Page 31 of The Troublemaker

“I guess not,” she said. “If it doesn’t believe in its food, why should I?”

“Exactly. I don’t want steak with imposter syndrome.”

“Is there flourless chocolate torte on the menu?”

“Of course there is. I checked.”

She felt a little bit warm, because that must mean that he remembered. That it was significant.

“I wanted to get one in honor of Dad,” she said.

“Your dad really loved chocolate.”

“Yes. He was a strange man. I know that. But I loved him all the same. I couldn’t have loved him any more.”

“If he was strange, then more people should be strange like him, Charity. Bottom line. He was a good man. He loved you more than anything.”

She knew that; that was the really brilliant thing. She knew that her dad loved her so very much, and she also knew that a whole lot of people didn’t have that level of assurance from their parents, or their parents really didn’t love them enough at all. Like Lachlan’s.

“I am going to get wine tonight. That’s acceptable, right?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I would think that if you took a woman out to a nice restaurant that she would want a glass of wine.”

“Not you, though?”

“I just never developed a taste for it.”

“Fair.”

“Anyway, Byron doesn’t approve of alcohol.”

“He doesn’t approve of it?” She could hear the frown in his voice.

“No. He’s coming next week. I thought that you might want to know that.”

“Right. He... Bunking with you?”

“Oh no,” she said.

“No?”

“No. He doesn’t think it’s appropriate.”

“He doesn’t... I... I don’t really know what to say to that, Charity. For the life of me I can’t figure out why it would be inappropriate for a man to stay with the woman that he’s engaged to.”

“Oh, he doesn’t believe in that. That kind of thing. No cohabitation or anything before you’re married.”

“Oranything?”

Suddenly, she felt heat creep into the edges of her cheeks, a wholly unexpected and unfamiliar experience.

He made her realize it might seem strange to most people. But she’d known Byron for so long, and understood his background and convictions. She respected them. It didn’t seem weird because she knew him, and now Lachlan was gawking at her like she’d told him the sky was green and the ground was made of taffy.

She didn’t want to talk about this with him. She didn’t want him to know. Suddenly, she felt small and embarrassed. Like there was a canyon between them filled with knowledge that she simply didn’t possess.

It had never bothered her. Not before. But right now it made her feel silly. Lachlan was an expert in hedonism. Charity was anything but. It was just simply something they didn’t discuss. It worked for them. But she had never... She had never talked to him about what she had or hadn’t done with another person. It was too private. Too intimate, she assumed. And the minute that she was married, and she actually had done something, she’d likely feel the same way.

She knew the mechanics of it all. She knew there was nothing to be embarrassed about; it was just the... The personalization of it. The applying it to her. The getting close to thinking of it at all while sitting in a truck with Lachlan McCloud. It just didn’t work for her.

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