Page 97 of The Troublemaker

He frowned. “I mean, I can, but I can’t say that I really want to.”

“Don’t be like that. I’m marrying you. I got a wedding dress today. I... Lachlan, I’d never even had sex before and now... I don’t know. It’s like I spent so much time by myself, and now I’m even sharing a bed with you and...”

“Charity,” he said. “I’d never had sex with you. It doesn’t matter that I’d been with other people. It wasn’t the same. It isn’t the same. And it isn’t going to be. You and me... That’s its own thing. Nothing is that. Nothing is us. Do you think this is easy for me because I had experience? I’ve never spent the night with a woman before.”

“You... You haven’t?”

“No, ma’am. Hit it and quit it was my thing.”

“That’s kind of awful,” she said.

He looked at her, his expression grave. “Charity, I have at times in my life been kind of awful. I have at times in my life felt like my pain was a hell of a lot more important than anyone else’s could be. I’m trying to be different. I’m trying to be better. It makes sense that you be the person I marry. Because you’re the only one that I ever had an easy time with as far as... I do care about your feelings. About your comfort. About your pain. I know mine is not more important. Yeah, it’s a lot for me, too, but I’m ready to jump in with both feet.” He put his hand on her cheek. “As deep as my feet go.”

“I’m sorry. I guess I’m just kind of freaking out. Because a week ago I was engaged to Byron, and now I’m marrying you in a couple of days. And...sometimes it’s difficult to reconcile the change in our relationship, too. To figure out what it means. And I wonder a little bit if what we were is gone. Because now there’s...all the sex stuff.”

“The sex stuff didn’t erase our friendship,” he said. “It’s just...another way we get to spend time together.”

Somehow, she knew that was wrong. That it wasn’t quite it. That it skimmed over the surface of the change that had occurred inside her when she had first been with him. Because it had been a change. A deep one.

He was saying all the right things, but somehow it was still skirting around what she felt. She felt filleted. Opened up. He obviously felt something, but she wasn’t sure it was that. And maybe it was just the ways that it was all different for men. She didn’t know.

But she had heard about it, of course. Because people talked about such things.

That love and sex and all manner of those things were different if you had testosterone.

She sat down at the little kitchen table, and he sat across from her with his bowl of chili.

“I should’ve told you I guess that I was going out to eat.”

“Well, I guess I didn’t tell you where you would be sleeping tonight. So I suppose all is fair in love and surprises.”

That word stuck in her chest.

“Lachlan,” she said. “I love you.”

She did. She had been toying with that for a few days. Because she had always known that she loved him, but what made a person in love. Was it sex?

She was certain she’d been in love with him since way before he had ever touched her. He was the most important person in her life, and the idea of putting another man above him really never would’ve worked, because he was the one. He was the only one who could ever occupy that position. The only one she ever wanted to do it.

“I love you, too,” he said.

Her stomach swooped, her heart hitting her breastbone.

“You said you didn’t want love with marriage,” she said.

“I didn’t need it, no. But I’ve loved you the whole time. Like I said, sex didn’t erase our friendship.”

Just like that. So easy. But yet again, she wondered if he meant something different. And she didn’t quite know how to ask.

If it was that easy, then why had both of them been planning to marry other people? She could attribute her own idiocy to inexperience. But then...maybe that was the same with him, too. He’d slept with people, but he didn’t know anything about emotional intimacy.

There was something about that that stuck in her chest, too.Emotional intimacy.

“I guess it’s good we’re marrying each other, then.”

“It was stupid to think that we shouldn’t,” he said. “Stupid to think that there was someone else that we would be happier with. There isn’t.”

“No,” she said.

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