Page 4 of The Troublemaker

He winced and shifted when she pushed her needle through his skin again.

“I can’t guarantee you that you’re not going to have a scar,” she said, her tone filled with warning.

“Just one to add to my collection of many.”

“Yes. You’re very tough.”

“Oh, hell, sweetheart, I know that.”

“Don’tsweetheartme.” He called every woman sweetheart. And she didn’t like being lumped together with all that. She likedtheirthings. Baseball and jokes about séances andDoc. “How is everything going at the facility?”

She had a hands-on role in the veterinary care of the animals at the new therapy center on McCloud’s Landing. But everything had taken a backseat when her dad had declined, then passed. She was working her way back up to it all, but it was slow.

“It’s going well. Of course, I am tripping over all the happy couples. Tag and Nelly, Alaina and Gus, Hunter and Elsie, Brody and Elizabeth. It’s ridiculous. It’s like a Disney cartoon where it’s spring and all the animals are hooking up and having babies.”

“The domesticity must appall you,” she said. But she wasn’t even really joking.

She continued to work slowly on the stitches, taking her time and trying to get them small and straight to leave the least amount of damage, because whatever he said about scars, she was determined to stitch her friend back together as neatly as possible.

“I’m glad they’re happy,” she said.

“Yeah. Me, too. It’s a good thing. It’s a damn good thing.”

But he sounded a bit gruff and a bit not like himself. She had to wonder if all the changes were getting to him. It was tough to tell with Lachlan, because his whole thing was to put on a brave face and pretend that things were all right.

He’d tried that when they’d first met.

She had been playing in the woods. By herself. She was always by herself. Even though she’d been fifteen, she’d been a young fifteen. She’d never really gotten to be around other children. So she was both vastly older and vastly younger in many different ways. She liked to wander the woods and imagine herself in a fairy tale. That she might encounter Prince Charming out there.

Then one day she’d been walking down a path, and there he’d been. Tall and rangy—even at sixteen—with messy brown hair and bright blue eyes.

But he’d been hurt.

Suddenly, he’d put his hand on his ribs and gone down onto his knees.

She could still remember the way she’d run over to him.

“AREYOUALLRIGHT?”

“Fine,” he said, looking up at her, his lip split, a cut over his eye bleeding profusely.

“That’s a lie,” she said.

“Yeah.” He wheezed out a cough. “No shit.”

She’d never heard anyone say that word in real life before. Just overheard in movies and read in books.

Her father was against swearing. He thought that it was vulgar and common. He said that people ought to have more imagination than that.

“That is shocking language,” she said.

“Shocking language... Okay. Look, you can just... Head on out. Don’t worry about me. This is hardly the first time I’ve had my ribs broken.”

He winced again.

“You need stitches,” she said, looking at his forehead.

“I’m not going to be able to get them.”

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