The Long Road Home (These Valley Days, #1)

by Bethany-Kris

  Now or never.

  Gracen thought it would only be fair to share the information she knew about him. Everything but how it connected him to her, anyway.

  “My friend,” she said, gesturing back at the salon, “Delaney ... she knows your sister. Her cousin is a friend. Delaney used to attend the church, too. Back before she grew up.”

  Malachi tipped his chin slightly higher. “And had a choice, I suspect.”

  She decided to throw his earlier words back at him, then. “You said it. Not me.”

  “Somehow, I still ended up with an invitation for my sister’s engagement dinner tomorrow night being dropped off at my friend’s place,” Malachi said, but nothing about his tone suggested he was happy about it. “A couple of days ago. Somebody just shoved it under the door. I’m not sure what I should do with it, you know?”

  The obvious missing piece between them, the fact that her ex was currently set to marry Malachi’s sister, hung in front of Gracen’s face but remained invisible to the man massaging his forehead with fingers that she’d been thinking about for days. In all sorts of ungodly ways. She’d much rather focus on the temptation in front of her than the issue of her unresolved feelings that a man who wasn’t interested in a relationship with her couldn’t fix.

  That mess was all hers.

  At some point, she would deal with it.

  Wouldn’t she have to?

  “So, did you have any plans later?” Malachi asked. To her, it felt like a million-dollar question. “Because I’m gonna need to have food to shove into my mouth if you’re asking questions about my family, now.”

  Well ...

  Did that mean he was willing to talk?

  She opted to see it that way.

  “I could do something for dinner,” Gracen said, “if you’re buying.”

  Malachi nodded with a gesture to her car. “I guess we’re taking that thing, then, huh?”

  “Hey, don’t make fun of my Honda. It’s a good car.”

  And it could get up to a hundred on the highway like nothing. Not to mention, the fact it wasn’t hard on gas. With fuel tipping a dollar and a quarter a liter, she wouldn’t complain about a vehicle that was the brunt of too many jokes when it came to guys. Besides, she’d heard it all before. None of it was new.

  “I’m not riding shotgun,” was all he told her.

  “It’s just a Civic. I bet you loved them in every Fast and the Furious—” Gracen didn’t bother to finish her half-hearted rant as she dug for the jingling car keys until she found them at the very bottom of her bag. Typical. There wasn’t a bag in the world that didn’t eat her keys when she needed them the most. Tossing them over to Malachi who caught the ring of trinkets with car and house keys attached, she replied, “I never said you couldn’t drive.”

  Chapter 11

  Thirty or so kilometers of the Trans-Canada Highway separated The Valley and the nearby, small city known as Grand Falls because of the large power dam built over the waterfall in the very middle of the town. Other than the radio pumping out the latest hits, the car ride remained mostly quiet between Gracen and Malachi.

  She didn’t know where to start.

  Never mind what they were doing.

  It all still felt a little new. Strange waters meant Gracen liked to take things slow, even a simple car drive if it allowed her to study the man in the driver’s seat. Maybe he didn’t know it, but even quiet, Malachi was more interesting to watch than the many kilometers of highway and the songs on the radio.

  He didn’t seem to mind her staring.

  If he noticed.

  Affectionally known as the falls to most, to call the tiny bilingual community a good drive away from the valley a city was laughable when one looked at the small five-kilometer circle that enclosed its residents inside town limits. It was the population’s slow growth—and subsequent development—of Grand Falls over the past decade or so that gained the hub its city status to all the rural communities that surrounded the outside of it. Not that there was much to see. Homes upon homes tightly packed, and a zip line across the falls for the few daring tourists the town saw drive through in the summer.

  Nothing made the town feel city-like. No cement buildings and busy traffic—unless it was dinner or closing time. Only a handful of fast-food joints lined the two main streets, Broadway, and Madawaska. The standard grocery stores, larger than the ones in the rural communities, had better, more cost-effective options if someone cared to make the drive.

  It was twenty-five or more minutes from Gracen’s valley town, so she didn’t make the trip often but maybe once or twice a month. If her car didn’t need maintenance, then she didn’t have any other reason to travel back and forth to the falls except if she just wanted to go.

  The drive was nice.

  “We’re not really dressed to go in and eat somewhere, huh?” Malachi asked after he’d taken the last exit off the highway into the falls.

  Gracen peeked over at him, after just having finished her iced coffee and placed it into the cup holder until she had a trashcan nearby, and replied, “Speak for yourself, Mr. Leather Jacket.”

  Malachi grinned but kept his eyes on the road. “That’s all you’ve got? Fine, I’ll play.”

  “Oh?”

  “I was trying to be nice, but I didn’t want to point out how you basically painted your jeans on this morning, and maybe that isn’t Chateaux appropriate,” he offered, still as smug as ever while he navigated the vehicle down Madawaska drive. “And no offense, because I can pack away a Big Mac like nobody’s business, but I don’t like the way the inside of fast-food joints look, if you know what I mean. Greasy.”

  He made a good argument, though.

