Loved Either Way, page 39
She appreciated the careful, but frank and respectful, way the RN broached Delaney’s current circumstances, and in a way, that gave her a little more dignity.
Delaney let out a hard breath that came with a lot of relief. “Okay, yeah. Thanks.”
“It’s going to take about an hour down at the lab.”
She jerked a thumb over her shoulder, saying, “Should I just hang out in the waiting room until—”
“No, I’m going to ask one of the nurses to open a private room so you can wait in privacy and peace. You don’t recognize me, do you?”
Delaney’s brow dipped low, and she took in the nurse’s distinct wide forehead and pretty blue eyes again, but she couldn’t match the woman’s smile to anyone in her memories. Her years of doing hair at the Haus, and the former salon she’d owned with Gracen, meant the nurse could have been a previous client.
She went with that safe bet.
“Did you used to visit the Haus?” Delaney asked.
“My younger sister—Kerry—did her practical hours for her license at the Haus, actually.”
Instantly, the information gave Delaney enough information to name the face in front of her, and why it took her more than a few minutes of conversation to remember.
“You always picked her up on Fridays,” Delaney said.
Madison smiled, nodding. “Yep—she talked about you guys non-stop, and it seemed like … Kerry swore that all the girls who did their hours at the Haus loved you and Gracen. Um, so maybe that’s why I might have known that was your mother working the front, so when I heard her say your name, I listened in on the conversation.”
She appreciated the honesty.
Delaney lifted her shoulders, muttering, “Thanks for saving me from an even more awkward conversation, I guess.”
“I’ll put in a complaint with the hospital’s HR department, if you’d like me to. Making comments like those to patients isn’t acceptable, and even if it was just a verbal reprimand, it’ll be on paper, in her file, and she’ll get the point the next time you have to walk through those doors.”
Delaney considered it for a good, honest minute.
And then said, “No, thank you.”
Madison straightened a bit in the chair across the small triage paper with Delaney’s admittance paperwork spread out between them. Everything from her weight, height, and last period—that very day, unfortunately—had been tracked on the paper over the course of a few minutes.
“Are you sure? I can do it without your name being on file if you’re concerned about something happening outside of the hospital because of the report,” Madison offered.
Of course.
Everyone knew all too well what happened when members of the church were singled out in their small valley town. Sure, the previous pastor who had shouted hellfire and brimstone from the pulpit during her days as parishioner, and even when the Haus had been burned, no longer sat as the head of the tabernacle on the hill.
Or so she had been told …
It didn’t matter.
That was the only damn thing that had changed.
“I don’t want you to make that report,” Delaney said, so that it would be clear where she stood, “because it’s my mother, and not because she’s a member of the Truth and Grace Tabernacle.”
Delaney didn’t have to like her mother to care about her. Amanda didn’t have to know Delaney still loved her, either, because the only way she could continue to feel that way about her mother was from afar.
At a safe distance.
“You’re better than me,” Madison admitted, “because I couldn’t say the same if it was mine.”
Yeah, well …
Delaney just shrugged.
It was what it was.
“I’ll get you into the room, and someone will be around shortly to draw your blood, okay?” Madison asked, standing from the chair. “Is there someone you wanted to call to wait with you, or did you just come in alone?”
Delaney followed behind Madison, exiting around the private triage corner, as the phone in her purse beeped. “I have someone outside, but I’m good to wait alone,” she replied as she dug into her bag to find the phone, expecting a missed call from Gracen as she’d silenced the ringer before coming inside.
Madison gestured to another nurse behind the desk. A willowy blonde with light pink scrubs and a bright, white smile who nodded back and pointed at a private room off to the side of the nurse’s station.
“Right there,” Madison told Delaney. “The doctor will probably stop by to confirm what I put on your intake, but it shouldn’t be long. We’re not very busy today, thankfully.”
She briefly looked at the room, and the number alongside it, muttering, “Sure, thanks.”
Delaney had a bigger problem.
The text on her phone from Lucas, actually.
You’re at the hospital?
That was all he asked.
How did he know?
Chapter 38
“Hey, what’s going on?” Lucas asked the second he picked up Delaney’s call. “Are you in the hospital?”
“I’m at the ER in town. It’s not serious,” Delaney replied.
Lucas wished that helped the painful tightening in his chest, except it still felt like someone had taken a hammer to his breastbone all the same. His soaring panic came out in the form of rushed words he rapid fired out of his mouth. “Well, what’s happening? We talked this morning and you seemed fine. Are—”
“Lucas, it’s okay,” Delaney said quietly.
At the same time a voice called out behind him, “Lucas, we’re being seated, if you’re ready.”
Under the alcove entrance of the downtown restaurant that served some of the best steak dishes in the city, Lucas turned to catch the eye of his lawyer up the steps nearer to the podium. He lifted a hand for Lawrence to see that he had, in fact, heard the man.
“Could you stall them for me?” he asked. “Five minutes, max.”
Lawrence agreed with a nod before turning back to the woman waiting behind the podium. Lucas put his attention back on his phone call.
