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)
Lucas wished he cared less than he did.
Ronald wasn’t even worthy of that.
“I hear Mom’s back in the area,” Jacob noted.
“Living somewhere in Rothesay with her new husband,” Lucas confirmed.
A realtor with whom she’d been having an affair for the last decade or more. Not even Dalton money and all the bubbly in the world had been enough to make Penelope stay when Ronald finally stopped pretending like he wanted her.
It was a messy thing … their family.
“Are you gonna meet up with her? They’ve been down in Florida since last winter, right?” Jacob questioned.
Lucas did his best to act busy with the papers on his desk, before shuffling them into a drawer where they didn’t belong. Anything to drag out how long it took him to answer that question. “She did stop drinking.”
Jacob sighed loudly. “Yeah, so she says.”
“There was a time when she was a decent mom,” Lucas added.
A hard scoff echoed. “When?”
Lucas would never be the bastard to tell his brother the truth: before you.
“I don’t really want to see her,” Lucas said, needing to get the two away from dangerous waters. “But I might if she reaches out and asks. What would it hurt?”
“A lot,” Jacob answered immediately, “she’s like an emotional leech, Lucas. She sucks the good right out of you.”
All of them, really.
With parents like theirs, the two didn’t have a chance at making emotional connections outside of their close circles. It contributed a lot to their close bond and guarded nature.
“If you do see her,” Jacob said, taking one of the two leather bucket chairs across from Lucas’ desk as a seat, “don’t even hint that I want to speak to her.”
“I won’t.”
An easy task, really.
Their mother rarely asked about her youngest son. As if they needed more proof about her missing maternal instinct.
Jacob huffed a hard breath, shoved his sunglasses high on his head, and then glared at a spot on the one that had once held a portrait of their parents. One of the few things Ronald did take.
“Just talkin’ about them drains the good out of ya,” Jacob said sadly.
“That’s the truth.”
Sometimes, they just needed to hear someone else say this shit they experienced was fucked up. Children didn’t need a lot to grow up into decent human beings, and money counted for practically nothing when a home had no love.
Jacob cleared his throat, and his familiar dark gaze swung back to Lucas with less emotion than before after he dropped the aviators back down on his face. “How was Freddy this week?”
“Busy. It’s settled now, though. I’ll go back in six weeks for a check and to do a run through with the new people, but …” Lucas trailed off with a shrug. “I’m back home for a while.”
While their main home office for the brewery remained in Saint John, the seaport city of New Brunswick situated on the Bay of Fundy, the call center for everything from their distribution lines to truckers had been relocated two hours away just outside of Fredericton. The relocation was new because the growth of the company demanded it in the last decade. What had started as a small enterprise for his great-great grandfather turned into an empire for his family.
An empire Lucas had started to hate.
Resentment could do that to a person.
Lucas didn’t want Jacob to ever feel the way he did, and perhaps if the young man found a place to focus his energy and passions, he wouldn’t. On the other hand, Lucas would always be stuck right here.
“So … that’s a hard no for this weekend?” Jacob asked, his shaggy brunette hair a far cry from the short cut that his older brother kept trimmed neat.
Jacob never had to listen to Ronald bitch about it.
“Yeah, that’s a hard no,” Lucas replied. “Sorry, man.”
Jacob shrugged and lumbered out of the chair to stand at his towering six-and-a-half-foot height. The age difference meant nothing when the two brothers stood toe to toe and looked one another in the eye. Not once had they come to blows despite sometimes coming close.
“We can figure out another time,” his brother said, but he didn’t sound particularly happy about it. “Do you have a date for the weekend thing, at least?”
Instantly, a black-haired, hazel-eyed pretty face flooded Lucas’ mind before he could stuff the memory of Delaney’s sweet smile away. Her reflection seemed to haunt him every time he looked in a mirror as if she was going to suddenly turn up behind him to say hello. It was a joke how fast she came to his mind first considering he didn’t even have the woman’s number to call her at all let alone ask for a date to a formal event that was sure to be stuffy and boring. He blamed his incessant thoughts of her on the fact that she’d been on his mind from the moment he left that walk-in salon in Freddy without knowing if she was okay.