Page 79 of The Troublemaker

And she kissed him back. Hard and with ever-expanding need.

It should be done. Shouldn’t it? After all that? She shouldn’t be able to want him again.

But she did.

She started to shake, uncontrollably, because suddenly... It was terrifying. The ferocity with which she wanted him. The desperate depth of this desire that hadn’t seemed to exist before today.

What would she do? If it took over everything? What would she do if this remade version of herself wasn’t something she could control?

She’d always had control.

She started to cry. Tears sliding down her cheeks, and she was mortified by her weakness. Except, Lachlan was the only person she would ever cry on. Ever cry with. He reversed their positions, rolling onto his back, letting her weep against his broad, bare chest. They were naked. And perhaps that was fitting. Naked as she cried, limp and spent and terrified.

“I’m an awful person,” she said. “Byron is a good man, and he never did anything to me and...”

“Charity,” he said, his voice level, his eyes never wavering from hers. “I want you to marry me.”

THISHADBEENhis purpose in coming here. Because he had realized with stunning clarity after their lips had met earlier today, that this was the right thing.

This was what he wanted. Charity was the woman that he wanted to marry. He couldn’t imagine spending the rest of his life with anyone else, partly because he couldn’t imagine rearranging his life so that she took a secondary role in it. He couldn’t imagine putting another woman in front of her. And the simple truth was he wanted her. He always had.

All it had taken was one moment to let that desire loose, to let it free, and it had been clear. Everything had been.

She was already his best friend. She made him feel soothed.

Yeah, there was...stuff about him, about his life, that he’d always tried to protect her from, but he could do that. She made him better.

She was what he wanted.

“This is why you want to marry me?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Lachlan...we...”

“Why not? It makes perfect sense. Why were we going to marry people that we liked less than we like each other?”

As soon as he said it, it all seemed so ridiculous. Because really.Really. Why the hell had either of them been thinking of that? Why had they thought for one second that they would be happier with anyone else? She was his best friend, and wasn’t that the thing? You married your best friend?

“I...”

“I’m changed. I’m reformed. You saw to that,” he said.

“You didnotgo six months without sex,” she said, trying to sound reproving.

“No. But you went thirty years without it, so I figure that balances out the scales for both of us, doesn’t it?”

“It does not work like that,” she said, her tone frosty, her eyes looking evil all of a sudden.

“Charity,” he said. “I want you. You. Not anyone else.”

“You’ve known me an awfully long time, Lachlan, and you have wanted plenty of other women in between.”

“You got engaged to someone else. You went away to college, you left me and you got engaged to another man.”

“Were you about to get down on one knee back then?”

He huffed a laugh and settled back on the bed. Charity’s bed.

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