Loved Either Way, page 23
His fingers froze at the tips of her wavy hair.
He stared down at the length.
One he considered long, really.
“How long was your hair?”
“At one point, to the floor,” she said. “In grade nine, I could actually step on it. I hated it. It gave me migraines, we weren’t allowed to wear it down. No woman can unless it’s to bed or they’re alone with their husband. It’s supposed to be a woman’s crown, they say. So, why can’t she show it off? Why is she even hiding it?”
Lucas didn’t have those answered, but he didn’t think she expected him to come up with one, either. The chance was, the fact that Delaney had started to ask questions like that at all was a big part of the reason she hadn’t remained in the church with her family.
“After a few years, it got to the point where they didn’t even look at me if they saw me on the street or something,” Delaney muttered.
He heard the hurt there, too.
It even made him ache.
Lucas was intimately familiar with how hard it could be to desperately want and need the love and affection from people who should, above all others in the world, provide it. Only to find they just couldn’t do it.
“Gracen and I owned a second salon—we sold the first,” she explained, peeking back at him with a sad smile. “And bought the next one. A big courthouse we converted into a huge salon that we put everything into for years. We lived right across the river. That was our life every day. The salon. Each other.”
Delaney sighed, adding, “Until it wasn’t.”
She hated how saying that sounded so cliché, but it was true, too.
“What happened?” he asked, sensing she left something unsaid.
“My older cousin, and my brother, Levi, set fire to the salon after Gracen and I helped my cousin—Bexley, you met her—leave the church once she graduated high school, and they couldn’t legally stop her. They were also charged in connection with another fire that happened around the same time. A pizza place next door to our apartment but according to what I heard sitting in the trial, that was unrelated to me or Gracen. Mostly.”
His hands clamped tight around her tense shoulders. “Jesus, Delaney.”
“Yeah, so the Montgomery family isn’t the only bunch around here that likes to burn things down if you step out of line, I guess. Although, nothing’s ever burnt in my lifetime that wasn’t by the hand of my own family, that I know of, so—let that tell you what you want it to. Not sure if Malachi told you that part.”
“No, he did not.”
“Huh. Funny, it’s the first thing I think about every morning. As soon as I open my eyes, it’s like I’m staring across the river watching the black smoke pumping out of the back of what was supposed to be my whole life,” she muttered heavily. “I think about it too much, maybe. It was suggested I leave town during the trial—they held that in Woodstock—just in case.”
“I’m sorry, that must have been rough.”
“No, it was easy to run,” she admitted, shrugging. “I tried really hard to be a person outside of that church and my family, my own person … and in one day they turned me into someone everyone in my hometown recognizes and knows because of what they did to me.”
She shook her head, angrier when she tacked on, “I can hear it, you know? Oh, there’s Delaney Reed. They say her family burnt down her salon because she went against their church. I can’t stand it.”
“Delaney.”
He tried her name, an octave lower than his usual tone, as a way to coax her away from the soup she continued to methodically check and stir after turning it down to a medium simmer. When that didn’t work, Lucas opted to try something different.
Braiding her hair.
If it worked once to calm her nerves, and she liked it, then he could use playing with her hair to his benefit. Besides, whatever sugary-sweet spray she’d dusted it in that morning from an aerosol can—proclaiming it to be dry shampoo when he squinted at the powder she had to brush out—had made his hands smell like her, and he couldn’t get it out of his head.
Like how his hands and fingers had smelled like the softest, hottest parts of her, all wet and needy because of him. That memory brought the tart taste of her sweetness to the forefront of his mind, and Lucas was just fucking with himself, now.
She made him addicted, and barely had to try at all. In fact, not one of the many reckless hook-ups of his early twenties left him semi-hard all morning the way rubbing a nut out on and in Delaney’s hands had that morning.
Intimacy was one thing.
Real connection was another.
The woman currently stirring the soup a good head lower than his own, hit both of those on the mark for Lucas. A human connection he’d never experienced in his life before this moment. On the outside, Delaney was the perfect picture of a baby bird, if there was any comparison. Weak and needing protection. To someone else, they might see him as the protector, but he didn’t. Her petite size and sometimes quiet nature meant nothing for the strength all five-foot-maybe-one of her radiated. A stubborn confidence that probably should have been beaten or taught out of her—considering the people she came from—stained her aura in bright colors.
Can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
Lucas separated Delaney’s hair into three thick chunks that he began to rope back and forth into a braid. The way she went still at what he assumed would be familiar motions for her made him smile down at his slow work.
“It’s been a while since I did this,” he admitted, a quarter of the way down her hair.
Delaney laughed a lovely sound. “Who taught you to braid—any sisters?”
“No sisters. Jacob was the only one after me. Cub Scouts taught me, amongst many things, how to braid rope, tie a knot, start a fire … boy things, my father said. Although, I did braid my mother’s hair once.”
Delaney’s head tipped to the side. “Really?”
