My mother looked at Sean, then to me. “We just wanted to give you and Darcy a little . . . push. It’s not every day we can get you together, so we figured having you both in Darcy’s house for a few days would do you good.”
I blinked. “I don’t understand . . . I mean, I do, but you’d better be fucking joking. “
My mother looked down to her feet.
“We’re not, Neala.”
I snapped my head in my father’s direction and gaped at him. “What?”
My father shook his head. “It was a stupid idea, but both your mother and Darcy’s wanted to have one last attempt at trying to make you both get along.”
Hold the bloody phone.
They were really responsible for us being buried in Darcy’s house for days eating canned food, taking freezing cold baths, having zero fucking heat, and for Darcy almost dying?
I exploded. “You can’t force two people to get along! I am sick to bleeding death of you all trying to control our lives. If we wanted to be together, we would be together. That is up to us, not you!”
Everyone flinched as my voice rose.
“She’s right,” Darcy jumped in. “You’re all something bloody else. How dare you force us together like animals!”
I was shaking with anger while he spoke.
“It wasn’t meant to be like this. We thought you would both find it funny,” Justin protested.
I growled at him. “We’ve hated being in each other’s company for fifteen years. Do you understand that? Fifteen bleeding years! What makes you think four days would sort us out?”
Justin raised his eyebrows. “You slept together; hate was obviously not an issue between you in that house.”
My heart broke all over again with the reminder, and I was mortified that everyone close to me now knew what Darcy and I had got up to in private.
“Justin! Bloody hell, man!” Darcy bellowed as he paced behind me, his eyes burning with rage.
I wiped my eyes before any tears could fall. “Thank you for that reminder, Justin, and thank you for letting everyone know something so personal.”
Justin frowned, then grunted when his ma slapped his arm.
“What happened between us wasn’t even our choice. You forced us together and knew we would either sleep together or kill each other,” Darcy snapped at his mother.
Marie frowned. “We just wanted you both to get along—”
“We know!” Darcy screamed. “We know what you all bloody want, but what about what we want? Don’t make this out like you were doing this for anyone but yourselves. You all want us together so we can play happy families.”
I folded my arms across my chest and looked down as I started to sniffle.
“We’re not sheep; you can’t just round us up because you want to see us together.”
Sean cleared his throat. “I wasn’t aiming to get you together; I just wanted you to stop fighting all the time.”
I raised my hands to my temples and rubbed.
“How did you do it?” I asked.
My father was the one to answer me. “First, I want to apologise to you both. I didn’t like the idea, but I made the decision to go along with it and help out, and that was inexcusable. I’m very sorry,” he said.
“Same here,” Jimmy, Darcy’s father, chimed in. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have partaken in the scheme, as it was stupid and wrong. I hope you both can forgive me . . . forgive us.”
“I love how you’re all laying the blame at my and Clare’s feet!” Darcy’s mother snapped.
Sean scoffed, “It was the pair of you who came up with the idea. We were just the eejits who carried out the deed.”
I was now aware that both our fathers had helped bury us in Darcy’s house, but the people I was most furious with were our mothers and brothers. Our fathers would go along with our mothers just to keep the old bats happy, but our brothers wouldn’t have gotten much backlash if they’d said no to the idiotic idea. They’d wanted to do it for selfish reasons.
“We apologise to you all every single time we argue in your presence – we rarely even cause scenes anymore – so I don’t understand why you went to this extent,” I said, my voice like ice. “You do understand what you all did, right? You buried us inside a house and trapped us for days. Do you have any idea what it was like? It was scary, dark, freezing, and uncomfortable. We both fought the majority of the time there. I had to endure insults day and night from a parrot . . . a fucking parrot!”
Darcy placed his hand over his mouth, and I snarled in his direction.
“I’m not laughing,” he said quickly, and looked away from me.
Bastard!
I looked back to my father, who suddenly looked depressed. “Go on,” I snapped. “Tell us how you did it.”
