Chapter 35 Deli
Deli
Lachlan draped a lazy hand over the steering wheel like they weren’t chancing death by eighteen-wheeler on sheer mountainsides.
“So, did he get the part?”
Deli felt a quick slip of pain between her ribs. She glanced at Lachlan, unsure whether he knew he’d been wielding a knife. “It doesn’t work that fast.”
He glanced back. “Yes it does.”
“How would you know?”
“He hasn’t spoken to you since informing you of his grand accomplishment?”
Deli lied. “Yes. A bunch.”
“A bunch?”
“Mmhmm.” She studied the horizon.
“So he’s missing you desperately already?”
A twist of the blade. She doubled down. “Desperately.”
“Sounds like you’ve done what you came here to do.” Lachlan’s knee tapped up and down. “Why stick around and make the man suffer?”
Deli couldn’t tell Lachlan the truth. If he’d been in the Beast’s castle when that hag bestowed the curse, he would have been turned into sentient Thigh Chafe, not, like, a candlestick.
She couldn’t tell him Trey hadn’t responded.
She couldn’t say she’d spent the night awake, refreshing her phone in a dark bedroom with no reception at all.
She couldn’t bring herself to tell Lachlan that she was yet to be loved.
“Distance makes the heart grow fonder,” she said. “I need to make sure the lesson sticks.”
“Uh huh. And you’ll do that by . . . turning him wild with jealousy?”
He sounded so doubtful, like the idea that Deli could make Trey jealous was on par with vegan cheese tasting like the real thing. A nasty voice deep in her head agreed.
She couldn’t say nothing.
“Trey is pining for me already. Imagine how he’ll feel when he sees me in the arms of a gorgeous six-foot-something man who looks good in tartan. He’ll have to get on a plane just to keep from imploding.”
Lachlan rolled his eyes. “Jesus, The Highlander really has a hold on you.”
She recoiled at the accusation. “Don’t loop me in with my mother and her special brand of bananas, thanks.”
He stared at her long enough that she mumbled about his eyes being on the road.
“You’re the one here, in Scotland, searching for a The Highlander knockoff, and your mother, the superfan—whom you are nothing like—is not.”
“I don’t even watch The Highlander. Trey just . . .”
“Trey just . . . ?”
Deli sighed. “Trey has a thing about the men on that show.”
“Then why isn’t Trey in their arms, frolicking through windswept landscapes?”
Deli was starting to feel a poking on her sore heart. “Do you need me to explain the situation again, but, like, slower?”
“Just sounds like he’s the one with complicated feelings for Scottish hunks.”
“Trey was upset because he thought I wanted someone”—she gestured at Lachlan’s enormous self making the cabin of the massive truck feel compact—“unrealistic. He’s a normal person.”
Lachlan’s small movements—the knee tapping, the chest rising and falling—went still for a fraction of time, like a shock had gone through him. “I’m a normal person.”
Deli snorted and rolled her eyes. “Nothing about you is normal.”
He shrugged. “At least I haven’t thrown a fit because I can’t reach the top shelf.”
Deli let anger smother the pain Lachlan was prodding. She was tired of hurting.
“Listen, Shrek. It was perfectly reasonable for him to be angry with me when he thought my tastes were defined by some genetic outlier impossible for most people to compete with.”
Deli suddenly thought of Trey’s costars on Chestnut Gardens. Girls who had carved their faces and bodies into shapes most women would never be. She didn’t fault them for it, but she faulted Trey for lusting after one or two.
She chased the thought from her mind.
Lachlan watched her, serious again. “He was angry with you?”
“Trey just cares about me.”
“No.” Lachlan’s voice was dark. “He doesn’t.”
Deli realized she had reopened the cuticle she’d made bleed the night before. She wrapped her hand in her other fist. “You’ve clearly never had a soulmate. You don’t know anything about him. And you don’t know anything about me.”
Lachlan’s nose crinkled like he smelled something rotting. He flexed his hand against his knee and balled it back into a fist. Deli was struck with the memory of that hand pressing against her lower back, radiating warmth where he kept her steady.
“Please, I know you.” He looked at her sideways.
“I know that you’re in love with an absolute bawbag, so you’ve run away from home in hopes his childish jealousy will break you out of the friend zone he’s put you in for, how many years now?
You’re glued to your phone, trying to teach everyone in your life some kind of lesson, and in the meantime, you’re running around Mo’s life, using her guest room and jacket and time.
” He looked at her in mock curiosity. “Did I miss anything?”
Deli didn’t want to think. She just wanted to bite the hand squeezing around her pain.
“I love this game,” she growled. “My turn. You’re the neighborhood downer who stalks through this tiny town like a guard dog no one asked for.
You’re screwed up from whatever happened with the gorgeous redhead you fumbled, and your daddy issues, or mommy issues, or both—but you haven’t changed a thing about the pub they left you with. ”
For a split second, Lachlan looked shocked.
