Chapter 48 Deli
Deli
Deli was waiting for Lachlan outside when he pulled up to the cottage.
As he walked over, she gestured behind her where Hannah and Aunt Mo were inside, chatting at the kitchen table about place cards, and whispered, “Lachlan, I don’t think Hannah likes me.”
“She doesn’t like anyone. It’s the best.” Lachlan pointed toward the path meandering away from the cottage, not to the cliffside, but into the gentle hills. “Walk with me?”
There was such an earnestness in the offer—such an openness in his face.
“Okay,” she said, and they began to walk as the sun moved toward the sea.
For the first time, Lachlan explained that Hannah hadn’t always been quiet.
Once, she’d been a vibrant young mother engaged to be married, but her daughter and fiancé had vanished into thin air the night before the wedding.
Hannah spent her life silently searching for her child.
Most people thought she was saving her words for all the things she’d need to tell her daughter once she’d found her—all the questions she’d ask about a life she hadn’t seen.
“Still,” Lachlan said, offering his hand as they stepped over a patch of stones, “Hannah never gives up.”
Just that morning Aunt Mo had come in from the garden, beaming, with a handful of small, spiked clove.
You do not know how I have loved you.
“That’s . . .” Deli searched for the words.
“Yes,” Lachlan said simply—a sweet sadness in his voice. “It is.”
They came over a small hill to a massive meadow blanketed in blooming purple heather. The trail was dotted with patches of wildflowers, all miraculously vibrant and alive.
Deli laughed, taking in the sight, but Lachlan pulled up short. She heard him make an uncharacteristic sound of surprise.
When she turned back, she was struck still.
There, in the meadow, Lachlan Scott was a portrait—brushstrokes of auburn, amber, and cinnamon against the untamed Scottish wild. A gust rippled through the blooming valley, tousling his hair and turning his cheeks a pale raspberry, while the sun tipped the sea’s gentle waves with gold.
Deli took his arm without thinking as they continued into the meadow full of new life.
“I don’t recognize so many of these,” she said. A budding bush of mustard colored flowers scented the air with coconut and almond. “What’s this called?”
Lachlan nodded toward the shrub. “Gorse. Or broom.”
Deli leaned closer and tilted her head this way and that, trying to commit it to memory so she could add it to her dictionary later. She felt the muscles of Lachlan’s arm relax under hers. They were different from the muscles in Trey’s—full and sure. Trey felt sharp all over.
Just ahead, she spotted narrow shoots of green tipped with vibrant cerulean bells.
“I wonder what these are,” she said under her breath as she knelt to examine the rare blue flower, and she thought of Scarlett’s delphinium.
“Bluebells.” Lachlan knelt behind her and left a trail of goosebumps up her neck with his answer. Deli made a sound of squeaky protest as he reached around and plucked a stem from the ground. “It won’t mind,” he said. “The meadow knows me.”
They stood as Lachlan held his hand out and offered her the perfect drop of blue. She tucked her hands behind her back and bent to study the pristine blossom made small in his palm. “I wonder what they mean.”
“They’re poisonous, for one. And it’s unlucky to pick a stem—you’ll anger the faeries that live underneath.”
Deli shoved his arm. “You’re making me a faerie target!”
He chuckled. “The meadow and I are old friends. You’re always safe with me.” She focused on the way the pink light was turning the bluebell periwinkle. Lachlan’s hand held steady. “But I prefer the old rumors about them.”
Deli risked a glance at his October eyes. “Rumors?”
“Aye.” He lifted an eyebrow. “Legend says if you wear a necklace of bluebells, you must only speak the truth.”
“Ha! Wish I’d known. Could have saved myself a trip and slipped one of those babies over Trey’s head while he was sleeping. Hey, you, wake up. Do you love me or not?”
Lachlan’s smile faded. “I imagine so.”
“Plus, you wouldn’t have wasted the last month chauffeuring around an irritating, lovelorn squatter, right?”
