Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 112249 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112249 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
What, decide they were a thing?
Label it?
That didn’t seem hard.
Except it was entirely possible that he’d also overlooked something. A flag she put up. Some signal he missed.
Malachi tried not to overthink it. “Well, I’ll be back shortly. What do you want to eat, anyway?”
Her quick response, teasing and adorable like always, eased Malachi’s inner anxiety.
“Depends on what you got,” Gracen returned.
She was serious, though.
Even asked for a list.
Malachi ran through the items he’d picked up at the store and what he planned to make with the food. By the time he finished, Charlotte had returned with a case of water she put in the backseat before climbing into the front passenger side.
“Let’s just do breakfast tomorrow morning,” he heard Gracen try to convince Chip in the background of the call. “Haven’t you ever had portobello mushrooms on hamburgers before?”
Her sigh echoed as she came back on the call.
“We’ve made a deal, he’ll eat breakfast tomorrow in the morning,” Gracen said.
Malachi scoffed out loud but was secretly pleased that Gracen had managed to find a rapport with Chip in his absence. At least, that’s how their exchange came across to him as he listened in.
“What’s he planning to get out of it?” Malachi asked. “The deal, I mean?”
Gracen repeated the question.
Malachi didn’t need her to hear the answer.
“Well, fuck, I ain’t cooking, am I?” Chip boomed.
A very valid point, too.
Chapter 22
“So, are we gonna talk about the us thing, now?” Malachi asked the same way he might question if Gracen wanted a glass of water.
At the perfect time, too.
Her mouth, full of the best cheeseburger—-so cheesy, mushrooms for days, and seasoned meat she couldn’t get over—Gracen had ever eaten, stretched into a knowing smile. Malachi glanced her way with a chuckle, and his eyebrows bounced up and down.
“What?” he asked. “You thought I forgot about that?”
Nope.
Not for one second.
Malachi didn’t expect an answer from Gracen while her mouth was full, and instead, focused on his friend strolling down below with a fresh six-pack of his favorite beer cans in hand. He waved to Chip when the man stopped at the end of the dock to glance back toward the lodge and the two sitting on the high, rear veranda.
Charlotte, already in the back bench seat of the canoe with a picnic basket at her feet and a paddle across her legs, waited patiently for her counterpart. She seemed more interested in the still, quiet river. No doubt, Chip’s chosen location for his lodge had something to do with the river’s calmer nature in this neck of the woods.
Gracen finished her bite, and set the burger back to the plate balancing precariously on her bare knees. She used the napkin laying across her frayed jean shorts to clean her fingers and wipe her mouth. Malachi could definitely see Gracen was able to chat without showing off her chewed food, but he continued staring out at the river.
Only his profile gave her a glimpse into what might be running wild inside the beautiful man’s mind. She found his nerves in the way he chewed on the inside of his bottom lip and even his restlessness in the fast beat of his fingertips against the arm of the chair.
Did he have his walls up high like hers? She had the strangest urge to climb over every one despite being unable to say she would let him do the same. Oh, she wanted to, sure. She craved for him to climb inside the hollow walls of her heart and make a home there, but it scared her, too.
Up until the moment when he’d said those simple words over a phone call—were they something, an us?—while she was sitting beside someone else who was practically a stranger, Gracen had been fine to do what they had been doing all along together. It didn’t have to be something. That made things easier even if feelings did come into play. She could enjoy Malachi as a person and continue to understand the boundaries between them.
She didn’t consider that he’d want to change it.
Or how much she’d want to say yes.
“So, us,” Gracen said.
She meant for it to sound silly.
Playful, even.
Inside her heart, saying it was anything but those things.
Malachi still laughed under his breath, and scratched at the underside of his jaw before grinning her way. “It came out way better when I said it.”
“Maybe it sounded like that in your head,” Gracen returned with a wink.
All in good fun.
Malachi seemed to get it, but as his smile softened, and his stare swept up and down her just a couple of feet away from where he sat in a matching chair, it became clear the fun had turned serious for him. “Is that how you feel, though? Like it only sounds good to ourselves—in our heads?”
It had been a shamelessly long time since Gracen found herself enraptured with the attention of a man, and it showed when the intensity of Malachi’s stare and what his question implied forced Gracen to play with her food for something else to do. Life had stepped in the way to keep her busy and focused on other—far more important things—than relationships and sex. Really, she was grateful because maybe she wouldn’t be as independent and capable of taking care of herself had she spent the majority of her adult life depending on someone else to get her through it.