Instead, he strode from the room, went to his study, poured himself two fingers of whisky, walked to his bedroom, put on a sweatshirt and walked onto the balcony.
Dinner had been interesting.
The woman he’d fallen in love with twenty years ago had come back, though not completely.
There was no fidgeting energy and mile-a-minute conversation, not that Isabella could get a word in edgewise.
But she had her long, thick hair (and it pissed him off but he had to admit that he liked the blonde, it looked too f**king good on her) tied up in one of those haphazard knots that made her look effortlessly beautiful (which she, unfortunately, was) rather than coolly beautiful.
She wasn’t dressed in some ludicrously expensive designer outfit that made her look untouchable but track pants and a tunic that made her look real as well as sexy as all hell.
She laughed uproariously and uncontrollably when Sally had her incident with the flour and, he further hated to admit it, but Isabella’s face in abandoned laughter was, just as he remembered it, stunning.
And she hadn’t made his daughter feel a fool for her childish mistake.
She’d smiled often at both Sally and Jason during dinner, engaging with Sally in her jabbering and carefully drawing out Jason like she was a qualified grief counselor.
And she cooked like a f**king dream.
But she completely ignored Prentice like he didn’t exist.
Completely.
Prentice found this annoyed him.
Then he found the fact that this annoyed him annoyed him even more.
Now he found the fact that he was thinking about it at all annoyed him even more.
He sipped from his drink.
Isabella seemed determined to insinuate herself in his children’s hearts.
And she was, as ever, f**king good at it.
Sally was already half in love with her and Jason hadn’t talked about his mother with anyone but Prentice since she died.
Prentice took another sip from his drink.
He had two choices; kick her out or let her do her worst with his children and pick up the pieces when she left them behind.
Kicking her out meant breaking Annie’s heart and Annie had enough heartbreak in her life, she didn’t need any more.
And his children had been left behind by a far better woman than Isabella Evangelista and they were surviving.
And, even though Isabella was a part of it, Prentice liked hearing laughter in his kitchen and seeing his son grin. Jason hadn’t grinned for months.
He took another sip of the whisky.
He had no choice really and he found that annoyed him most of all.
“Fucking hell,” he muttered to the sea.
* * * * *
Fiona
You can say that again, Fiona’s silent words were lost on her husband.