Chapter 52 Deli
Deli
Deli MacDonald wasn’t typically a waffler.
She usually knew exactly what she thought—be it about karaoke songs, politics, or what she wanted for dinner—so much so that it was sometimes a problem. Her mother said she was born stubborn.
But as Lachlan took to the Let’s Make Trey Jealous concept again with renewed passion, Deli couldn’t decide if she really wanted it to work. She couldn’t decide if she thought Trey would ever love her the way she hoped.
And she couldn’t decide if she’d begun to wish it was Lachlan at the end of this whole thing instead.
“Right,” he said as he parked. “That’s us.”
Deli’s hair blew into her lip gloss as Lachlan got out of the Defender and closed his door behind him.
They’d pulled off a winding road onto a dirt one to find the photo shoot location.
Watching Lachlan navigate the unmarked, twisting paths through a place so rugged and raw and different from Deli’s eight-lane freeways and smog-choked skylines made her feel a sad sense of wanderlust. She would be thinking back to these moments when this all inevitably ended, watching The Highlander in her apartment.
Get it together, brain, she thought as she unfastened her seat belt with a click and stepped down.
She stared at her new boots—a gift that had appeared at the foot of her bed one day with googly eyes stuck to the box and a note about an auntie’s duty to preserve big toes—and put on a smile.
She squared her shoulders in a confident sort of way, she thought. Fake it till you make it, dude.
Then she walked around the truck and saw Lachlan’s bare ass.
She was surprised the sound that came from her body didn’t send birds into mass flight, but Lachlan spun around.
“S—” he half yelled, half mumbled as he pressed the kilt he was about to put on against his body. “Christ, woman, look away!”
The sight of Lachlan Scott’s hot cross buns had frozen her face in whatever ungodly contortion it made to unleash a sound like a seagull dipping its tailfeathers in magma.
“Ohmigod!” She dove back into the truck. “Sorrysorrysorry!”
She slammed the door. Her breath was fast. The wind whistled past the still-open back.
“Jesus!” Lachlan cried as he collapsed to the ground—out of the sight of the rearview mirror, which Deli was, apparently, looking into.
She slapped a hand over her eyes. “Ow!”
“Are you alright?”
“Sorry!”
There was scuffling and more mumbled curses. She shuddered as the back door slammed shut and left her in a cotton ball sort of quiet until her door opened.
Deli kept her hand over her eyes. “Hello?”
“It’s me.”
“Uh huh. Is it . . . safe? Or will I be violating you again?”
She heard the smile in his answer. “It’s safe.”
Deli didn’t move.
Warmth laced through her skin as Lachlan cupped her chin and turned her face toward him. He gently pried her blindfolding fingers loose in his and pulled them away, but he didn’t let go. The light filtering through her scrunched eyelids blazed orange-red.
“Deli, I’m sorry. I should have warned you. Will you open your eyes?” She didn’t. “Maybe just one?”
Deli painstakingly opened one eyeball. “I can’t believe I just stood there—” she began, but the words died in her throat.
Lachlan was starting to feel unreal. He hadn’t paused to put on a shirt in his hurry to comfort her after she’d ogled him like drunk-Deli ogled french fries, and he was so gorgeous it was almost funny.
One of his booted feet was propped on the step to the passenger side, and a beautiful pleated kilt in deep green with threads of cream and a turquoise green draped over his thigh to the knee of his bracing leg.
He was breathing so easily, despite his bare chest’s size.
“I thought I’d have a second while you gathered your things so you wouldn’t even know, and I didn’t want to announce it and be creepy about it but—” Lachlan shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. I should have warned you.”
“No.” She was struggling to speak. “’Smyfault.”
Lachlan’s eyes fell to her hand in his, and he pulled back like she was a snake. He probably didn’t want good ole porn-stache Deli touching him, and she couldn’t blame him.
Lachlan coughed. “I should finish getting dressed.”
“And I will keep my eyeballs to myself.”
She was hot around her ears and, if she was completely honest, a little bit in her unruly nethers. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone but Trey had awoken that particular beast. It felt like betrayal.
“Judas,” she whispered toward her bits. “Shut up.”
But it also felt good . . . and new. Moments of tension with Trey were charged with a familiar danger—and when she really thought about it, loving Trey was asking a question on repeat: Have I done enough?
He would dangle the carrot, slip her secret moments of assurance, and then let her fall—and Deli always landed on her feet. Her sore, sore feet.
She focused on rearranging her features into something casual and grabbed the bag of snacks as she got out.
Lachlan slung the duffel over his shoulder.
