Page 61 of The Troublemaker

“Well, you haven’t really given me a chance to boost your confidence.”

“Just... Forget about it. Nothing is settled. I was just trying to... I just wanted you to know. I didn’t want you to be blindsided by anything if at the end of the week the decision is that...we’re going to end up living in Virginia.”

We. He didn’t like that, either. Because she meant her and Byron.

And usually when she saidweshe meant the two of them.

Yeah. Aren’t you some kind of bastard. Because you intend to marry somebody else, and then who do you thinkwewill be to you? You just want to keep her.

It was true. He wanted to keep Charity all to himself. He wanted her to stay in that little house on the property adjacent to his; his sweet, innocent angel. His woodland fairy. For forever. That was reasonable, right? He didn’t want anything to disrupt it. He didn’t want anything to change it. He had resented her years away at veterinary school. He had resented the appearance of Byron in her life and had been thankful that the guy had never been local.

That he had only come out to visit a couple of times, and that in general he didn’t impact on Lachlan’s daily life. He was all right with Charity having an attachment as long as it didn’t hinder the one that he had with her.

So there. There was that.

“Fine. What are your plans with him this week?” he asked, knowing he sounded sullen. Not caring.

“I don’t know. I don’t have... I don’t have firm plans.”

“You want to show him Oregon? Let’s go on a trail ride.”

“Oh. That might be fun.”

“We can all go. Fia can come.”

He wasn’t quite sure what he was doing. Except... Maybe if she could find a way to make all this fit together, it wouldn’t feel quite so...enraging. Because that was what it was. Enraging. He felt like she was doing things without his permission.

She needs your permission?

No. Not like that. But they were...halves of a whole. And they had been for a very long time. The idea that she was just going to take herself away from him was such a... It was something he couldn’t even fathom. So yeah. He wanted to see what it would look like. This future where they had partners and tried to maintain everything that they were. He wanted a sneak peek of that. He wanted to control it. Well. He had never said that he wasn’t invested in controlling his life.

He knew what it was like to be out of control. He had spent his entire childhood that way.

Charity was stability. And he didn’t think he had ever fully realized that until now. She represented something safe and sane. Her house had become a touchstone for good feelings. Her father had been an adult he could trust. And she had always been there for him. He couldn’t lose Albert and then have her leave. It was absolutely unfathomable. It was like wave after wave of emotional indignity. And he didn’t handle regular emotions all that well, so the intensity of these was... Well, he was damn well over it.

“That sounds nice,” she said.

“Super nice. What if we do it tomorrow?”

“Isn’t it supposed to rain tomorrow?”

“Not till the late afternoon. We can go in the morning. It should be pretty sunny up until the clouds roll in around two.”

He was making a lot of proclamations based on a brief scroll through his phone’s weather app. But he knew the area well enough to say that it sounded about right.

“Yeah. Well, I’ll talk to him about it.”

“Do you have appointments that you need to take into consideration?”

“I’m actually pretty free tomorrow. I left the week fairly sparse because Byron was going to be here, so I didn’t make any new appointments after talking to him about his exact dates.”

“Perfect. So unless there are some unforeseen piglet emergencies...”

“In which case the piglets will have to take priority,” she said seriously.

“Obviously.” He said that with equal seriousness.

“Okay. Well, I guess... Let’s do that.”

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