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And Lachlan had never slept better than he did sharing a bed with Charity.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
SHEWASFEELINGsort of wretched and awful, and she felt like she ought to feel triumphant. Things had been going better with Lachlan.
There were still nights that she woke up sometimes and he wasn’t there. But he wasn’t ready to talk about whatever was going on with him, and she was trying to find a way to deal with that. In many ways she was the one who had changed the terms of their relationship. She was the one who had decided she wanted something more. Something different. She was the one who had decided she needed something more than sex and friendship to call it love.
So she had done the work to expose herself to him, and the fact that he wasn’t ready to do it for her was something she was just going to have to suck up and deal with.
She wasn’t that silly girl she’d been.
She’d lost her dad. She had endured pain. She had faced the fact that she was ignoring parts of herself that needed to be tended to. She had been honest enough to realize that what she had been doing with Byron had been a replacement tactic.
Had been a relationship that didn’t challenge her.
Lachlan challenged her.
When they had been friends, only friends, it had been different. They hadn’t challenged each other in quite the same way that they did as a married couple. Or rather, he challenged her. He was resistant to her doing the same back.
But it would be okay.
She could be patient.
After all, their relationship was more than fifteen years in the making. What was a little more time? They could keep building this. It wasn’t finished.
That was the thing. Happily-ever-after was a process.
They’d said they loved each other. They’d slept together. They’d gotten married.
There was still a lot of work to do.
She was beginning to understand that, to accept it. She hadn’t seen enough marriage to really have a concept of that before then. She had thought maybe people just had happy marriages or unhappy ones. She and Lachlan had so much happiness. She loved to be with him. He was her favorite person. She liked his humor and his warmth. She always had. But now she also loved his touch, the way that he made her body feel. The way that she felt like they were changing one another every time they came together. Becoming a part of each other. More and more, she felt like they were being woven together into something that could not be easily separated.
She loved that.
But there were also isolated moments. Sad moments. Times when she could feel him shutting her out.
Times when she wanted something from him she didn’t have words for, so she had to swallow her anger, even though she just wanted to lash out.
It was a weird thing. More and more, she was feeling a bit vulnerable and touchy. To go along with a sense of lagging energy. She wasn’t really enjoying that.
She mentioned that to Alaina one afternoon when she came by McCloud’s Landing to check in on a horse.
“Are you pregnant?” the younger woman asked, her green eyes flashing with excitement.
“I... Oh.” She didn’t feel like she knew Alaina well enough for that, but clearly Alaina didn’t care about that. Charity had a hard time caring, because now she was way too bowled over by the realization Alaina had just forced on her.
She had spent so many years knowing that she was categorically not pregnant, and she felt extremely stupid for not immediately wondering that now. But it had never mattered much other than for convenience’s sake if she tracked her cycle, because of course, having never slept with a man, there was never a risk that she could be carrying a baby. Not so now.
“I... I guess I could be.”
She knew she could be. She and Lachlan had been haphazard with birth control at best. She was thirty years old, so there was certainly nothing unwelcome about the fact that she might be having a baby. They were ready. Or at least, they were certainly old enough.
But it felt like a shock. Because while children had definitely been an implied part of this arrangement, they hadn’t talked about it all that much.
She had never had an experience of a mother. He had a terrible father. She knew that both of them wanted to do something to heal those absences in their lives, but very suddenly it felt monumental. Knowing the mechanics, having assisted with many animal births, did nothing to make her feel better now.
“I could be.”
