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At one point, Michael questioned her about her sculpture and she stumbled and mumbled something about the upcoming competition and Mick’s role in her piece. There had been a stupefied silence at the notion of their brawny offspring acting as a model, eventually broken by a hastily smothered snicker from his sister, whom Sophy had long since written off as a complete pill.
She was more exasperated than anything else by then. She gave up. His family were a bunch of incurable blockheads. Mick seemed to share that view; his entire game plan appeared to be to keep cool, not ruffle the waters and get the hell out as soon as possible. Unfortunately there seemed to be about twenty-five different courses and most of the mouths around the table were too full of bile and snark to make much progress in chewing.
They were finally done with the dessert, slices of obscenely delicious chocolate cake for those not intolerant to wheat or fattening foods, which basically came down to Sophy and Marcus, and Mick excused them from the liqueurs in the drawing room. Sophy tried not to let an actual audible sigh of relief. Frankly, she thought he would be far better off heading back to his hotel room with an enormous bottle of Scotch.
Lest their escape from the lair be too easy, Michael took immediate offense at their reluctance to continue the emotional battery over a postprandial sherry. He launched a full-scale offensive at Mick, seeming determined to provoke him into retaliation, and failed to raise his son’s ire until he ended with disgust, “Good Christ, between you and your sister…”
It was as if Mick literally froze at her side. Suddenly she was standing next to a human popsicle. He took one step forward and his voice was brittle with anger.
“Don’t you d – ”
The moment that he moved, his mother reacted as if she had been prepared for such an action all evening. She flung an arm between her husband and her son, and glared at Mick almost defiantly. Her suspiciously plump, carmine lips were trembling. She was…frightened.
Sophy stared at her in astonishment.
Annabel was afraid of her son.
She was staring at Mick as if she expected him to just let loose, turn a sickly shade of lime and start tearing off his shirt with his fists.
Mick.
Mick, whom Sophy was absolutely certain would be voluntarily stripped of his service medals before he would ever use unnecessary violence against another person.
And this was his mother.
Totally bewildered, she looked up at Mick and flinched. There was an expression there of almost unbearably tragic resignation. It was the most dominant emotion over the hurt and justifiable exasperation. She tucked a firm hand through the crook of his arm and felt him jerk slightly against her. He made no other movement.
Sophy scanned the row of Hollisters, standing shoulder to shoulder, facing off against them.
Next move: pistols at fifty paces.
“Thank you for dinner,” she said at last, lamely. “It was delicious.”
And easier to stomach than the company.
There really didn’t seem to be anything else to say.
Chapter Eight
The bride looked more like she was waiting for a bus than anticipating her vows. She kept shifting from one foot to the other and peering impatiently at the clock on the back wall of the church. Her obvious agitation had garnered a degree of interest among the bored-looking teenagers in the side pews, who were probably hoping that she was going to do a last-minute bolt.
From his unwelcome position in the family pew – his father was all about keeping up appearances – Mick studied his imminent sister-in-law. She was a fairly young blonde with a sharp chin and a stroppy expression, and he knew absolutely nothing about her except that her father was a backbench Member of Parliament who had insisted on an iron-clad pre-nup. Score ten points for Sean. The ceremony appeared to be keeping her from something more important. Holding her hands loosely in his, Marcus had the sleepy-eyed, slack-jawed countenance he always displayed after a hangover.
What a picture of wedded bliss.
A strand of silky brown hair brushed his collar and he glanced down at Sophy, sitting quietly by his side, one knee jiggling slightly. She was wearing another new dress, a silky blue-green fabric that draped distractingly over her breasts and thighs, and one of those silly things that women attached to the side of their heads at weddings and racecourses, as if they’d lost ninety percent of the hat on the way in. He had looked down at her several times since they’d arrived at the churchyard, ridiculously feeling as if he was making sure that she was still there and hadn’t subsided bashfully through the floor. She was so bright and funny when she was among friends that he already tended to forget how uncomfortable she was around strangers. He was constantly taken aback when his wise-cracking companion got out of the car or entered a building and suddenly seemed to shrink in both size and personality. He suspected that very few people knew the real Sophy.
The Minister was clearing his throat, thumbing through pages in his Bible. The bride and groom had gone with the traditional vows, which seemed a wise move. Marcus had delivered some spectacularly bad speeches in his time, when given free rein to improvise. There were good reasons why their father had pushed him into finance rather than the law. It was easier to spout nonsense in a boardroom than in a courtroom.
Mick sighed and moved his neck a fraction, trying to ease the muscle tension in his shoulders. He’d slept badly the night before; he usually did after dealing with his family en masse. On an individual basis, they could occasionally be tolerable. They all tended to be influenced by pack mentality and fed off one another when they were together. It was less amusing to be an ass without an audience. Although he and Marcus rarely had a civil word for one another regardless and his mother stringently avoided him. She seemed determined to believe that he had a loose fist and a hair-trigger fuse on his temper.
Christ, if he hadn’t snapped after thirty-one years of arguments, misunderstandings and petty digs, he wasn’t likely to start throwing punches at this point.
None of which made the whole situation any less bloody embarrassing when it was exposed to an outsider.
Neither he nor Sophy had spoken much when they’d left his parents’ house the previous evening. She had sat in the car, gazing thoughtfully out the dark window at the city lights, until they’d reached her hotel and she’d paused in opening the door to ask him if he had a mini-bar in his own room. She’d then sympathetically advised him to make use of it and cheekily promised to hold back his hair the next morning if he over-indulged.
Smiling faintly now, he rubbed a hand over his closely-shaved head.
