Page 9 of Finding the One (River Rain #7)

“Two, right?”

Dair

D air opened his eyes to bright sunlight and confusion as to what was crushing him.

He saw gleaming black hair, some of it eschewed from the pins that had held it up, and creamy skin over a bare shoulder.

And he smiled.

Blake was passed out on top of him.

To say the woman got pissed out of her skull after her sister left was a vast understatement.

One espresso martini turned into four, and it was Dair pouring her (and his sister) in her car after he took the fob off her.

He didn’t know where Ned’s place was in these mountains. He only knew where Duncan Holloway, the outdoor gear magnate, and Imogen Swan, the award-winning Hollywood star, lived, since that was where they had cocktails and tapas the first night they were in town.

And having his hands on a drunk Blake Sharp was far too advantageous of a circumstance for him to go to Ned, who was still there, quietly sharing a drink with his set, and ask where Dair should take his daughter.

So he took Blake to the posh Victorian hotel off the quaint Old West town square where his family was staying.

Holding it close to her chest like a prized possession, Blake had cooed at and maybe drooled a little over her bouquet the whole ride back.

That was, she did that when she wasn’t twisted in her seat, havering with Davina about fuck knew what.

It involved shoes. And shopping in New York.

So he zoned out.

He dragged her and her heavy as all fuck tote to the elevator, Davina following, both of them making too much noise, all of this protestations about going up to their rooms rather than to the hotel bar for another drink.

He deposited his sister at the door to her room, only for her to blow a raspberry at him and throw herself in Blake’s arms. They hugged in the hall, blathering rubbish about how neither of them knew how awesome the other one was for years and how they were so glad that was over, and now they could be best mates forever and ever .

He let this go on for a while before he peeled Blake out of Davi’s arms and guided her listing, slender body in that fucking miraculous dress to his room.

He let them in.

The first thing she did was flip her shoes off.

They went flying. One hit the bed. The other flew over it.

He was setting her tote on the couch, about to laugh at her movements, but she let out a sound that did things to his cock and gushed, “I’ve been needing to do that for three full hours .” She got over that and looked around, asking, “Do you have a minibar?”

“You’ve had enough,” he replied.

She narrowed her violet eyes at him.

Christ, she was stunning.

She’d always been stunning. Even as a little girl.

She looked like her mum.

But there’d been something else to Blake. Something more raw. More real. Warmer.

More vulnerable.

She came to him and poked him in the chest. Three times. Hard.

It probably hurt her finger more than him.

What it did to him was make him want to bust out laughing.

“Who’re you to tell me I’ve had enough?” she demanded.

“The man who’s good with ye like this and will not be good rubbing your back while ye boke in his toilet.”

She scrunched her nose.

Fuck, he wanted to kiss her.

Regrettably, now was not the time.

“Be good,” he warned. “I’ve have to go check on Mum.”

She frowned dramatically.

Still, all she felt for his mum was in it.

And she would know that pain.

So, again, he wanted to kiss her.

He’d been wanting to kiss her since she pulled her shite at her own wedding.

Jesus, she’d decimated that arsehole.

It was magnificent.

But he felt like he was coming out of his skin watching it.

And he didn’t understand his reaction.

Dair couldn’t say he’d had a thing for Blake Sharp while growing up.

Though he couldn’t deny he’d always been strangely fascinated by her.

She was gorgeous, definitely.

But she hated to get dirty. She hated hunting. She complained about the cold and rain. She turned her nose up at the food.

And it was hard as fuck to watch her work her arse off for her mother’s approval, when that bitch barely knew either of her daughters existed.

As she got older, Blake became more and more like her mother, except wilder and not in a way it was fun to be around, and Dair had less and less stomach for spending time with her. So he found reasons not to.

That church scene, though.

It looked empowering.

But Dair knew her enough to know he was watching her unravelling.

Aye, he’d sat there powerless and witnessed her publicly unravel the woman her mother had tried to knit her into being.

She was a pool of used yarn on that altar before Rix grabbed her.

Dair had been the one who’d wanted to grab her.

He was surprised by his reaction to it.

He was not surprised she went into hiding after it.

The press and social media had a field day with her.

It was all good, if it wasn’t you who was in a wedding gown at an altar sharing how your fiancé fucked everything that moved, filmed it and put it on a website for all his mates to see.

Since then, he’d texted her several times and called twice.

She didn’t take either call, but the texts she returned, only to put him off.

He let her be, sensing she needed it.

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.

But it died before she said, “In all Helena did to me, to us, the way she treated her girls…ye ken I dinnae condone violence.”

Dair becoming a professional rugby player was not high on his mother’s list of career choices.

Dair enjoying his drink like any good Scotsman would, and sometimes brawling in pubs was categorically not something his mother approved of.

“Aye. I ken.”

“But I was pleased she was able to share even a little of the pain Helena forced her to endure her entire life.”

That was Kenna Wallace.

She’d been gutted that night.

But she had a mind to someone else.

“She put so much force into it, the woman might have a black eye,” Dair noted.

Another ghost of a smile drifted over his mother’s lips.

“Kiss. Then bed, son,” she said words he’d heard thousands of times in his life.

He bent to buss her cheek and lifted away.

“Ye going to be able to sleep?” he asked.

“We’ll see,” she replied.

There wasn’t much more he could do but nod. So that’s what he did.

She gazed on him with the love she always gave him as she closed the door.

He returned to his room.

And found Blake sprawled on her stomach in his bed still wearing her bridesmaid dress.

He grinned, took off his jacket, shoes, socks, watch and shirt. He brushed his teeth and spied the bouquet sitting on the nightstand. He took it to the sink in the bathroom, filled the basin, and set it in.

He went back to the bedroom and rearranged her, yanking at the bedclothes so he could get in beside her and pull the covers over them.

She didn’t even twitch as he did this.

Which set him to grinning again.

Not long later, he was passed out right beside her.

How she got her body on his without waking him, he didn’t have a clue. He’d stopped drinking when she started. Though, Davi hadn’t let the glass of whisky he’d had to abandon for the bouquet toss go to waste.

He wasn’t a light sleeper; he wasn’t a heavy sleeper.

What he was, was a man who would wake up when a beautiful woman draped herself over him in a bed or anywhere.

He stared at her head.

He was dying to take the pins out of her hair.

She had the most extraordinary head of hair. Thick. Raven. Shining with health.

However, every time he’d seen her since he came to Prescott, she had it up.

He wanted it down.

But first, they had to face the day after the scene with their parents.

And then they had to have a chat about what she said to him at the rehearsal dinner about being a bully.

After that, he’d get her on the same page he was on.

Dair wasn’t sure with the bully comment if she was.

But she hadn’t shrunk away from him touching her neck.

And she’d melted into his arms when they’d danced.

Further, she hadn’t wanted to leave him with Helena and his father. And she’d had his whisky waiting for him when he returned.

There wasn’t a time in his life that he remembered not knowing Blake Charlotte Sharp.