His full outfit was straight out of her imagination—a vest over a crisp shirt, a fur pouch slung around his waist, a knife tucked into his boot.
She bounced her eyes away to keep herself from ogling. Deli had never been an ogler before.
“I’ve got the snacks!” She made her face smile normally.
Lachlan actually smiled normally. “My hero.”
He led her to the type of trail a couple of hobbits would have loved that disappeared between soaring peaks.
They walked awhile as the off-and-on sun broke through to light the slopes and turned the veins of water running down the rock faces quicksilver blue.
Ahead of them, a stream cut their path in half.
“Here,” Lachlan said, reaching for the bag of food she was shifting uncomfortably on her shoulder. “Stay here, I’ll help you across.” He carried both bags across the stream in two long steps using a single stone in the middle and set them on the dry ground.
Deli spotted a series of stones she was pretty sure she could use without help and made a confident leap just as Lachlan turned around.
One boot sank into the mud to the ankle and remained there as her foot slipped right out, but she managed to land on a dry rock with the other.
She stood like a flamingo, in the middle of cold Highland water, with her foot exposed, in her only pair of good socks.
The silence between them was very, very loud.
Lachlan breathed in.
“Don’t,” she warned.
He stuck his bottom lip out and raised his eyebrows.
“I said don’t.”
He dropped his head to hide his grin.
She flexed her woolen toes in preparation for her next jump to a water-slick stone.
“Oh, no, we’re not doing this again.”
“I can figure out rocks on my oWWNFRNG!”
Her declaration turned into a wheeze as Lachlan quite literally stepped into the water and swept her off her feet.
“I’ve met your ankles, Deli. They’re lovely, but I wouldn’t call them robust. Now, are you fixing to complain, or are we past this?”
Thick white clouds with graying bellies wandered across the sky above him, and she thought of the way the stars framed his face the night she’d fallen in The Wallflower.
It occurred to Deli that if she hadn’t met Lachlan Scott, she might have never known what the sky looked like from somebody’s arms.
She might have never seen the world differently.
“Good.” He carried her across the stream and set her on her booted foot. “Now, can you keep your balance while I retrieve Cinderella’s slipper?”
“I’m a very good hopper.”
“Hop away, princess. I’ll be but a moment.”
She hopped. Then he was kneeling in front of her.
He patted his knee. “Foot.”
Deli obeyed. She watched his hand hesitate before cupping the back of her ankle.
There was such a startling intimacy in the way he cradled a simple, tired part of her body that so often hurt, she was overcome with a rogue wave of emotion.
Lachlan didn’t see the tear that shocked her by running down her face.
He was already guiding her toes into the neck of her boot.
Deli’s chest ached. She looked up to the sky as a soft breeze blew a strand of hair across her cheek, mimicking the path of the next tear to cool on her skin. The clouds looked heavier and softer than before. It wouldn’t be long until the rain was too much for them to carry.
Lachlan slid her heel into place and patted her foot affectionately as he looked up smiling. She wiped the tear away with her thumb, and it took Lachlan’s smile with it.
“What’s wrong?”
Deli was filled with warmth. She lifted the hand on his shoulder to his jaw and said, “Nothing’s wrong.”
And at that moment—while the wind rustled through the grasses and the water sang over rocks, while the clouded sun turned Lachlan’s eyes to topaz held to the light, while she felt far enough away from her real life . . . Deli actually meant it.
He grinned. The scruff moved against her skin.
“So is the kilt, like, a kink thing, or—”
Deli’s eyes went wide in self-horror as she realized she’d escalated from ogling to groping. Lachlan laughed at her expression and covered her hand with his own, keeping it in place against him, and her teenage dread changed to a sort of adult oh-well-ness. Then Deli laughed, too.
It felt so good, like it had been locked away. Deli kept laughing until her head was thrown back in snorting laughter. Her whole body shook and her eyes brimmed with the absurdity of the day, the month, the impossibility of the fantasy scene she was living.
Lachlan’s other hand spread wide against her back as he stood and buried his face into her shoulder, and the part of her that thought about everything was tackled by the part of her desperate to feel.
She ran her hands through his hair and held him in the sensitive hollow of her collarbone, and they stayed there a little longer with their bodies pressed together, alive with joy.
When they finally managed to catch their breath, Deli leaned back just enough to shrug. She nodded toward the bag of snacks that lay forgotten in the dirt.
“I could really use, like, an entire wheel of cheese right now. Think she packed any?”
Lachlan wiped away a final cry-laughter tear and nodded. “I’d stake my life on it.”