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“Limited scope,” she scoffed. “You’re going to act like you know my fiancé better than I do, then claim I have limited scope in regards to you? I know you better than just about anybody else.”
They took the tack off the horses, and she began to help towel them dry.
“I just think that you... I just think...” she sputtered.
“What do you think?”
“I think you don’t like him because you don’t want to like him. You’re acting like you’re my big brother and no man is going to be good enough for me. But Byron and I have things in common that you don’t get. I can talk to him about medicine, about his experiences at school. I have things in common with him that you and I will never have in common. You will never understand those things about me. So... So there. It could be argued, Lachlan McCloud, that you and I have nothing in common, and yet we seem to spend a whole lot of time together. So... So.”
“What’s your argument, Charity? It is better to have something in common, or no?”
“You need to have something in common with the person that you’re going to marry. It’s all fine and good to have a friend who’s...who’s different from you. But he and I understand each other.”
“Okay. Great. Do you want to fuck him?”
The words took her off guard. She felt... She felt like he had scalded her.
“Ibeg your pardon.”
“Do you want to fuck him?” He repeated the question, this time with more purpose.
She tried to speak, but she couldn’t make her mouth work. Or her voice box, which seemed to be emitting a helpless string of start-stop-sounding noises. “I don’t think of him that way,” she finally managed.
“Hell and damn, Charity. You are supposed to think of the person you want to marry that way.”
“No. I mean... What I mean is... It’s not the driving factor in our relationship. And even then, I wouldn’t think of it in those terms. I want companionship. What I want is something companionable and...”
“Get a golden retriever, babe.”
“Don’t call me babe.” She found herself moving toward him.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s what you call every woman. And I’m not every woman, and I never have been. When you call me sweetheart and babe it’s like you’re dismissing me. Putting me in that category. I’m Doc. That’s what I am, and I’m the only one that’s that. And that’s what I want.”
“You want to be special?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “And I don’t like when you do that thing where you try to make me the same. Because it makes me feel small, and I hate it. And you’re doing it now, and you’re doing it because... I don’t even know why.”
She looked up at him, and her heart was pounding, her chest aching. And she didn’t think that wrinkling her nose was going to make the feeling go away. Which was confronting and annoying, and she hated it. And why did he have to keep saying things like this to her?
Like when he had mentioned sex and virginity. And now he had said... He had said that. And he had jarred her brain into this territory that she didn’t know how to navigate. That she didn’t understand.
She had never once in her life thought about...that word that he had used as a verb. She had thought in warm, sweet terms. That they would get married, and things would be sort of nice and soft and special. Then they would have that magical connection that she didn’t share with anyone else. It was the thing that would make them married. It was the thing that would make her feel that way about him. And once they were a married couple, they would have it. It made sense to her. Except, standing there looking at Lachlan with her heart threatening to burst its way out the front of her chest, it didn’t make sense anymore, and that made her angry. Outraged, in fact, because how dare he? How dare he take something that she had so carefully defined for herself and try to impose his own rules on it?
She was just different than him. That was all. He was trying to measure what she wanted with his own yardstick, and it just wasn’t fair, and it didn’t work.
She was still wet. Miserably so, and somehow warm with it, and she didn’t like it.
“Doc,” he said, his voice suddenly low, rough. “You might want to take a step back.”
She shivered, painfully aware of the fact that her dress was wet and cold, clinging to her skin. She was breathing hard, because she was angry. His own shirt was plastered to his body from that rain, and she could see the outline of his every muscle.
Muscles that she had gone out of her way not to look at, for all the time that she spent with him.
She remembered that moment again, when he had walked into the house and stripped his shirt off and she had looked away, because it was a practiced habit. Because she could remember clearly a time when he’d done that when she had been sixteen, and they had been down at the creek. A memory that she worked hard not to dwell on or really have at all.
Right then she did.
