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)
Lucas flinched. “That sounds terrible.”
“Does it? I got used to it after a while. For a bit, people from the church used to yell at me in the grocery store, too. Those were fun days.”
He couldn’t wrap his mind around that.
“What, why?”
“One of the biggest rules for the women of the congregation is to keep their hair uncut and natural,” Delaney said, shrugging one shoulder as she opened the pot to stir it once more. “I was probably a walking, talking fuck you to every single one of them. Not only did I leave the church, I was actively practicing outside of the limits of their faith. If anything, it just gave them a reason to be more horrible than they already were after I left.”
His fingers froze at the tips of her wavy hair.
He stared down at the length.
One he considered long, really.
“How long was your hair?”
“At one point, to the floor,” she said. “In grade nine, I could actually step on it. I hated it. It gave me migraines, we weren’t allowed to wear it down. No woman can unless it’s to bed or they’re alone with their husband. It’s supposed to be a woman’s crown, they say. So, why can’t she show it off? Why is she even hiding it?”
Lucas didn’t have those answered, but he didn’t think she expected him to come up with one, either. The chance was, the fact that Delaney had started to ask questions like that at all was a big part of the reason she hadn’t remained in the church with her family.
“After a few years, it got to the point where they didn’t even look at me if they saw me on the street or something,” Delaney muttered.
He heard the hurt there, too.
It even made him ache.
Lucas was intimately familiar with how hard it could be to desperately want and need the love and affection from people who should, above all others in the world, provide it. Only to find they just couldn’t do it.
“Gracen and I owned a second salon—we sold the first,” she explained, peeking back at him with a sad smile. “And bought the next one. A big courthouse we converted into a huge salon that we put everything into for years. We lived right across the river. That was our life every day. The salon. Each other.”
Delaney sighed, adding, “Until it wasn’t.”
She hated how saying that sounded so cliché, but it was true, too.
“What happened?” he asked, sensing she left something unsaid.
“My older cousin, and my brother, Levi, set fire to the salon after Gracen and I helped my cousin—Bexley, you met her—leave the church once she graduated high school, and they couldn’t legally stop her. They were also charged in connection with another fire that happened around the same time. A pizza place next door to our apartment but according to what I heard sitting in the trial, that was unrelated to me or Gracen. Mostly.”
His hands clamped tight around her tense shoulders. “Jesus, Delaney.”
“Yeah, so the Montgomery family isn’t the only bunch around here that likes to burn things down if you step out of line, I guess. Although, nothing’s ever burnt in my lifetime that wasn’t by the hand of my own family, that I know of, so—let that tell you what you want it to. Not sure if Malachi told you that part.”
“No, he did not.”
“Huh. Funny, it’s the first thing I think about every morning. As soon as I open my eyes, it’s like I’m staring across the river watching the black smoke pumping out of the back of what was supposed to be my whole life,” she muttered heavily. “I think about it too much, maybe. It was suggested I leave town during the trial—they held that in Woodstock—just in case.”
“I’m sorry, that must have been rough.”
“No, it was easy to run,” she admitted, shrugging. “I tried really hard to be a person outside of that church and my family, my own person … and in one day they turned me into someone everyone in my hometown recognizes and knows because of what they did to me.”
She shook her head, angrier when she tacked on, “I can hear it, you know? Oh, there’s Delaney Reed. They say her family burnt down her salon because she went against their church. I can’t stand it.”
“Delaney.”
He tried her name, an octave lower than his usual tone, as a way to coax her away from the soup she continued to methodically check and stir after turning it down to a medium simmer. When that didn’t work, Lucas opted to try something different.
Braiding her hair.
If it worked once to calm her nerves, and she liked it, then he could use playing with her hair to his benefit. Besides, whatever sugary-sweet spray she’d dusted it in that morning from an aerosol can—proclaiming it to be dry shampoo when he squinted at the powder she had to brush out—had made his hands smell like her, and he couldn’t get it out of his head.