina for the last hour.

They’d never cackled with me.

So, I didn’t cackle. I was too… me to cackle.

But that didn’t mean I didn’t want to be a part of cackling, even if I didn’t cackle myself.

“You’ve barely said two words to him,” Mum kept at me.

I refocused on her. “Not true. I said five. They were, ‘What are you doing here?’”

Her eyes grew big and horrified.

They then turned to annoyed slits.

“ Blake ,” she bit. “Please tell me you did not .”

I got closer to her and lowered my voice. “Mum, they weren’t invited.”

“An oversight I’ll take you to task for since you cast yourself as your sister’s wedding planner,” Mum retorted.

“I didn’t cast myself,” I said. “Alex isn’t into that kind of thing. She asked me to do it for her. Since I am into that kind of thing, and she’s my sister, I’m doing it for her.”

“She should have hired someone,” Mum sniffed.

After saying that, her eyes got mean, so per usual, I braced, something I was very good at since Mum got mean a lot.

Alex learned early to check out.

I wasn’t that smart.

All my life (or, until recently), every sting from her hit its mark, releasing the poison.

I’d been infected with it for years.

It was only lately I’d started searching for an antidote.

That search, mind you, hadn’t been entirely successful.

But I was getting there (I hoped).

“You couldn’t even handle your own wedding preparations,” she noted snidely.

I wanted to bite, that bait was so juicy. I really, really did.

But, I told myself firmly, I was not that Blake anymore.

Helena Coddington-Sharp sure made it hard not to take a big bite, though.

With some effort, I changed subjects.

“The rehearsal dinner is for family and members of the wedding party,” I hissed. “They’re neither.”

“They’ve been family friends for decades,” she shot back. “Therefore, practically family.”

“Alex hasn’t seen any of them for years,” I returned.

“That doesn’t make them any less family,” Mum replied.

“Actually, it does. Newsflash, Mum, like my wedding wasn’t your wedding, even if you took it over, Alex’s wedding isn’t your wedding either.”

That made Mum mad, and she didn’t hide it. “I did everything as you’d wish it to be.”

“How do you know what I wished?” I asked. “You didn’t ask. Furthermore, you don’t know me. Back then, I didn’t even know me.”

“I know you made the biggest mistake of your life letting Chad Head slip through your fingers.”

I blinked, the shock I felt at her statement was so profound.

Then I stared.

“He cheated on me… a lot ,” I reminded her.

“He didn’t put his ring on any of those women’s fingers,” she reminded me.

I knew she was crazy.

But that was insane .

“Mum, he cheated on me…even just days before our wedding. At a party celebrating our rapidly upcoming nuptials, he was fucking a friend of mine in a broom closet or something.”

“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.