Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 141951 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 473(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 141951 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 473(@300wpm)
“Like, quit?” Delaney asked, dumbly.
To her, it sure sounded that way.
Surely, she hadn’t heard him right.
Right?
Lucas shrugged his broad shoulders covered in black silk. He’d lost his blazer long ago to the back of the chair he sat in for the duration of the memorial. “I mean, that sounds less professional, but sure.”
“From the brewery?”
Delaney still couldn’t wrap her mind around the idea.
“Honestly,” Lucas said, glancing over at Delaney where the two sat side by side in red crushed velvet backed chairs, “I stayed in the family business because I didn’t have a lot of other options outside of the brewery to take care of myself. My shares of ownership came later, from my grandfather’s estate, and since Jacob had been left with nothing, I still couldn’t leave the place to do something I wanted to, really. My hands were tied.”
Responsibility could be like that.
Especially when it wasn’t one’s own.
“Is this because of your father?” Delaney hedged carefully.
There hadn’t been a proper time over the course of the afternoon that she felt comfortable to share with Lucas how his father had attempted to contact Linda about Delaney. With the funeral home mostly cleared out of those who had gathered to celebrate Jacob’s life, and only Delaney and Lucas remaining in the gallery with Jacob’s urn in the chair separating the two, now seemed like as good of a time as ever.
Especially when Lucas confirmed her suspicions.
“He’s not going to make things easy on me. If I go ahead and resign. He never has—but I can’t do it anymore,” he said.
“Would there be any reason your father might try to contact people connected to me? Like my boss, say?”
His stare narrowed at the news. “He didn’t.”
It wasn’t even a question.
“It’s not a big deal because Linda wouldn’t even answer his messages back, but he found me through you. I haven’t really connected those dots, I guess, but—”
“You don’t have to,” Lucas interjected, saying exactly what Delaney thought. The fact Ronald Dalton had somehow attempted to interfere in his son’s personal life, when the man clearly had no invitation to be there, was concerning. “Who’d know, huh? Maybe he was trying to prove something about the time I took away. He hasn’t brought you up to me.”
Delaney nodded. “Okay.”
“But we also haven’t had a face-to-face meeting in … a while.”
Ah.
That possibly changed things.
“The good news,” Delaney said, “is that there isn’t much to find. I’m not exactly infamous or prolific, so …”
Lucas chuckled. “Well, you don’t have to be either of those things to mean something to me. Let’s hope that’s not his interest.”
She almost asked why.
He continued on before she could, saying, “I’m worried that if I do what he did, stay under his thumb doing everything he demands to make life bearable, that history will just repeat itself. I don’t want to wake up one day like he must have done and realize that I turned into him.”
“I don’t know your father, but—”
“No buts,” he interjected, his jaw growing taut, and his gaze hardening. “You don’t know him. Keep it to that.”
Delaney reached over the urn with the intricate carvings along the top cover to place her hand on Lucas’ forearm once he’d placed the photograph of Jacob next to the urn between them. “I don’t know exactly what you’re worried about—how you think you’ll be anything like him—but I’m proud to know you, Lucas. I think a lot of people here today would say the same thing.”
In fact, people had.
“And he can’t change that,” Delaney finished.
The only thing that should matter.
Lucas sighed heavily, and relaxed back into the chair while he eyed the makeshift altar to Jacob Dalton at the middle-front of the room. “You and my therapist are the only two people I’ve told that I’m considering leaving Dalton Brewery.”
No wonder.
She could only imagine what would follow a choice like that for him. Would another few articles get published in the newspaper? Would he be the villain? The employees of his family’s company, especially those that had shown up to support him today for his brother, would undoubtedly be affected in one way or another, too.
He’d make a ripple.
Where would the waves end?
Delaney chewed on her lower lip. “And, what’d the therapist have to say?”
He chuckled. “He pointed out I’ve made more than a few hasty, and possibly reckless, decisions in the last handful of weeks that all could be tied back to my, as he put it, fragile emotional state,” he said, deadpanning every word except the one he clearly disliked. “Resigning could be another one of those, and he told me to give it a bit of time.”
She tried not to grin, failing. “Big man, you don’t want the world to know you cry?”
His dark stare rolled to her when his head fell to the side. “If only, right?”