  Gracen’s acid-wash, ripped jeans, and tummy-baring balloon-sleeved crop top wasn’t the appropriate attire for the only fancy restaurant in the falls that Malachi could seem to come up with in the spur of the moment. The thing was—well, the town had probably grown since the last time he’d been in the area.

  “Did you forget about the Chinese buffet?” she asked, pointing at the sign of the place she mentioned that’s name had never changed in more years that she could remember. The business, with food that was not Chinese and a typically empty parking lot, sat just across the street from where Malachi had needed to stop at a red light.

  Not that she would eat there.

  Gracen heard enough stories.

  Better yet, warnings.

  He acted like he couldn’t see a thing. “The golden arches, then? We can take the drive-thru—”

  “Oh!” Gracen interrupted. “Yeah, and then eat at the falls.”

  “You’re reading my mind, woman.”

  Malachi had already turned on the blinker to switch lanes before the light turned green again. The parking lot of a nearby grocery store also acted as way for vehicles at the light to enter into the mall’s lot and the McDonald’s on the corner. Just beyond the fast-food joint and the Ford dealership on the edge of town sat the hotel on the hill overlooking the dam and falls down below.

  “I could eat something greasy,” Gracen agreed.

  “I’m paying,” Malachi said.

  No arguments there.

  He shot her another winning grin that she answered with her own.

  “By all means,” she told him, “take me to dinner.”

  Malachi scoffed playfully. “It’s fast-food in a car—don’t get me feeling guilty.”

  “About what?”

  “If I start feeling like you’re making this into a date, then I might have to make it up to you with a proper one,” he muttered while he navigated the parking lot until he was around the other side and pulling along the driving corral for the drive-thru’s speakers.

  Who said anything about a date?

  “Is it?” she asked him then.

  Malachi eyed her from the side as he rolled his window down in just enough time to hear the girl working the drive-thru ask, “Hi there. Can I take your order?”

  Gracen shru
gged away Malachi’s questioning stare lingering across the car. They could hammer out the unimportant details about what this night was later.

  Food came first.

  *

  “Are you going to the engagement thing tomorrow night?” Gracen asked.

  At the prime moment, too.

  Malachi’s mouth, full of cheeseburger, didn’t have to come up with a response or distraction to the question right away. Gracen did that on purpose. The last time she asked about his sister and family, while they’d been looking for a place to park in the viewing lot facing the dam and falls, he changed the subject faster than she could blink.

  The topic was a sore subject, apparently.

  Gracen still had questions.

  “Delaney says she’s probably still going to go—out of respect, but she isn’t gonna stay long,” Gracen added fast because Delaney sure had needed to make sure the detail was clear to her friend when she explained it. “She says your sister is really sweet, plus her cousin is the maid of honor, or something. You said you got an invitation earlier, so I was curious. That’s all.”

  “Small world,” her companion muttered around his bite.

  Gracen made a face. “Chew and swallow first.”

  He did, but only to immediately tell her, “You know, I’d say you sound like my mother when you talk like that—just to shut you up—but if I’m honest, I can’t even remember what my mother sounds like. It’s been a long time. If I didn’t have social media and a couple of pictures saved to my phone, I wouldn’t even know what she looked like.”

  Damn.

  Gracen didn’t know how to respond to that except for a quiet, “Same, but I guess not for the same reasons, huh?”

  He quirked a brow high at that question. “You knew yours loved you. I know mine don’t.”

  “Maybe I wasn’t trying to see it that way.”

  Malachi shrugged where he’d sunk into the driver’s seat to eat his food. “I learned really fast that I couldn’t lie my way through my situation. My family shunned me as a teenager, did nothing to defend me when I needed it, and their influence could have saved me from juvenile lockup, and in a way, now that I’ve had a few years behind me to think about it, that was the best thing my mother—specifically—ever did for me. I couldn’t give a fuck about Frankie Beau. That was the problem, you know?”

  “What, he’s your stepdad, right?”

  “That was the problem,” Malachi repeated, nodding. “I couldn’t see him like that; wouldn’t, so it made me a target in the house, and that gave me every excuse to get out. It’s not hard to find trouble when you’re always trying to keep from going home. I’m not mad that I got away from my fucked up family and their church, okay? I’m mad that they pretend like they didn’t do it to me.”

  And the way they did it, she suspected.

  Even if he didn’t want to outright say it.

  She focused on picking her favorite fries—and the only ones she would eat in the familiar red sleeve—out, the longest and well salted, and popped them into her mouth. Malachi finished chewing what remained of his burger, but his faraway gaze zoned in on the falls instead of the woman in the seat next to his.

  She hadn’t meant to do that.

  Make him sad.

  “I came home when I heard my sister was getting married because this feels like the first chance I’ve had to get something back that was taken from me,” Malachi said, crumpling the burger wrapper and tossing it into the bag on the middle console. “Nobody gave me a choice back when I was a kid—my whole life was taken away overnight. A friend I talked to before making the trip told me I didn’t need to come all the way back here for answers. The fact no one has ever contacted me since I left my family should tell me everything I need to know.”

  Gracen frowned, muttering, “Some friend.”

  “He didn’t mean for it to be cold.”

  “Well, it sounds that way. Mean.”