It was a tender memory for Lucas, one he didn’t want to delve into because it could only bring pain, but she had been kind enough to share hers with him.
“The plant out west opened around the time my little brother was born,” Lucas started, trying to keep his voice level and the emotion out of it. “So, my father, Ronald, spent the first two years of Jacob’s life across the country, and Penelope, my mother, barely got out of bed for the first six months. She had a nanny for Jacob, but I was a ten-year-old kid who could see that my mother was sad, and so I tried to help her sometimes.”
As foolish as that had been. It wasn’t good for a young mind to be exposed to bouts of drunken stupor and the emotional load adult issues put on the shoulders of a child.
Lucas understood that, now.
He was the personification of parentification.
A companion to a toxic parent who found joy in the misery of others, and was barely tolerated by the other adult in his life—the man who fathered him—on top of being a caregiver for his brother for almost all of his life. Jacob didn’t get much better from their parents, of course, except Lucas refused to feel burdened by the role that was forced upon him when it came to his only sibling. Family had meant something to him.
Even if it didn’t to the people who made it.
Lucas willed himself out of those spiraling thoughts by muttering, “It was also the only attention I could get from her—the five minutes I’d get to bring her something to drink, or when she’d be just drunk enough to let me sit and watch soap operas with her in bed after school … and yeah, once I braided her hair.”
“God,” she breathed under her breath, exasperated in tone, but he couldn’t be sure.
“What?” Lucas asked, amused but wary at the same time, as the braid came to an end with the last couple of inches of her hair.
Delaney put the cover back on the soup pot and turned around to look up at him. “You’re standing here trying to comfort me—ah, don’t,” she said when he opened his mouth to deny that had been his purpose for leaving his seat at the island. “You’re comforting me like there isn’t a reason why we’re standing here in the first damn place. Like you’re not grieving. It doesn’t have to be about me, okay? And you don’t need to bleed your pain out to make me feel better about mine, either.”
He pursed his lips with a shake of his head. “You’re grieving, too. Something different than mine, yes, but that doesn’t change what the grief is. People grieve different things for different reasons, and those same people grieve differently. So what if I’m grieving?” he asked honestly. “You are, too. Both things can be true.”
Perspective wasn’t always easy.
Lucas decided to give Delaney some since she was so worried about him. “The fact you’re here is the only reason I haven’t been on some crisis hotline or draining my bank account for my four-hundred-dollar-an-hour therapist. You give me something to focus on, and that’s okay with me. I’m aware that I hold things together really well. On the surface, yes. If you haven’t figured it out yet, I didn’t have much of a choice growing up but to do things, and get them done right the first time around.”
Delaney swallowed hard, her brow pinching in pain. “See, like that. You say things like that and it just makes me want to hold you.”
He chuckled.
That was not at all what he expected her to say. Funny. To him, he thought they kind of wanted to do the same things. Just for each other. To comfort and care.
“You can do that,” he told her. “Hold me together. I don’t have to be breaking apart while you do it, though.”
Her chest deflated with a hard breath. “Okay, so that’ll just be me doing that between us sometimes, then?”
Lucas smirked.
“What?” Delaney asked.
“You said us, like it’s a thing. That makes it real, right? I mean …” His eyebrows jumped high. “You said it.”
That time, it was her turn to smile.
“You know, I almost broke another rule for you today, Lucas Dalton, but you surprised me again,” Delaney murmured, pointing her index finger against the center of his chest. Could she feel the way his heart thundered there—did she have the first clue it was because of her?
“Did I?”
She nodded, but her stare dropped a bit as she whispered, “You would have been the first man I ever slept with that I didn’t make label what we were before I got into bed with him.”
Yep.
Would have.
Except he wasn’t here to make her break rules, and he only heard one thing in all she said that mattered to him.
“So, like I said,” Lucas told her, “the us thing—it’s real. You said it first. I just agreed.”
Her sneaky grin that she tried to hide as she spun around to face the stove again didn’t escape his notice, and this time, he fit against her back where he could tuck his face into her neck. He kissed the soft, warm skin that pebbled under his lips and grabbed two fistfuls of her oversized sweater to keep them close, molding their bodies together, as she took the cover off the top of the pot.
“Delaney,” he whispered along the column of her neck.
“Hmm?”
Her question came with a shiver.
He fisted the fabric of her sweater tighter, telling her, “Definitely an us.”
“And now you said it,” she agreed. “So, I guess we’re doing that, huh?”
“Guess so, sweets.”
So there it was.
At that declaration, he pressed a kiss to the top of her head.
“I’m putting a can of diced tomatoes in this,” she told him. “It’ll need to simmer for at least twenty-five minutes if you want it to taste really good.”
There was something about her tone.
Suggestive, maybe.
“Mmhmm, and?” he asked.
“For the rest of the day, all we’re going to do is eat good food, fuck, maybe drink … and we’re not going to talk about your shitty parents, or mine, or about anything else that doesn’t make us both feel really, really good. Deal?”
