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)
Malachi, not the type to be prideful or get a hurt ego over a comment like that, only laughed as he rounded the table on his way to the front door. “Right, that’s what it is. Stay up here with her and keep an eye on what she is or is not lifting—I’ll get the rest of the boxes.”
“Sounds fair to me.”
After all, she wouldn’t freeze.
Malachi had made himself scarce in the apartment by the time Gracen returned to the kitchen. This time, without a box in her arms.
“Hey,” she said behind Delaney, “I found this in the box under the linen one. Should it go in your room? I can’t remember you ever having a Bible after high school … didn’t we donate your old ones?”
“All three,” she agreed.
Delaney finished hanging up her jacket and toeing off her hiking boots before she acknowledged the pocket Bible Gracen brandished. Hanging out from between the closed, gold-trimmed pages was the cross pendant hanging from a familiar necklace.
She finally took it off.
Not to mention, she found it a better place.
“I still think the overall message has the right idea,” Delaney said about the Bible.
“Just without the organized bit of the whole church thing, right?”
“Right.”
The necklace worked much better as a page marker for the Bible, and oddly enough, she didn’t even notice it gone from her neck. All those years it took for her to take it off had been a mental game that came to an end the second the clasp hinge broke as she dried her hair a few mornings ago.
Wasn’t that how life worked sometimes?
“Lucas left that behind the first time I cut his hair—sometimes I read it, or I’ll find one of the passages I used to like for one reason or another, and I go back to it again,” Delaney explained. “Back when I got rid of mine, I was angry. I’m not really mad at the book, anymore, so …”
Gracen nodded, and flipped the Bible around to look over the back, making the cross flop back and forth on the cover. “Okay—in your bedroom, then?”
“Yeah, that’s fine.”
“I guess we’ll get good headway on unpacking and setting up this place tonight,” Gracen said. “Has Bexley forgiven me yet for stealing you back from her?”
Delaney scoffed. “No one is stealing me from anyone else.”
“You know, she didn’t text me for like a whole week after you told her you were definitely moving.”
“She still RSVP’d to the wedding, didn’t she?”
Gracen snickered under her breath. “Well, that is something, huh?”
Exactly.
“She’s fine—now,” Delaney qualified at Gracen’s pointed look from the other side of the small kitchen. “I get it, though. Having those couple of years to live together let me and her be real cousins and friends for a while. In a way she couldn’t be when she was still at home, and whatever. You know what I mean?”
If anyone did, it would be Gracen.
Her friend nodded. “I get it, no worries.”
“I take it the fact Malachi thinks you can’t sleep in the house tonight is because you didn’t tell him I’m having a guest all weekend?”
A guest who would be arriving early tomorrow.
Gracen grinned slyly. “He really likes Lucas, Delaney.”
“Yeah,” she agreed, “I can tell.”
From the moment she showed up with her U-Haul, that was the only thing out of Malachi’s mouth. He’d made a trip to the camp. He found a vehicle that Lucas needed to check out for himself that would work for the trade. Not to mention, all the things, and the headway, they had made and wanted to show him for his epoxy and wood art piece for a wall at the cabin.
Delaney’s friends didn’t pry too deep into her relationship with Lucas—seemingly knowing that the long distance didn’t affect the fact there was a relationship seemed to be enough for Gracen and Malachi.
Besides, there wasn’t much to ask.
Every week, something new came out in the paper about Lucas, his family, or the brewery. Delaney gave Malachi and Gracen a lot of credit about not being too nosy despite the fact both had mentioned seeing the recent troubles following Lucas. The initial suspicion about the internal upset in the family ranks proved to be true when news of his resignation from Dalton Brewery made the rounds, followed by the news he would be forced to sell his significant shares in the business.
If not for tentative, and hostile, negotiations in mediation with lawyers for both sides of the Dalton equation, and the peewee hockey team Lucas had volunteered to coach—to help out a friend—for the duration of the month of March, they might have taken a weekend together before now.
Instead, life forced them to wait.
“Not gonna lie,” Delaney said, smiling over at Gracen as she moved to the sink where she could fill her electric kettle for tea, “but you might not see very much of me tomorrow after he gets here.”