She tried to make her laugh light. Lachlan had a real life to get back to, just like the pieces of Deli’s—waiting for her to glue them into something bearable.
He looked at the bloom in his hand for a long, long moment. “They also say that if you can turn a bluebell inside out without tearing it, to have faith, for you will win the one you love.”
She reached for it, but he closed his fingers and pulled away.
“No, Deli.”
“Come on,” she said. “Lemme have it.”
“No,” Lachlan repeated. He didn’t smile. “He doesn’t deserve . . . He doesn’t deserve it.”
They stood in the meadow, looking at one another.
Deli spoke abruptly. “The sun’s getting lower. We should go.”
She started back without checking if Lachlan was coming, too—intent on avoiding her new, unhinged, make-believe thoughts whenever she looked the man in the eyes—but she heard his footsteps, sure and steady, keeping pace behind her.
He caught her arm moments before she stepped into a patch of mud that would have claimed her shoe to the ankle.
“Deli, you’re freezing.” She hadn’t thought to grab a coat on her way out. Lachlan shrugged out of his jacket. “Put this on.”
“No, I’m fine,” she said.
He wrapped it around her shoulders anyway.
It was something . . . to be enveloped in the warmth of Lachlan’s body—in the cinnamon and smoke and sea salt scent of him. When they got back, Deli hesitated on the cottage doorstep.
“I . . .” she started. Then reality forced its way into her brain before she could mumble something complicated, so she walked straight through the empty cottage and out the open back door.
They found Hannah in the garden. Deli could see the peach fuzz on her cheeks and the strands of white hair loose from her braids dancing on the breeze, cast golden in the last of the light.
She stepped into the wild like she was greeting an old friend.
In an instant, Deli saw Hannah as she could have been—a bride, a grandmother, a woman who gathered a family around her table as it overflowed.
Deli didn’t know what to call the quiet ache of realizing all the things a woman would never have. No one had bothered to make a word for that.
Lachlan stopped behind her and watched Hannah move slowly down the path, trailing her fingers along a row of yarrow with the kind touch of a companion. He touched Deli’s arm, so gently she almost missed it, like he just wanted her to feel him there.
Yarrow. Courage. Healing. Cure for a broken heart.
Her eyes began to water.
Lachlan took a deep breath beside her. “I know,” he said. His eyes were shiny in the day’s final moments, too. “It’s just not fair.”
A tear crested Deli’s cheekbone, and she didn’t try to stop it as it left a cool trail to her chin and trembled before letting go.
Deli had cried more easily and often since coming to Fearnhall than she had, maybe, in her entire life before.
It was like the soil itself called the depths of her out, hungering for things she didn’t know were buried.
Hannah turned toward them, and Lachlan jogged to sweep her into a wide, rocking hug—his stubbled chin resting on her silvered head.
Then he chose a pink carnation from the garden’s bouquet—like he knew it told of a mother’s undying love and a promise to never forget you. He tucked it behind Hannah’s ear.
Deli felt another tear leave her, though she thought it might have been for Lachlan and the happy son he never got to be.
A few minutes later, as they watched Lachlan’s Land Rover disappear over the hill, Aunt Mo explained that Hannah didn’t like to drive in the dark anymore. He’d come to take her to the type of appointment Hannah’s daughter should have been there for.
“Hey—is that Lachlan’s jacket?”
“Huh?” Deli turned away from the shrinking taillights. Lachlan hadn’t asked for it back. “Oh, I—yeah. He insisted.”
Aunt Mo smiled too widely for news of a borrowed jacket as she thumbed through the stack of handmade paper Hannah had come to deliver.
“Photo shoot tomorrow. I know you should rest, but . . . Scrabble?”
“Sure,” Deli said as she opened the closet, patting the pockets of Lachlan’s coat. She slipped her hands inside and felt something soft and small.
When Deli opened her fingers, she found a perfect blue blossom curled in her palm—whole and inside out.