Loved Either Way, page 12
She came out of the spins with a bit of a dizzy wobble, and a breathless laugh that had her bent over at the middle. Not an intentional bow, but it worked to end her show.
She would not do that again.
Wouldn’t dare.
The last thing she wanted to do was fall flat on her face on the ice, and give another kind of show should her dress ride up too high on her ass.
Delaney’s toothy smile matched Lucas’ as he skated a wide circle backward around her. She faced the large scoreboard on the far wall of the arena hanging beneath a massive Canadian flag stretching from one side of the rink to the other.
“See, you still got it,” he told her.
“I really shouldn’t do that after drinking wine,” she replied.
Lucas only chuckled. “You barely even blinked.”
She eyed him from the side, shaking her head a little.
Maybe it was the smell of the rink and the chill of the ice that did it, or it could have been the gorgeous man who never took his gaze off of her, but her willingness to share came back in the form of a tightness in her chest. The words practically rushed right out the second she opened her lips.
“My grandmother put me into figure skating when I started kindergarten,” Delaney said, her words never once breaking Lucas’ clean circle he continued to make around her. “I guess, to teach me how to skate, mostly, but I took right to it.”
“What did you say earlier—thirteen you stopped?”
Delaney exhaled a breath she could see in front of her face. It ached coming out of her lungs. “Lucky me, I was an early bloomer.”
The pucker of his brow said he didn’t understand. Funny … she hadn’t either, back then.
“My parents pulled me out of it, refused to pay fees or replace my equipment and things. I always needed new costumes …” Delaney trailed off, knowing none of those things really made sense to clear up the reason why she had quit as a young teen. “It wasn’t really about the money. My father was more concerned with how short my costumes were and how people could see the shape of my body when I skated.”
Lucas shredded ice as he instantly came to a stop. “What?”
She shrugged one shoulder, but her attempt to laugh off the seriousness in her delivery was nothing less than weak. “Oh, yeah. I listened to him rant for weeks every time we sat down at the dinner table.” Not just then. All the time, really. “The second skating got brought up somehow, he started. My mother—she sat there and let him do it. It was his house, anyway, or so she always said whenever one of us had something to say about the way he did things. She didn’t care. I tried to argue for a while. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I didn’t skate and sin.”
“What does sin have anything to do with it?”
“Well, when I kept coming up with what I thought were smart arguments to keep skating, being a thirteen-year-old starting to grow into her own brain that didn’t automatically believe everything they told me, he just took me to church. Instead of him shouting at me about how I was going to become a whore because of figure skating, the pastor spent four hours counseling me about my sinful and wanton behavior, and how it seduces boys and men when I pranced around in short, shiny skirts and tights.”
Lucas blinked, standing strong like a pillar, close to the middle of the ice.
Delaney suddenly wished she hadn’t allowed herself to go to that place—that horrible place where God and her faith had been twisted and manipulated by the people around her for their selfish desires and needs. Very rarely had they considered her. Anything about her, really.
“Shit, Delaney—”
She held up a finger at the pitying tone Lucas took one, and wanted to stop that in its tracks. “I learned something when they did that to me—when they took skating from me. They taught me something important about my family.”
“What did it teach you?” Lucas gestured at nothing in particular, muttering, “I can’t imagine that would teach a teenage girl anything good—to what, hide her body even in sport because she’s responsible for the thoughts of the opposite sex?”
Delaney nodded. “No, I was already used to being told things like that. If you were alive and had a vagina, you’d hear that nonsense coming out of church every sermon.” From the time she could walk and talk, really. As soon as she understood that she was the girl, and by default, always the reason in a bad or inappropriate situation. Especially when it came to men. “They taught me if I had to question them, or the things they told me, they were probably wrong.”
A small smirk pulled at the edge of Lucas’ lips. “Oh?”
She pointed at her head. “Like I said, I started to think with my own brain instead of the way they told me how. Every question I had for God didn’t seem to be answered in the Bible, and I wasn’t exactly encouraged to think outside of our safe little box. The voice I heard in my head when I was alone didn’t sound like the one they wanted me to listen to when I started asking the questions I thought were important. It sounded real—more like me.”
For her parents, that fucked up everything, and it changed all their lives forever. She refused to apologize for that.
“Jesus, okay,” Delaney said suddenly, needing to get them off this conversation and back to the happy place the two of them had found moments ago. She kicked off on the ice, starting a wider circle around Lucas than he had previously done to her. He, on the other hand, began a slow skate backwards. “Are we skating, or what?”
Lucas flashed a cheeky grin. “Want to race?”
Did he really have to ask?
She couldn’t say no to a challenge.
Delaney spun fast, and headed for the far side of the rink with a holler, “First one to that side and then the back wall wins!”
“Brat!” She heard him shout.
Hey.
He had way longer legs.
She deserved a head start.
To be fair, Delaney really had to work for that win. Cold air whipped past her pumping legs even as she came to a dangerous stop at the back boards before jetting toward the other side of the rink. Lucas was not far behind.