Deli always knew when she’d met another kid with . . . difficult parents. “Please. There was a layer of dust so thick on that frame I’d believe it if you told me you built the place around it. Did I miss anything?”
She wouldn’t have said it, but he’d said it first.
The seat belt kept her body from flinging through the windshield as Lachlan slammed on the brakes. Graham stared at them through the glass from the practice field, eyebrow raised.
“Stop doing that. I don’t know what scared little boy is tantruming around in there”—she poked him once in the chest—“but I don’t care. Little Lachlan isn’t my problem. He’s yours. And he’s not getting in my way. Capisce?”
Lachlan’s nostrils flared. He leaned so close to her face she could feel his annoyingly fresh breath on her skin.
“Yeah? Well, I do know what lonely little girl is sulking in there”—he pointed at her heart—“Delilah. And I can’t wait until you get tired of playing adult and go back home to Mommy.”
Whatever goodness Lachlan Scott was capable of, he hid it on the top shelf and only poured it for people he called precious or pitiful. Deli MacDonald was certainly not precious to him, and she’d draw blood before he called her pitiful.
She leaned even closer, daring him to pull back, like a game of angry-whisper-chicken between grown adults. “You’re never getting rid of me. I’m here. And Mo? She’s my family. Not yours.”
“I won’t let you hurt her.”
“As if you could let me do anything.”
A sharp knock on the window pierced the tension.
“Oi!” Graham cupped his hands against the glass and peered in. “Lovebirds! Let’s go!”
Lachlan’s door was already slamming closed behind him.
Deli and Graham watched him cut a path through the mist as he stormed away. “Christ, girl, what did you do to the poor lad?”
She crossed her arms over her chest, hushing the soft, people-pleasing part of her that cried guilty. “I haven’t done a thing to him.”
Graham nudged her shoulder with his. “I wouldn’t be so sure. Come on. The boys are dying to meet you.”
Deli shook out her wrists to recover from the bizarre, searing jabs of the drive as she followed Graham.
She didn’t know why Lachlan brought that out of her, or why she brought it out of him.
It was like the air between them hissed with electricity so potent it forced a path out, one way or another.
She focused on breathing the fresh air as they walked.
“The boys,” it turned out, was a cluster of potbellied men in their fifties and sixties, two ripped women tossing a medicine ball back and forth, and a young man with an acne-covered face and bones practically poking through his skin, eyeing her hungrily as he rolled his socks up to his knees.
She swept the field again, hoping to find the dreamboat she’d been promised now that she hadn’t heard back from Trey. She couldn’t let him forget about her, and she didn’t have a better plan than escalating with a fake fling. She squinted at movement through the mist.
A man with his back to her tugged his shirt over his beanie-covered head.
The broad sweep of his shoulders rippled with muscle.
Bingo, she thought as he pushed his arms through the sleeves of a ratty thermal undershirt.
He turned as he pulled it over his face, and Deli got a full view of his perfect front.
His muscles moved in tandem with a layer of softer body, like a man who had earned his strength, not purchased it.
There wasn’t a personal trainer in Los Angeles who knew how to coax that sort of body out of their client.
Deli marveled at the sight of a real Highlander and understood what Trey meant when he’d said unrealistic.
“Graham!” she hissed out of the corner of her mouth. “Who is tha—”
Lachlan Scott tugged his shirt down and found her staring, slack jawed, as her question died like a fly getting swatted.
“Who’s who, lass?” Graham began to follow Deli’s line of sight. She panicked.
“Um, that!” She pointed at the pimply boy with ravenous, possum-ish eyes.
Graham sounded suspicious. “Kevin?”
“Yep. Yes. Kevin.”
“Kevin . . .” He drew out the name, waiting for her to stop him. She didn’t. “Is a checkout boy at Tesco’s up the road. He’s built on Mountain Dew and Hot Cheetos.”
“Maybe he’ll fill out?” Deli squeaked.
“Aye, give him forty years and he’ll fit right in with that lot.” He gestured toward the bald men with round bellies and a total lack of butts.
“Well, he’s the best option here besides the girls, who could kick Trey’s ass.” She admired the women radiating power. “They’d strike fear into his heart, not jealousy.”
“I see at least one other contender.”
“Graham. Lachlan loathes me.”
“You certainly have an effect on him.”
“Yeah, blind fury and the slipping of his brain out of his ear.”
“The line between hate and love is very thin, indeed. Passion has many masks.”
Deli made an exasperated sound. “I already have somebody to love. Someone who doesn’t have to go anger-stalking into the woods after spending a single car ride with me.”
She prayed the memory of Trey tossing her mother’s birthday gift away in disgust didn’t show on her face as Graham studied her.
“The day is young. Could be your dream man’s just running late.” Graham clapped his hands together and turned toward the group. “Alright, you lot! Let’s begin!”