  Malachi sighed. “He might have also been a little pissed because I couldn’t work an upcoming job for his company. He’d already got the go-ahead on his bid for the build, I’d signed on for the contract—”

  “You’re in construction?” Gracen asked, clamping onto the newest detail of his life that he hadn’t shared with her up until that moment.

  “I’ve done different things,” he replied, moving right along like it wasn’t important. “I don’t have or need a lot, so work can be a secondary thing every once in a while, if that’s what I want to do.”

  Huh.

  “I’m tied to my job six days a week,” Gracen said.

  He smirked her way. “Yeah, but I bet you make good money, too.”

  “I do okay.”

  The salon overall did exceptionally well.

  It took the whole team.

  Malachi slowly reverted to his somber mood as he focused on the water rushing past the opened doors of the dam to crash over the falls. “I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow.”

  It took him a long time to answer her initial question, and it didn’t leave her with any respectable answers, but Gracen understood why he came to his current conclusion.

  “Do you think anything would happen if you showed up?” she asked.

  “Oh, nothing bad.” Malachi laughed and rubbed at the pinch forming between his eyes. “My mother and stepfather aren’t the type to make a scene in public.”

  “I’m more concerned about what these people might do in private.”

  Malachi’s hand dropped to his lap, and he let out a slow breath while his gaze remained locked out the front windshield. “Been there, done that, too.”

  She couldn’t bring herself to press him on that.

  Gracen’s heart already ached enough.

  “Hey,” she told him, reaching over the fast-food bag to give Malachi a playful shove. It earned her tired smile.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Can I make a safe guess that talking about all of this isn’t what you want to do with me tonight?”

  The question raised his eyebrows high. “I mean, let me know if you’ve got better things on your mind.”

  Of course, she did.

  Fun things, too.

  “My evening is open,” Malachi added.

  As if it wasn’t already clear.

  *

  “Gracen, is that you?”

  The question came with the creak of the downstairs bathroom door.

  Crap.

  “Go,” Gracen ordered Malachi with a shove to the back of his leather jacket. He gave her a look over his shoulder while he climbed the old staircase to the second floor and a chuckle when her gaze narrowed on him with a warning in response. Her silent demand for him to be quiet. Just so she could call back to Delaney, “Yeah, it’s me. Finish your shower, I’ll catch you up on stuff later, okay?”

  At least, she assumed Delaney was planning on a shower based on the running water echoing down the rear hallway. Her friend liked to run the shower for a few minutes, swearing it was the only way to get it as hot as she liked it.

  Who was Gracen to argue?

  She preferred baths.

  Gracen held her breath while she leaned over the railing to listen for her friend’s reply, hoping she wouldn’t exit the bathroom.

  “Does that stuff you speak of have anything to do with a certain guy, or not?” Delaney questioned.

  Suppressing her smile and refusing to meet the gaze of the man who was currently shrugging off his leather jacket at the top of the stairs, Gracen said, “Ah, yeah. We will definitely be talking about Malachi later.”

  The girls did have rules. Especially about their home and bringing other people—male, mostly—around.

  For good reason, too.

  She’d fill Delaney in on her temporary houseguest later. After the fun was finished and her best friend couldn’t cockblock Gracen and Malachi with a game of Twenty Questions. Although, it wouldn’t take Delaney long to figure it out once she exited the bathroom and noticed the scuffed, blac
k combat boots sitting next to Gracen’s runners just beyond the front foyer.

  “All I need to know,” Delaney called out before the bathroom door slammed shut.

  “We good?” Malachi asked at the top of the stairs, his arched brow and easy smile enough to make Gracen want to crawl up to meet him.

  He’d even pulled off his shirt, too.

  Jesus.

  “We are perfect,” she returned, already climbing the steps.

  If she knew Delaney like Gracen thought she did, her friend would be tied up in the bathroom for at least an hour. Or more. With music—that Gracen could already hear muffled through the walls—blasting, Delaney would go through her entire evening routine like clockwork.

  They were safe.

  Well, from interruption, anyhow.

  Malachi managed to find Gracen’s bedroom without her direction, but to be fair, it was the only one upstairs. He turned the corner to enter the space first, so she didn’t see him reach for her until both his hands reached out through the doorway to grab her arms. He muffled her surprised giggles with a messy kiss that left her breathless and only a little lightheaded. She barely noticed that he’d shut the door with a gentle nudge of his foot against the edge.

  Gracen had better things on her mind.

  Other distractions to enjoy.

  Like Malachi.

  And his wandering hands.

  He worked apart her jeans while keeping her back pinned to the door, his fleeting, quick kisses dotting over her trembling jaw and down her throat. Anticipation raced through Gracen’s bloodstream with every kiss he added to the torturous path down her body.

  Malachi dropped to his knees.

  Just to tug her jeans down.

  His hands slid up over her hips while he surveyed the black cotton panties at his eye-level. she stepped out of her jeans with a bit of his help.

  “Love a thong,” he praised as he grabbed two handfuls of her ass and squeezed tight. “All I need to do is slip it aside—”

  “At least let me lay down on the bed first.”

  She would need the stability.