At Wits' End - Kenzie Reed Page 0,71

but she snatches the headband off her head and stuffs it in her purse.

“She’ll listen to her, but not her own father?” My father says loudly to my mother. He’s taken to not addressing my sister directly, and my sister is responding in kind. “How much longer do we have to sit here like this?”

“Well, you’ve been here for two minutes, so longer than that,” Rocco’s wife Katherine says irritably from across the table.

“I was talking to my wife, not you,” my father says snidely.

“What did you just say to my wife?” Rocco leaps up, clenching fists the size of small hams, and his father Vito shoves his chair back and leaps to his feet. “What did you say to my son’s wife?” he snarls.

Before it turns into a full-blown fight, the door flings open. “Surprise!” Murray cries out with false cheer, walking in with Liam Ferguson and a couple of his suited assistants.

No, it isn’t a surprise.

Murray texted us earlier, because Mr. Ferguson was in town. That’s why we’re all uncomfortably crammed in here, prickling with rage and itching for a fight.

Murray wants to reassure Mr. Ferguson that everything is going smoothly. He decided that we needed to get together for dinner, both families, and then he and Mr. Ferguson would crash our get-together and “catch us in the act” of peaceably socializing with each other.

If he’d been five minutes later, he’d have caught us in the act of eviscerating each other.

“Mind if we join you?” Murray says. He’s already pulling out two chairs. He and Mr. Ferguson plop down in their seats.

“We won’t impose on your dinner,” Mr. Ferguson assures us. “Maybe just one drink. I’d like two fingers of your Macallan’s twelve-year-old sherry oak single malt. Linda, is it?” He winks at Linda, and a look of resignation flickers across Sienna’s face.

Mr. Ferguson’s the kind of man that Linda would normally swarm over like a hive of bees starved for nectar. He’s wearing a flashy sharkskin suit and a chunky Rolex, and he flashes enormous white veneers every time he smiles. Handsome, slightly older, very wealthy, and inappropriate – he’s wearing a wedding ring. Absolutely perfect for her.

But Linda just nods pleasantly. “Coming right up,” she says.

“I’ll have the same!” Murray calls out to her.

“Got it.” She glances at Mr. Ferguson’s two hulking assistants. “Can I get you gentlemen some water?”

They both shake their heads.

The two of them give off a vaguely menacing air, which is a little off-putting but not unheard of for a man of Mr. Ferguson’s means. I’ve dealt with plenty of the uber-wealthy in my time, and bodyguards are common.

Linda strolls away without a backward glance at Mr. Ferguson. Not a single hair-flip or flirtatious simper. Could it possibly be that she’s really turned over a new… I shake my head. “Nope,” I mutter to myself.

“What’s that, babe?” Sienna puts her hand on my knee.

“Nothing, hon.” I lean in and kiss her on the cheek, but brush her hand off. The last thing I need is to treat everyone at the table to the sight of my raging hard-on when I stand up to go to the bathroom. “Stop that,” I whisper to her. “Bad. Naughty.”

“You have no idea.” She winks at me.

My lips curve up in a slow smile. “Oh, I have some idea.”

Sara clears her throat. “Ahem. We have ears.” She makes a gagging motion with her finger in her mouth. “We all know you’re on an eternal honeymoon. Please can we make it through the dinner without the play-by-play?”

“Right?” Jamie nods at her and shudders in sympathy. “So rude.”

“Well!” My mother says loudly. “It’s so very nice to see you, Mr. Ferguson. We haven’t had a chance to chat much lately. So, will you be starting on your project as soon as the property sale goes through? We have pretty mild weather here – I would imagine you could do construction for most of the winter.”

“Absolutely.” He flashes his big fake teeth in a smile. He does that a lot. “That’s our plan. We should be done by the summer of 2022.” He’s got a faint accent, and I cannot for the life of me place it. He wasn’t born in the U.S. Ferguson is a Scottish name, but the accent sounds as if it might be Eastern European.

“We’ve got plenty of contractors and suppliers we can refer you to,” my father says.

“I appreciate that. We tend to work with our own crew, though.”

We sit there making idle chit-chat about