Read Online Blissed (Misfit Brides #1) by Jamie Farrell - Free Book Online

wanted it to be.
    “He’ll be okay soon,” CJ said.
    Maybe someone else’s dad would be okay soon, but the liquor cabinet over the fridge held the exact same booze her parents had received as wedding gifts.
    Except for those few open bottles she’d refilled as a teenager.
    “How much did he drink?” Natalie said.
    CJ’s grin turned a color of delicious that perfectly matched every last put-together inch of his solid, male body.
    She disliked him more by the minute.
    “Aw, Mom, can’t a guy have a night of fun every once in a while? This man here”—he slapped Dad on the back, then shifted to prop him up again—“hasn’t gotten shitfaced in years . When a man loses the love of his life, there’s nothing like a night or two to drink until you forget. Then you move on. All he’s been dealing with, he’s had it coming.”
    Drool slipped out Dad’s mouth. He swiped at it, clocked himself in the nose and knocked his glasses crooked, then laughed like Noah had told a bad knock-knock joke.
    Natalie’s roots radiated more heat than the heater. She stepped up to Dad’s other side. “Bedtime. Let’s go.”
    He swatted at her again and banged the entryway table instead, knocking flat his wedding picture that had been there since Mom passed—one of the few photos that had survived the flood. “Can’t hold the fam’ly, can’t hold me. Man gots friends, time like thish.” Dad punched CJ in the ribs.
    CJ didn’t flinch. His gaze flicked to Natalie, and a fleeting memory of her own guilt at that long-ago Knot Fest tickled her conscience.
    “Might want to get him a bucket,” CJ said. “Sound good, Arthur? Bed and a bucket? Let’s go, buddy.”
    With CJ’s help, Dad made it farther into the house.
    The Queen General would read Natalie the riot act when she got wind of this. And she’d get wind of every bit—how Natalie was a shithead to Dad at the shop, how Dad went who-knew-where to get drunk, how Natalie welcomed CJ Blue into her home in the dead of the night.
    If she could start this day over, she’d poke herself in the eyeball with a sewing needle to avoid having to live through it.
    But she didn’t have that luxury. Instead, she had to attend to a drunken father and the QG’s poster boy. A drunken father who’d earned his night out, and a poster boy she now owed for not allowing Dad to drive home drunk and possibly causing Natalie to bury both her parents within a year.
    The thought made her breath hitch.
    And maybe her general dislike of CJ thaw.
    But only a little.
    She gestured toward a short hallway beneath the stairs. “His room’s that way.”
    With the men headed to Dad’s room, Nat ducked out to the garage, sucked in enough chilly air to numb her lungs, snagged a bucket, and wondered how the hell she could minimize tonight’s damage.
    She needed to stuff her pride back into the shadows and be a good little divorced daughter of Bliss, but when she got back inside, CJ was taking up Dad’s entire doorway with his tallness and broadness and inherent male Neanderthal-ness.
    She might’ve gone a little tingly in some formerly dormant parts.
    Residual cold from the garage. Her dormant parts were defrosting. Totally normal after going outside for less than a minute in early spring. Yep. That was all it was.
    Nothing related to having an attractive, apparently capable, single man in her house.
    Or related to thinking about what might’ve been her own role in the demise of her marriage. But she had enough problems without going there.
    She put the bucket between her and CJ—a girl had to give some indication she didn’t like having strange men in her home. Until he acknowledged recognizing her from the confessional incident or introduced himself, she would absolutely call him a stranger.
    She hovered just beyond the door.
    “Here, let me.” CJ gave her an even more delectable grin. Hints at laugh lines creased the corners of his mouth.
    “Arthur’s not decent.” CJ winked, and then the