“I’m sorry,” he told Delaney, knowing damn well he’d missed part of her explanation for being at the hospital as he made the request of Lawrence. “Tell me again why Malachi drove you to the hospital at seven at night?”
“Malachi called you.”
The clipped tone from Delaney had Lucas cringing at his reflection in the entry glass facing the quiet, slushy street outside.
“Hey,” Lucas said, offering the word like an olive branch meant to relax Delaney without saying as much. “Remember how I asked why you and Gracen go whispering in other rooms together, and you told me some things can’t be changed?”
Delaney cleared her throat on the other end of the line, and something like paper shuffled in the background of the call. “I guess,” she said blandly. “What about it? Ugh, I hate these paper sheets they put on these stupid hospital beds.”
His heart squeezed painfully.
“Seriously, why are you at the damn hospital?” he asked. “Did something happen? You weren’t messing around in their shop with the machines or something, ri—”
“Lucas, calm down,” Delaney interjected, her voice rising over his own inside his head. “I’m already sitting here trying to figure out whether I want to cry or scream. Listening to you panic on a phone call isn’t really helping that much.”
Cry or scream—what?
“And now I’m going to have to tell my friend to put her husband in his damn place,” Delaney added after a moment.
Lucas barked out a low laugh. “No, that’s what I meant about the Gracen thing. Us guys have our lines, too. Mine is you. His is her. If something happened or was wrong with that woman and I knew about it, you bet your ass I would send him a text to say as much. You don’t want to apologize or explain your whispering in different rooms—well, same.”
Silence answered his unapologetic declaration.
Lucas tacked on for politeness, so he didn’t sound like a total asshole, “Basically, anyway.”
Delaney’s sigh echoed over the phone. “I don’t know whether to like that the two of you made friends, or …”
“I was just about to have a late dinner with my father and our lawyers to sign the final paperwork on the purchase and transfer of shares—are you okay? Tell me if this is something that can’t wait, Delaney.”
Her silence dragged on longer.
Lucas couldn’t stand it. “Did I say that wrong—is that it?”
“What could you possibly say wrong?”
“Maybe because I’m so used to somebody needing me that I keep looking for it from you, in a way. I expect you to call me and say you need me if something is wrong, but you’re already over there probably figuring it out on your own, right?”
“Lucas—”
“Let me try again, okay?”
“Okay,” Delaney muttered on the other end of the call. “Try again.”
“I’ll stop asking if you need me and start asking if you want me instead. Or that’s what you can do, if it’s hard for you to say you need me. Stop looking at it like that. Start asking yourself what you want—ask if it’s me.”
“I was better this morning than I am right now,” Delaney admitted.
A shitty justification, in his opinion, for her lack of a phone call later when she did decide to go into town to visit the hospital. Whatever the reason.
Lucas gave Delaney a bit of grace.
“When I ask myself that question,” Lucas said, “the answer is sure as hell you for me.”
Delaney sniffled, but asked, “I thought you weren’t doing that dinner until next week?”
“Lawrence is good at moving things along,” he said of his lawyer.
Otherwise, Lawrence spoke for himself.
And his work.
“I thought if I said yes and got everything done, I could come upriver sooner than we’d discussed for a week or two,” Lucas added.
“Can we start there?”
Lucas blinked at the question, but also had to move aside for a well-dressed couple that entered the restaurant. He followed the pair with his gaze as they climbed the stairs to where the host waited to take coats and greet those who entered the establishment.
“Lucas?” Delaney asked.
“Start where?”
“A week or two,” Delaney clarified. “I want you for longer than that.”
Lucas chucked, the rumbling sound easing a bit of the ache in his chest. “Okay, it can be more than that. I’ll figure it out. It’s not like I’m going to be punching in on anybody’s clock.”
Not that he ever did that before, really.
Salary all the way.
“Well, there’s still the foundation for—”
“The foundation is in the beginning stages and has another year or more of work ahead of me before it’s functional the way I envision it in my mind,” Lucas interjected. “Also, there’s nothing I can’t do over a telephone or video call for that at the moment, anyway.”
“Are you keeping the apartment in the city?”
His brow furrowed. “Are you asking me that for a reason?”
“It’s probably bigger than my little one bedroom over the garage, huh?”
“Delaney—”
“Does it sound as juvenile to you as it does to me when I want to ask you to move in?”
All at once, that pressure building inside his chest seemed to release. Finally, he seemed to grasp what she had been dancing around for the better part of their conversation.
“Is that what it is? You want me to move in?” he asked.
“You’re the one who keeps saying you can work on whatever, wherever,” Delaney returned.
Like it wasn’t a big deal.
Oh, God.
It was.
“I thought about keeping the apartment in the city,” Lucas said honestly. Because he had given this some thought, although he’d been waiting on Delaney to take that first step between them. He’d move accordingly, and so, now he could.
She cleared her throat. “Did you?”
“A part of me will always stay in Saint John,” he said, “and what if we wanted to go for a weekend? It’s there and furnished.”