She barely got herself stopped at the other side and turned around before the man rushed her. All of him. Every towering foot of him that loomed over her as he shredded ice again to come to a stop mere inches in front of her at the back boards. She felt the prickles of ice shavings dance up her bare legs, but she couldn’t even make herself look away from Lucas as he inched closer until her back pressed against the boards and his hands caged her in on either side.
He grinned big.
Even when she peered up at him and whispered, “I win.”
Delaney earned herself that bruising, breathless kiss she’d wanted in the car. He didn’t ask for it, but he didn’t have to this time around. Her tongue tangled with his—so demanding, taking more even when she gasped for air around their trembling kiss—as their bodies melted together against the boards. She enjoyed the sensation of being pinned under him a little too much for her own good, but she couldn’t bear to push him away.
So, she didn’t.
“I’d break my rules for you,” she told him, shivering even though she wasn’t all that cold anymore once Lucas had pulled back from the kiss. “I would.”
If her cousin wasn’t at the apartment waiting …
If he just kissed her like that again …
She would break every rule.
He made her think it might be worth it.
Lucas wet the seam of his lips with the tip of his tongue as he tried to catch his own breath. The way he stared at her—hard and long, unmoving—said he wanted her to do exactly that. Break every and any rule.
His mouth said something different.
“Don’t,” he told her, shaking his head and pushing away from the wall to skate backwards. “Don’t ever lower the bar for me. Set it even higher.”
Goddamn him for saying that, too.
It made her like him even more.
“Best two out of three for the race, then?” she asked. “If you want a chance to save your pride, I mean.”
Lucas laughed loudly. “You bet your pretty ass. It’s so on.”
Chapter 13
“Delaney?”
Bexley’s muffled voice filtered from deep within the darkened apartment when Delaney finally got the door open after she wiggled the key the right way in the lock to loosen the final tumbler on the deadbolt.
“Is that you?” her cousin followed up.
“Its me,” Delaney called back. “You’re still up?”
A chuckle echoed behind Delaney. A dark laugh that definitely did not belong to Bexley.
“It’s not that late,” Lucas said. “Almost eleven.”
Fair enough.
Maybe she had been secretly hoping her cousin would be out—enjoying the town herself, like Bexley usually spent her evenings—or sleeping. Although, it wasn’t like Delaney needed another reason to break one of her rules.
“No, just getting out of the shower. Give me five minutes to get dressed,” Bexley said, her voice a little louder for a second before Delaney heard the distinct click of the bathroom door closing.
With a handful of minutes to spare, Delaney turned in the opened doorway of the apartment to face the grinning man standing just outside in the hallway. Both his hands pressed flat to the doorjamb so he could lean down closer to Delaney.
“You really didn’t have to walk me all the way to my door,” she said. “Inside the front would have been fine, too.”
Lucas shook his head like that wasn’t even an option. “No way. I watch too much true crime to let you do that.”
Delaney lifted an eyebrow high in silent question.
He shrugged, adding lower, “Hey, you don’t know the kind of porn buddy upstairs binges for twenty hours a day, you know what I mean? I’m just saying.”
Yikes.
She didn’t want to know the kind of true crime rabbit hole he had found if those were the kind of concerns he kept in the back of his mind.
“And maybe I wanted to do this one more time but out of the cold,” he said.
Before she could ask what he wanted to do, Lucas showed her. He caught her lips with his own when she tilted her head upwards, but the softness in the kiss left her mouth tingling with the ghost of him even after he’d pulled away.
“Get some sleep,” he told her, pushing back from the door to stand to his full height.
Delaney didn’t move from the doorway. “Are we gonna do this again?”
Lucas didn’t hesitate for a second. “Absolutely. The first chance we can.”
“I could let you know what my next couple of weeks look like?”
“Please do.”
Delaney’s smile bloomed. “I’ll do that. For what it’s worth, I don’t mind the drive to Saint John, either. And I love to watch the ships in the harbor.”
“Good to know,” he murmured.
For a moment, Lucas waffled on the spot as his gaze traveled to the end of the hallway where the exit door to the stairwell waited to take him back downstairs to the main entry floor. He shifted from one shoe to the other, and even shoved his hands into his pockets.
She thought she knew what he wanted.
Maybe.
Because she wanted it, too.
“One more for good measure?”
Lucas’ gaze swung back on her, but it blazed. “And sweet dreams?”
That sounded perfect to her.
“Please,” she whispered.
He met her in the doorway again, and his arms snaked around her waist to cage her close. Where the lit of the hallway and the shadows of her apartment met. His first kiss landed on the apple of her right cheek before he quickly dropped another on the other side. Delaney’s fingers curled into the open lapels of his blazer in an effort to keep them both there in that moment, when his soft lips pressed against her forehead with hushed words.
“More than one—just because,” he told her.
Well, she wanted the extra.
He definitely deserved it.
