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“Are you okay?” He ran across the room and knelt down beside her. Lachlan. He had come back. He had only been gone for an hour. He hadn’t left her.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I mean, physically. You hurt me.”
“I know,” he said, his voice rough. “I hurt myself. Gus came after me, and basically told me that I’m a dumbass.”
“Well... You are.”
“I know. Charity, I couldn’t control the feelings I had for you. And I told myself I was afraid of me. But I was afraid for me.”
“Lachlan?”
He knelt down on the floor beside her. “My dad hated me. From the time I was a kid. He made me the source of all the bad things in his life, his marriage. He didn’t think I was his son. And I spent years scrabbling around in the dark trying to figure out why. And it was easiest to think maybe it was because there was something bad in me. Because if I don’t know... Charity, if I don’t know why, if I’m good, if I’ve been good...why did he hate me so much? What’s going to stop someone else from...from seeing the same unlovable thing he did?”
“Lachlan,” she breathed, pain rushing through her chest. She’d been so hurt, so angry at him, and now she was just hurt for them both. “There is nothing unlovable in you. You have been there for me for all these years, and I’ve loved you for every single one of them. As a friend, as my lover, as my husband. Every year I love you more. Better. Different.”
A hard sound that might have been a sob in a softer man, shook his frame. “Gus told me that you believed in me, and I needed to believe in me, too. It’s hard.”
“I know it is. I mean... Lach, I don’t know. I don’t know what this costs you. But I want to love you through it. I do.”
“I love you. I mean, I’m deeply in love with you.” It looked like it pained him to say that. It almost would’ve been funny if it didn’t hurt so much.
“You don’t have to say that like it’s torture.”
“I know. I don’t mean to. It’s just that it’s really pushing up against things in me that... I’m scared. And I would rather punch things than be afraid of them. I would have rather convinced myself I was dangerous than admit I’m just scared.” He shook his head. “I never saw functional love. I saw love that was twisted and weaponized. Given then taken back as punishment. I look around me, and I see it. So I know that it’s possible. I’m just so afraid that isn’t going to be possible for me.”
“It’s not magic,” she said. “It never was. I believe that things happen for a reason, too. But I don’t believe that it’s all just fate. We have choices that we have to make, Lachlan. I chose to hide for a long time, and I’m not hiding anymore. I can’t, not if I want to love you the way that I know that I can. And you can’t hide from me, either. We have to be brave. We have to choose this. We have to choose how we’ll love each other. Because we chose a lot of years loving each other as friends, a key part of ourselves guarded. So now we have to choose radical love. Huge love. The kind that changes things. I won’t hide from it. You don’t hide from it, either.”
It was amazing. How much they changed. How much their lives had changed in the space of just a couple of months. But it was time to grab on. It was time to quit running.
“I love you,” he said again. “I love you.” Like it was a spell. An incantation. A promise.
“I love you, too. I always have.”
“I know that, Doc. I think you really did reform me. It just took a lot longer than I anticipated. Because it’s not about not drinking, or not having sex. Both of which I have failed at miserably. It’s about changing something inside of me. It’s about taking all those stitches and using them to put me back together inside.”
“You’ve done that for me, too. You made me more me. You helped me find things out about myself that I would never have known were there. I certainly never would’ve been brave enough to explore it on my own. This is the life that I want to live. This one. With you. And I’m not afraid of you. I’m not afraid of how big the feelings are between us. I’m not afraid of any of it.”
He pulled her into his arms and kissed her. “I love you.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I know. But I said it a bunch of times without really getting to the bottom of it. Without getting to the depth of it. Now I have. And when I say it, I mean it. With all the fear, all the trauma, all the hope that I have in my body. I want you to love me that same way.”
“I do.”
“I’m so glad that we’re married. That we’re having a baby.”
“I can’t even believe that,” she said. “But I guess we have all the time in the world to get used to it.”
“And all the time to keep on loving each other.”
She leaned in and she kissed him. And then she pulled away and looked at him. He was the very image of a man in love. Backlit by the kitchen light, on the floor beside her, sitting there in that place where she’d been broken, working now to mend the pain. Lachlan McCloud was the epitome of a cowboy. And she was proud to call him her husband. And the love of her life.
Second Chance Cowboy
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