Delaney grew quiet on the other end of the line again. Something about that silence seemed weighted and sad to him. So heavy, he could feel it through the speakers.
“Are you gonna tell me what’s going on?”
Delaney dragged in a shaky breath. “Promise you won’t freak out?”
“I can sure try,” he returned, “but no promises there. I won’t make one I might break.”
“You’re so sweet it’s fucking disgusting.”
He grinned, but the clearing of a throat made Lucas spin around to see Lawrence had come to stand at the top of the stairs. His lawyer gestured at the watch on his wrist, making Lucas nod in silent reply.
“I was going to tell you—when I knew for sure,” Delaney corrected, adding after, “But then someone else had to stick his nose where it didn’t belong before I even had some answers of my own here.”
“What?”
Lucas had no clue what she meant.
From start to finish.
“I took a pregnancy test today, Lucas,” Delaney said, “and it was positive.”
Stopping his heart in an instant.
She didn’t give him the chance to speak, and restarted the organ in his chest, when she continued on, saying, “But I’ve also been bleeding all day, and not feeling great, so … Anyway, Gracen convinced me to make a trip in. Malachi drove. He doesn’t know.”
His mind blanked.
Just … gone.
Nothing really seemed important to Lucas, not even the dinner he was already late to and would need to get through lest he drag on the communication with his father and Ronald’s irritating lawyer. Not a good option. The dinner, and the papers he had to sign during it, seemed so insignificant compared to the achy sadness in Delaney’s voice.
That killed him.
“I’ll be there before you lay your head down tonight,” Lucas promised. “Are they keeping you there at the hospital, do you think?”
“You don’t have to make the trip here tonight,” Delaney argued. “That’s a four-hour drive, Lucas.”
“Are they keeping you at the hospital tonight?”
“Well …”
“What, Delaney?”
“I don’t really know? Probably not, but I’m not sure. I haven’t even seen the doctor yet, and honestly, I barely want to stay because my mother is doing patient intake for the ER. Really could have done without that tonight, you know?”
Lucas couldn’t imagine how bad Delaney’s day had gone for her thus far. He would try to make it marginally better.
“Call me when you do know. Anything at all, Delaney, do you hear me?”
“Yeah, okay. I will,” she assured. “That’s a long drive, Lucas. I’m serious. You don’t have to come rushing here tonight. It’s … if it’s a pregnancy and I’m losing it, it’s really early, and—”
She shouldn’t have to do it alone.
She wouldn’t.
“Either way, I’m coming home. I just want to know where the fuck I need to find you.”
*
Lucas joined the table situated in the very middle of the large dining room—a purposeful spot that he believed the lawyers had pre-chosen before arrival to keep the Dalton men polite and cordial during dinner—with an apology for being late. The unconcerned wave of two of the three men at the table didn’t seem too bad.
Ronald, on the other hand, followed Lucas with his gaze until he took his seat directly across from his father at the table. “Couldn’t imagine what’s more important than twelve and a half million dollars.”
Lucas, more interested in the menu in front of him than the man trying to poke at his raw nerve, responded only, “Everybody has different priorities, Ronald.”
He’d dropped the dad bit altogether.
Lucas wouldn’t even call Ronald his father after today.
Chandler, the man Ronald paid a nice hourly fee to put up with his bullshit on the legal side of things, seemed to pick up on the fast-rising tension between the father and son at the table. He stepped in to divert Ronald’s attention away from Lucas for a moment by pointing at something on the menu that the two began to discuss.
On his side, Lucas turned to his lawyer.
“Can we reschedule breakfast tomorrow?” Lucas asked Lawrence under his breath. “Something came up earlier that I will need to handle once we’re finished here.”
He didn’t feel comfortable sharing the circumstances that led him to cancel the breakfast. Those details felt a little too personal and close to his heart. Maybe at a different place and table, Lucas might have felt safe to give Lawrence the insight, but …
“Your phone call?” the lawyer asked back.
Lucas nodded subtly. “I’ll be heading upriver for a bit. Breakfast was all semantics, anyway, right?”
“Celebratory based on tonight, really,” Lawrence replied, smirking. “It’s fine. We can go over everything and what to expect with the incoming transfers into your accounts over the phone. It didn’t have to be over a meal, Lucas.”
“Great. My phone is always on if you call, anyway.”
“Good to know he answers someone’s calls,” came the comment from across the table.
Even the lawyer beside Lucas heard the snideness from Ronald.
“Is there a reason I need to answer a call from you?” Lucas asked the prick across the way.
Ronald opened his mouth to respond, but promptly snapped his jaws closed when a bubbly redhead sidled up to their table with a wide smile plastered on her face. If the server could tell she came to the wrong table, the woman didn’t make it known. That, or she was terribly good at her job.
Either way, Lucas planned to leave her a decent tip.
“Are we ready to get a start on the first course?” the redhead asked. Her green gaze turned on Lucas. “My name’s Marley, by the way. You weren’t here earlier when I introduced myself.”
