Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 141951 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 473(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 141951 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 473(@300wpm)
“Not a single clue.”
“Easily six figures. Can’t I live on that?”
He asked it like a joke.
Most times, money wasn’t very funny.
Then, he got serious.
Even though he tickled her while he did it.
“Better yet,” he pressed, “could you?”
He met her gaze.
She stared right back.
“This isn’t about your money, Lucas.”
Not for her.
“That’s not what I asked, and if it matters, even if I spent every damn cent of it on you, I wouldn’t ask your permission to do that, either.”
Well, then.
Delaney pressed her lips together to keep from smiling at his blatant arrogance, but his chuckles down below coaxed it out of her, anyway. She went back to drawing those lazy circles through his hair, eventually moving down to his shoulders and upper back where her fingertips glided over his soft skin while she tried to absorb what he just told her.
“Are you gonna do it?” she eventually asked. “Take the offer?”
“I want to,” he replied, “but I also don’t want to feel like somehow, he’s going to win.”
“Maybe it’s not about somebody winning between you.”
That statement had Lucas lifting his head. “I don’t mean for it to sound like I want to get one up on him. Honestly, if I didn’t have to see the man again, I’d be happy, but even that won’t happen. At some point, I’ll have to sit across a table from the bastard one last time to sign my name on a few papers. So, I’m stuck still thinking that every interaction, even through my fucking lawyer, is a way that he’s trying to poke at me somehow. It’s … not good for me. I don’t like what that does to me, Delaney.”
He pointed at his head, adding, “In here, you know?”
She did.
All too well.
It wasn’t an easy road.
A path no one wanted to willingly travel.
“I know what it’s like to walk away from your parents and say that’s it,” Delaney replied, “because you know it has to be—otherwise, it’s like they’re killing the person you could be. Maybe that’s where you are right now. Still trying to get away, and you haven’t quite figured out what it’s gonna look like when you finally are, but that’s okay.”
“Is it?”
Delaney shrugged against the mound of pillows at her back. “Yeah, babe. It’s okay not to have the answers about what life’s going to look like after this, or if it’s even going to be what you want it to be. It doesn’t have to be those things yet. It just has to be better than what you already have. What’s better than the things waiting for you wherever he is?”
Lucas barely even thought about it before replying, “Wherever you are. That’s been better for me from day one.”
“Good, because here it doesn’t matter. Whether you sell the shares, fight your father, or hide away from the world until you figure out everything in your life that you feel like is wrong or not quite right. Here, no one is asking you to be anything or anyone but exactly who you are. It doesn’t matter when you’re with me because here, Lucas, you are loved either way.”
That was all she had ever wanted, after all. From the time she was just a girl … For the people around her who proclaimed to love her to actually mean it—not to put conditions on it that had to be met, in extreme ways sometimes, to get what she deserved in return.
That’s not how love should work.
It would not be her kind of love.
Not ever.
“No matter what you do, I’m going to love you either way.”
“That won’t change?” he asked roughly.
“That will never change, Lucas.”
Chapter 36
“Do you have time for one more appointment?”
Sweeping the floor in front of the large mirror that faced the one stylist chair in Gracen’s attached salon, Delaney paused her end of day work to find her friend and Mimi in the open double doorway that connected the business to the rear of the house. Most of the day, Delaney kept those doors closed as she worked with clients who traveled to the home-based salon for their trims and colors. Malachi tended to be the one who came around at the end of the workday to open the doors wide for Mister Kitty to make his prowl of the place.
Otherwise, the cat meowed incessantly on the other side.
“It’s me,” Mimi declared with her weathered hands lifting high. Gracen’s grandmother beamed in the wheelchair being pushed by her granddaughter.
“It’s us,” Gracen added in a laugh. She nodded down at her grandmother, explaining to Delaney, “Somebody’s nurse headed out an hour early for an appointment, so we had time. She got it in her head that she needed a wash and set at four in the evening, so.”
Delaney grinned.
Mimi always got what she wanted.
No matter how ridiculous, or seemingly impossible, Gracen bent over backwards to make her grandmother smile daily. After only a couple of weeks living at the farmhouse on The Flats, with a support nurse that came in for twelve hour shifts every day of the week, rotating days off with another home care support worker on the weekends, even Delaney could see the difference it made for the old woman’s mood and mind. Sure, sometimes Mimi confused the time—like being back in the old house with familiar rooms and walls took her back to when her son and his wife were still alive; before her husband had died, too. Other days, she woke up knowing her granddaughter was over halfway along in her pregnancy and remembering the baby would be a boy.