Her head fell back so she could catch the last kiss where she wanted it the most. Not that she needed to test her already-fragile self control where Lucas was concerned, but she couldn’t stop from losing herself in that lingering kiss.
For a second, anyway.
They both knew it couldn’t last forever.
The other person in the equation reminded the two of that fact when Bexley made her entrance from the bathroom. The short hallway connected to the bathroom and bedrooms walked straight out into the middle of the apartment where Bexley had a good view of the two still standing close together in the doorway.
“Oh!”
Delaney grinned, and patted Lucas’ heavily rising chest with both hands as he backed away. “Call me tomorrow?”
“You bet,” he murmured.
“Have a good night!” Bexley called.
Lucas waved two fingers in return for a goodbye, but saved a wink for Delaney before she had to watch his back retreat down the hall. Her hormones did all the internal screaming for her demanding that he stay—screw the fact the apartment had thin walls and her morals were beginning to get even thinner in the process.
The click of the metal fire exit door at the end of the hall closed the chapter on the night for Delaney, but she remained leaning in the doorway for a beat or two longer. Not because she expected the man to turn around—Lucas didn’t seem like the type to push boundaries—but because she wanted to enjoy the culmination of their evening together.
A hell of a night.
Considering they didn’t end up in bed together.
“Well?” Bexley asked after Delaney had shut the door and retreated into the apartment to remove her coat and boots.
She hung her bag up, stuffed full with her mittens, hat, and scarf, on the same wall hook as her jacket. “Well, what?”
“How did it go?”
Delaney hid her smile by pretending to rummage through the pocket of her jacket for nothing in particular. “Um …”
“Delaney, come on. I’ve been dying here all night.”
Her laugh filled the apartment like the lights flooding them overhead when Bexley hit the switch in the living room.
“It was great,” she told her cousin.
Bexley smiled knowingly. “Yeah?”
Delaney shrugged. “He’s a good guy.”
More than.
“And I had a lot of fun,” she added.
Which was what mattered.
Lucas, in the span of a few hours, proved to be many interesting things all wrapped in a very attractive package. Delaney honestly hadn’t expected to end the evening ready to make plans for the next one, as soon as possible, but she wouldn’t complain that it turned out this way, either.
“I’ll probably see him again,” Delaney said, turning to face her cousin with a grin.
“Oh, just probably huh?”
“Well, everything is just a maybe until it isn’t, right?”
The world wasn’t as scary when Delaney saw things that way.
Bexley only sighed.
“I think I’m gonna take a bath,” Delaney said, heading that way.
“You really had a good night, huh?”
“How can you tell?”
Bexley’s laugh tinkled through the apartment. “Because you haven’t stopped smiling.”
Well, then …
“I guess that speaks for itself, doesn’t it?” Delaney asked before slipping into the hallway.
*
Beautiful dreams, sweets.
The goodnight text lit up Delaney’s phone seconds after she slipped into bed. She wondered if he, too, had just found his way back to his own bed, and still had her on his mind. Who didn’t crave to be wanted?
“You, too,” she messaged Lucas back.
It wasn’t good enough. She had to make herself put the phone down to keep from hitting the call button just to hear his voice.
Delaney didn’t know what to do with those feelings.
That bubbling anticipation.
It started the second he greeted her at the front door of the apartment building and hadn’t dissipated throughout the evening. If anything, it just got stronger. And there Delaney was, left buzzing with all her nervous energy and excitement, but alone in bed.
She couldn’t stand it.
Hell, she barely understood it.
Delaney picked up her phone again, but this time, she bypassed Lucas’ contact in her list for one not too far below.
Gracen.
The cell number Gracen would answer, no matter the time or day, rang four times before Delaney started to think her best friend might be asleep. Her suspicions were confirmed when a gravely, familiar male voice picked up the call.
“You know it’s almost twelve, Delaney, right?” Malachi asked, not even bothering with a proper hello.
She didn’t blame him.
It was late.
“A little after twelve, I think,” she returned. “Is Gracen—”
“Sleeping. It’s been a long week. The morning sickness really kicked in hard. She hit the bed before nine.”
A first time for everything.
“Okay, well tell her—”
“Who’s that?” came a sleepy voice in the background.
Malachi sighed while the rustle of movement echoed over the phone. “Go to bed, babe.”
“Who called?” Gracen asked. “Is that my phone?”
“I can call back in the morn—”
Delaney didn’t even finish her sentence before the speakers crackled in her ear as the phone was handed over. Or, guessing by the muttered hey, be nice by Malachi, Gracen had simply taken the phone from him without asking.
“Delaney?” Gracen questioned, her voice less wobbly with sleep.
“How did you know it was me?”
“Nobody else calls me this late.”
Fair point, she thought.
“What about the manor?” Delaney asked.
“It wouldn’t be for anything good,” Gracen mumbled.
Yeah, true.
Delaney hadn’t considered that.
“Okay, so it’s me,” she said quickly.
Gracen laughed. “It is really late.”
“I know, but I can’t sleep.”
