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“How are your stitches?”
He looked down at his arm. “Stitched.”
She sighed. “I think you might be entirely held together by thread that I’ve put into your body.”
That might be true. Hell, that truth might go deeper than she even imagined.
“Yeah. I can’t dispute that. I have to get back. We have new guests coming up to the ranch.”
About six months ago they had gotten an equine therapy center up and running on McCloud’s Landing.
It wasn’t really his thing. But he supported it. Again, if Gus wanted to do it, Lachlan was all about it.
“Okay. I’ll be by later to do the inoculations on the new horses.”
“Yeah. Okay. I’ll see you then.”
“Yeah. I’ll see you then.”
He nodded once and stood up, then put his hat on and walked out of the house. It was a pretty quick walk from Charity’s place to the ranch, and he had decided to walk instead of drive on purpose. His head was full. Which was not a totally typical situation for him. No. He had spent his entire life doing his level best not to fill his head up with thoughts. Because they didn’t serve him. Because they didn’t do anything. Because they didn’t matter.
Because there had been nothing in the world that he could do when he was a child to fix the situation that he was in. He’d just had to endure it. That was when he’d found out that there were a whole lot of things in the world that felt really damned good, and they didn’t require a lot of thought. Things that did something to help blot out the pain that he experienced.
But he wanted more now. Maybe it was that he was getting older. For sure it was seeing the changes in his brothers around him.
Maybe it was just being so damned tired of waiting to see if the monster would ever wake up inside him; if he would ever transform into Seamus McCloud.
Yeah. It had been a long haul, waiting for that one.
It was one reason he wanted to approach the whole marriage thing like this. For his dad, love and marriage had been a ticking time bomb. The jealousy, the toxic nature of his parents’ relationship, had him on a short fuse.
Love, that was the problem. That all-consuming love. Lachlan didn’t want that.
He was pretty sure he’d figured out how to make it work for him.
Plan for a calm life, the kind of life that would never, ever let that monster out.
There was something about the way his brothers had turned out that gave him some hope.
Something had to.
CHAPTER THREE
SHEHADAstop to make before she could head over to McCloud’s Landing. It wasn’t one she was looking forward to. Even though it was just for a vitamin delivery, she had a feeling it was going to be annoying.
For the most part, everybody in Pyrite Falls accepted her as a replacement veterinarian for her father. But there were those... There were those who just saw her as a child, and there was very little she could do about it. This particular rancher was one of them.
He didn’t like to listen to her, and he didn’t like to take her advice.
This was where she absolutely and wholly agreed with her father. Animals were simply better than people. Animals didn’t care how old she was; they could tell that she was trying to help them.
She wondered... She really did wonder sometimes if there was any future here in Pyrite Falls. Not because she didn’t love it—she did. It was her home, and it always had been. But that was the issue.
People had known her since she was a child, and often they treated her like a child. No matter what.
It was almost as if there was no way around it.
They looked at her, and they saw the little girl with pigtails who had tagged along with her dad on every call, and somehow never saw the grown woman who had been doing this work in her own right for years. It’d only escalated since her father died. When he’d been alive, they’d seen her as an envoy of his work—even though he wasn’t the one doing the work—to a point. But now that he was gone they saw her as groundless. Rootless. As someone they couldn’t necessarily trust.
