Chapter 59 Deli
Deli
Deli, who had spent the majority of her twenty-nine years loyal to a boy named Trey Evans—who was going to love her back one day—hadn’t kissed many boys.
At Bree Jackson’s thirteenth birthday party, tucked away in a corner out of sight of the parents monitoring the mini golfing preteens, Carlos Ramirez kissed Deli for the first time in her life.
It was stiff and sloppy and they were going at different paces, but Carlos had been staring at her in social studies for months with his dark velvet eyes and fast-talking mouth, and she’d floated home on the memory of him saying, Wow, that was awesome.
The handful of others that came after were sometimes better, a few times worse, but for the most part, the same.
On a bar top in a pub in Scotland, Deli MacDonald learned that anyone could mash their faces together in dark corners, but a real kiss was the closest thing she’d ever known to magic.
Lachlan didn’t just kiss her, he kissed her like a secret whispered, then a truth declared.
He kissed her like a love song strummed, then an orchestra’s crescendo.
Rain thrashed against the windows, and just as Lachlan’s hand skimmed from her thigh to the hem of the shirt he’d probably worn a thousand times—thunder clapped, and they were plunged into darkness.
Lachlan slowed his lips against hers. His thumb traced her cheekbone.
“Stay here.” He kissed her forehead and nearly her mouth, then pulled himself away at the last moment and jumped down from the bar top to disappear into the back.
In the dark, the spell was broken, and her thoughts—which she’d hoped she had successfully banished—were coming back in full force.
Deli felt very foolish. Exposed.
A flicker in the fireplace caught. Lachlan appeared in front of her with tealights and matches, eye to eye with her as she sat on the bar.
He stepped between her knees and kissed her quickly, and Deli felt herself go stiff.
Lachlan scanned her face before he moved to the tables and lit candles until the room filled with soft, warm light.
“Hey.” He spoke quietly as he found his way back to her, not intimately close, but close enough. “You alright?”
She forced her lips into a smile, but her jaw felt wired shut. Lachlan touched her knee tentatively, a gesture of comfort, and even then she flinched. He froze.
Deli wrapped her arms around her body.
“Lachlan, I . . . Nobody’s ever wanted .
. . I mean—” She took a big breath to gather her strength for a burst of honesty—a window to her shame.
“I don’t need you to say anything; I’m not fishing for compliments here, it’s just this is the last stop before you’re disappointed. And I don’t want to go there.”
As he listened, his face shifted from concerned to something darker—maybe angrier, maybe hungrier. She needed to rip the bandage off.
“If this goes farther, than, you know”—she gestured between them—“this . . . you’re not going to like what you see, okay?”
Lachlan held her gaze for a second, then another, and she felt her chin jut out like a child issuing a challenge, her arms still tight around her chest. He dropped his hands to his hips and his head toward the ground, obscuring his face.
She could see his shoulders, taut with tension, rising and falling with his breath.
The silence was miserable. She wanted to melt into the floor to escape.
“I know what you look like, Deli.” His voice was new—gravel and firewood and goosebumps. It was unfamiliar and terrifying. It left her aching to touch him. “And I assure you, I like what I see.”
She tried to accept what he was saying. She really tried.
“You can’t know that, Lachlan. And I can’t believe you.”
“If you can’t believe me . . .” Lachlan stepped closer. “Will you let me prove it?”
He reached toward her face and caught her chin gently in his hand, pausing to read her expression.
“Will you let me show you?”
It took all of Deli’s courage to stop herself from stopping him—to let herself have something that she had not earned. She nodded once.
He placed a hand on her knee, this time with purpose, and pried it sideways, then stepped in and pushed her other leg open with his hip, eliminating the space between them.
Lachlan ran his hand up her thigh and jumped to her lower back, pressing her toward his body, and she felt herself arch toward him before she could think. She sucked in a surprised breath.
Lachlan’s lips dusted her jaw. His whisper was smoke against her ear.
“I do want you, Delilah.”
Her name on his tongue—the way he made it sound like hers—would have been enough.
“From the moment I saw you get off that train, and every moment afterward.” He pulled her closer to him, and her thighs enclosed his hips as his breath coaxed chills from her skin. “Will you let me prove to you how much I want you? How much I have always, always wanted you?”
Lachlan met her eyes, and her sea of fear felt smaller under the heat of the thing that passed between them. He ran a hand through the hair at the base of her skull and tilted her head to position her lips. She closed her eyes as his nose brushed hers, and he whispered.
“Let me?”