Peter Bailey smiled back, wondering how long it was before the real food came out. He was starving.

Chapter Eighty-Nine

Imelda loathed her brother’s girlfriend with a vengeance. She knew enough about men to understand their preoccupation with a pretty face, but she could not for the life of her comprehend Petey getting involved with Bernadette O’Toole. The girl was gorgeous, no one could dispute that, but she had the personality of a gnat. Even Delroy, who appreciated a good-looking female, could hardly contain his active dislike of the girl. She seemed to rub everyone up the wrong way.

She was not just vain, arrogant and ignorant – which would have been bad enough. The real rub was that she genuinely believed that she was special. In a way, Imelda was more than a little jealous of the girl’s self-confidence. Imelda had been forced to suppress her natural nature; as the years had gone on, she had finally admitted that her Delroy was not a man to be challenged, and certainly not a man who was willing to allow his wife to dictate how he lived his life. It had eventually sunk in that her jealousy was not something he was prepared to countenance; it would be the reason he walked out on her. It had been a hard lesson, but she had learned it for the simple reason that she had no intention of losing the only man she had ever loved, or ever would love for that matter.

After her brother’s death, she had been forced to re-evaluate everything in her life, and admit that her family and her husband’s place in that family were the most important things. Her feelings as an individual were not. Everything was actually about the Baileys as a whole. Delroy loved her, there was no doubting that, but his love came with a proviso, and that proviso was that she did not encroach on him or his livelihood in any way. Her father agreed with him about that, as did her mother, and that had been the hardest lesson of all.

Sipping her champagne, she made her way over to Mandy, who somehow had become a close friend despite their shaky start. Mandy was the only other woman within her orbit who seemed to sympathise with how she felt.

Chapter Ninety