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)
Still hand in hand.
“Like riding a bike,” she muttered to herself.
Once a person learned, they never forgot how to do it. No matter how much time passed. Skating proved no different.
Lucas chuckled. “Yeah, pretty much.”
“Do you skate a lot?”
“Used to. I did hockey all through school, and played for a charity team once a year up until I turned thirty and didn’t really have time anymore,” he said.
He shrugged at her questioning stare, adding, “Life gets in the way of a lot of things I used to do just because I liked to, you know what I mean?”
She did.
Adulting sucked sometimes.
A few feet from center ice, Delaney dropped Lucas’ hand to kick away from him with enough room to widen her skates as she spun to glide backwards.
“Aha,” Lucas exclaimed, full of praise and clapping.
Delaney held up one finger, quieting him, before her backwards skate turned into a triple twirl on the spot. She could have tried for more spins before coming to a full stop, but lack of practice meant she forgot the most important rule about spinning.
Keep your eyes on one spot.
She came out of the spins with a bit of a dizzy wobble, and a breathless laugh that had her bent over at the middle. Not an intentional bow, but it worked to end her show.
She would not do that again.
Wouldn’t dare.
The last thing she wanted to do was fall flat on her face on the ice, and give another kind of show should her dress ride up too high on her ass.
Delaney’s toothy smile matched Lucas’ as he skated a wide circle backward around her. She faced the large scoreboard on the far wall of the arena hanging beneath a massive Canadian flag stretching from one side of the rink to the other.
“See, you still got it,” he told her.
“I really shouldn’t do that after drinking wine,” she replied.
Lucas only chuckled. “You barely even blinked.”
She eyed him from the side, shaking her head a little.
Maybe it was the smell of the rink and the chill of the ice that did it, or it could have been the gorgeous man who never took his gaze off of her, but her willingness to share came back in the form of a tightness in her chest. The words practically rushed right out the second she opened her lips.
“My grandmother put me into figure skating when I started kindergarten,” Delaney said, her words never once breaking Lucas’ clean circle he continued to make around her. “I guess, to teach me how to skate, mostly, but I took right to it.”
“What did you say earlier—thirteen you stopped?”
Delaney exhaled a breath she could see in front of her face. It ached coming out of her lungs. “Lucky me, I was an early bloomer.”
The pucker of his brow said he didn’t understand. Funny … she hadn’t either, back then.
“My parents pulled me out of it, refused to pay fees or replace my equipment and things. I always needed new costumes …” Delaney trailed off, knowing none of those things really made sense to clear up the reason why she had quit as a young teen. “It wasn’t really about the money. My father was more concerned with how short my costumes were and how people could see the shape of my body when I skated.”
Lucas shredded ice as he instantly came to a stop. “What?”
She shrugged one shoulder, but her attempt to laugh off the seriousness in her delivery was nothing less than weak. “Oh, yeah. I listened to him rant for weeks every time we sat down at the dinner table.” Not just then. All the time, really. “The second skating got brought up somehow, he started. My mother—she sat there and let him do it. It was his house, anyway, or so she always said whenever one of us had something to say about the way he did things. She didn’t care. I tried to argue for a while. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I didn’t skate and sin.”
“What does sin have anything to do with it?”
“Well, when I kept coming up with what I thought were smart arguments to keep skating, being a thirteen-year-old starting to grow into her own brain that didn’t automatically believe everything they told me, he just took me to church. Instead of him shouting at me about how I was going to become a whore because of figure skating, the pastor spent four hours counseling me about my sinful and wanton behavior, and how it seduces boys and men when I pranced around in short, shiny skirts and tights.”
Lucas blinked, standing strong like a pillar, close to the middle of the ice.
Delaney suddenly wished she hadn’t allowed herself to go to that place—that horrible place where God and her faith had been twisted and manipulated by the people around her for their selfish desires and needs. Very rarely had they considered her. Anything about her, really.