Page 49 of The Troublemaker

LACHLANFELTPLENTYbad the next day, and he decided that he needed to lead an expedition to find out how Charity was. Because he had made kind of a hash of that whole thing last night. He didn’t know why he felt the need to say what he had about Byron.

Except...it was true.

If you were madly in love with somebody, wouldn’t you want to pin down a wedding date? Wouldn’t you want to wear their ring?

Not that he knew definitively about things like that, but it just seemed like what had happened with his brothers. None of them had wasted any time getting married when they had found their women.

Hell, Brody had gotten married so fast he practically set a land speed record, even though Lachlan knew that was partly because Elizabeth didn’t like the idea of shacking up because she had a child. And Brody most definitely wanted to be shacking up.

So yeah. He questioned it. It was reasonable enough.

But he probably shouldn’t have, given she hadn’t felt well, and he had been pushing at a bad time. But he had felt like there was something else going on with her, and he wanted to figure out what it was. It had kept him from enjoying the rest of the evening all that much.

Fia was lovely. Funny and kind of mean, which he personally liked. She was also very pretty. It was easy to imagine what kind of life he could have with her. Maybe they would even live at Sullivan’s Point, in the farmhouse. Because she probably needed more help over there than his family needed at McCloud’s. But he would of course continue to work both places.

He could see how it would go. How it would even give him a chance to do more with Four Corners, and he liked that.

So yeah. He could see all that working pretty damn well. It made logical sense. But until he patched things up with Charity, he didn’t think he would be able to evaluate that very well.

So he came to her place with a peace offering. In the dusky morning hours. Cinnamon rolls. He had pilfered them out of the grocery store early—one of the things the Sullivans sold over at John’s until they got their own place up and running—and he figured that he could probably get at least a little bit of a smile out of her by bringing pastries.

He parked the truck in front of her place and walked up to the door. He knocked.

She didn’t appear.

That was weird. Because Charity was an early riser. His heart started to pump a little faster. Because normally, she would be up and about by now.

He knocked again.

She didn’t come to the door.

She could be in the shower, granted. But...

He knew that she had a spare key, and he knew where it was, so he decided to lift up the fake rock in the front garden and make use of it. If the shower was on, then he could leave, but he just needed to know that she was okay. She hadn’t felt well. What if it was something terrible like appendicitis, and she had left and gone home by herself, got really sick and...

He jammed the key into the lock and opened the door up wide. “Charity?”

He didn’t hear her or the water.

He charged back toward her bedroom just as the door jerked open.

And there she was, standing there wearing nothing but a white T-shirt that just barely grazed the tops of her thighs. In fact, it was so short that he could see the flowered panties that she had on underneath. Just barely.

He looked up, and her wide eyes met his.

“Sorry,” he said. He looked down again, just for a moment, and could see the dusky outline of her nipples through the thin fabric of the shirt.

“Dammit. I brought...cinnamon rolls.” He turned around and walked toward the kitchen. And suddenly, in a flurry of movement she scampered back, slamming the door shut.

“What are you doing?” she shouted through the door.

“You weren’t answering the door, and I got worried. So I decided to see if you were...okay? Because you didn’t feel well last night.”

“I was sad! Not sick.”

“You said that you were sick.”

“Well. It felt like sick. But I was just sad. So I cried about it and I went to sleep, that’s all.”

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