He sighed. “After Darcy left the pub the night of the engagement party, I knew you were already on your way to his house. I mentioned it to your mother and told her I was going after you because I was worried you would get hurt and freeze your arse off going up the mountain. Your mother, and Darcy’s, came up with the idea that once you got inside the house, because we knew you would get in, we’d block all the exits, thus keeping you both together to . . . settle your differences.”
My father shook his head.
“Myself, Jimmy, Sean, and Justin and a few others from the pub headed up the mountain after you, but we kept our distance in case you caught on to us. After an hour or so we reached Darcy’s house and we could hear you both arguing inside. Sean went to the back door and said it was over the parrot, so we figured it was nothing serious.”
Nothing serious. Ha!
That fucking bird traumatised me.
“Go on. Don’t stop now,” Darcy growled.
Justin took over. “We got shovels from your shed and got to work – you should put a lock on that, by the way. The heavy snowfall made things easy. I was expecting Neala to storm out at some point and catch us, but she didn’t. We were very careful about how much noise we made and just piled the snow up until it covered everything. I really thought one of you would have heard us, but you didn’t. When we were finished we did have second thoughts, but we thought we’d just let it play out and see what would happen.”
I was insanely mad, but them – they were fucking crazy. I could not believe this group of idiots thought, even for a second, that what they had done was a good idea.
“You’re a bunch of eejits; I hope you realise that.”
Everyone hung their heads.
They knew.
“I hope you also realise that I almost suffocated trying to dig our way out through the fucking snow,” Darcy snapped.
Everyone but our brothers gasped.
“Yeah,” I chimed in. “The snow in the tunnel he made collapsed on him and I had to pull him out. You almost killed Darcy.”
I was telling the truth, but I added a touch of drama to my voice to really get my point across – and from the look on everyone’s face, it worked.
“I’m so sorry,” Darcy’s mother cried.
Legit cried. Real tears.
I had never seen Marie cry before, so I did a lot of staring. I even felt bad. Just for a minute, though, until I reminded myself what the group of eejits had orchestrated.
“I honestly can’t believe you trapped us in a house by burying the exits; is that even legal?”
My father huffed. “Pretty sure it’s not.”
Interesting.
“What? You’re going to have us arrested?” Sean asked me, his tone sarcastic.
I curled my lip in disgust. “It’s no more than you bloody deserve.”
Sean didn’t reply; he only looked down. Everyone seemed to favour looking
at their feet.
“What about the blackout? Did you cause that too?” Darcy growled.
Everyone shook their heads.
“That wasn’t our fault. The village power only came back on yesterday. The mountain houses and lodges should have power by Thursday – the council is working on it,” Justin explained.
Burying us in together was bad enough; I might have smashed something just then if they’d messed with the power too.
“From this moment on I never want to hear anyone mention my and Darcy’s names in a sentence together in a way that is suggestive to us being a couple or ever being a couple. I don’t want anyone trying to play matchmaker, and above all, don’t trap us anywhere together ever again. Got it?”
“Got it,” everyone replied in unison.
I nodded, then glanced to Darcy before looking back to everyone else.
“And for the last time, there will never be a Neala and Darcy relationship. He doesn’t want me . . . and I don’t want him.”
With that said I turned and walked out of the room, up the stairs and into my bedroom. My heart was pounding against my chest and my stomach churned.
I hated myself.
I hated liars and I hated lying.
Yet I had just told the biggest lie of all.
I was no better than the rest of my so-called family.
It seemed being a liar came naturally me.
To all of us.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Another, Darcy?” the owner of O’Leary’s Pub asked me in his thick Northern accent.
I looked up at Bob and nodded my head even though it was starting to spin. He sighed, rested his elbows on the countertop in front of me, and stared at me.
“What’s the matter, kid?” he asked me.
I liked a girl a hell of a lot and I missed her like fucking crazy.
“I fucked shite up with a moth I was seeing and I’m a bit gutted about it,” I said, and shook my head. “She’s a good girl and I was a prick to her.”
“You cheat on her?” Bob asked as he leaned back, picked up a beer glass, and wiped it out with a cloth.
I frowned at him. “No, I shagged her, then told her I regretted it when I really didn’t.”