Jesus Christ.
He would hate every aching second it took her to open that damn can of tomatoes, pour it into the pot, and stir it around.
So be it.
All in all, it seemed like a worthy trade to him.
“Deal,” he returned.
Chapter 24
“H-hello?” came a sleepy, familiar voice when the call clicked through.
“How are you already asleep?” Delaney asked Gracen. “It’s barely even nine.”
“I’m pregnant,” Gracen grumbled on the other end of the call, unapologetic. “Don’t judge my sleep patterns, okay?”
Delaney snickered under her breath. “You got it, babe. Ask Malachi who’s winning for me?”
She seriously doubted he was crawling into bed with Gracen before ten on a hockey night, and despite the flat screen in their big master bedroom, he wouldn’t keep her up while he watched, either. Besides, Gracen hated hockey.
Gracen’s muffled yell on the other end of the call made Delaney think her friend had covered the speaker. It crackled for a second before Gracen came back on the line with a surprising answer.
“The Bruins.”
“Really?”
How many years had that been, now?
“Are they the penguin one?” Gracen asked.
Delaney only laughed. “You don’t care.”
“Not really,” Gracen agreed, happily, humming sleepily at the same time. Delaney could almost imagine her friend snuggling deeper into the fluffy duvet and pillows that made up Gracen’s big bed. “The better question,” her friend said, “is why you are calling me at nine, huh? Didn’t you tell me you were working on something earlier?”
Gracen couldn’t see the way Delaney’s cheeks pinked at the blatant question, but she still dropped her head like her friend could. She focused on the bright white tips of her manicure in the darkness of the cottage’s loft, her fingers curled around the back of the booster that she had to keep her phone on while she talked, or it would lose the connection. Thank God for the speakerphone. Naked under the quilt she kept tossed over her shoulders as she sat on the edge of the combined twin beds, only her toes grazed the cold hardwood floor.
“I was,” Delaney said.
“Mmm?”
“Did,” she corrected.
A second of silence followed Delaney’s admittance that she had, in fact, slept with Lucas before Gracen’s squeal broke the damn sound barrier. All Delaney could do to keep from spilling the flood of very personal details racing through her mind was bite down on the inside of her grinning cheek.
“Do I get any details?” Gracen asked.
The two shared a lot together over the years.
Some things didn’t need to be said, though.
“Ugh, you know how I am about sex.”
Gracen laughed Delaney’s excuse off.
Delaney preferred to tuck those memories of her first, only-a-little-fumbling time with Lucas locked away like a private letter she could revisit with her mind. Still fresh enough that she could enjoy the way his fingers had pinched so good grabbing her ass as they fucked, half-dressed downstairs using a stool for her knees and the kitchen island.
Her nipples still hardened at the way the cold countertop pressed against her skin in her haste to not even get her sweater off entirely before he shoved her down and filled her up. Like teenagers with shaking hands and not enough time lest they be caught, it was fumbling and fast and entirely fucking perfect.
She’d just wanted to feel him, to finally know he’d be as good as she thought stretching her open and fucking her hard from behind.
And it was.
He was.
Darkness fell early over New Brunswick in the winter. The dinner table barely got cleared from supper dishes, and it would already be dark. That same blanket of dark coldness carried the province through to the morning hours. A worker on a twelve-hour shift could miss the sun entirely in a single workday.
She’d still had a few spoonfuls of the beef-tomato soup left in her bowl, when he leaned across the island to take a kiss from her lips that started it all demanding politely that she pull down her pants for him. He’d let her taste the way her arousal turned tart after she orgasmed when he dropped a kiss to her trembling lips after spreading her wide on the stool and finding his dessert between her thighs, too.
The man had a mouth on him that he clearly liked to use, but it had been his tongue to start the unraveling of Delaney.
Delaney had never experienced being simultaneously turned on and almost ashamed—and truly liking it—at the vivid, explicit way Lucas could describe the way she tasted and smelled; or how he loved it and the things he wanted to do to her.
“You’re honey in the summertime,” he’d panted into a passionate kiss, and smeared wet with her around his lips. She hadn’t been able to get his pants shoved down fast enough, but she’d tried while he kept her locked under him. “A sin you learn to love.”
He couldn’t have known how right he was in saying that to her. Even the shame of tasting herself on his mouth after she had come turned her on. Years of being taught to be ashamed and afraid of what made her body feel good had turned Delaney into a secretive teenager who had hid all of her healthy, or otherwise, sexual exploration. The battle of her shame and pleasure became one she had always been careful not to play into lest it leave her more scarred than it already had.
Lucas Dalton, a gentleman for every moment she had shared up until she spread her legs wide for him, tempted her closer to the truth where both shame and pleasure lived. Safely.
She’d never trusted someone to let her revel in both without judgement until those moments with him. It had emboldened her to say as much, too.
“I want to be fucked like your slut.”
“Just not called it,” he’d returned, making a heat flush from her head to her toes when he’d added, “Yet.”
