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“Is that so?”
“I need more confidence.”
“You need more confidence?” He looked at her like she was crazy. She actually understood that. He knew her, so he understood that she had absolute confidence in herself and her capabilities as a vet.
“Let me rephrase. I need to project more confidence.”
“Why is that?”
“Because people here still treat me like I’m a child. I just went to Ed Forsyth’s place to deliver vitamins, and he has an ailing horse. He won’t listen to me. The animal is going to get worse, and when that kind of stuff happens I just get tongue-tied. And when I get all tongue-tied I can’t...”
“It is very hard for me to imagine you being tongue-tied, Charity.”
“Well, I’m not. Withyou. Don’t you remember when we first met?”
“Yes. I don’t really remember you being tongue-tied then, either. In fact, you dragged me back to your father’s house, lying to me about the nature of his job...”
“I didn’t really. You asked if he was a doctor. He was.”
“You know that I meant a human doctor.”
“Well... Yes. But I wanted to help you, and I didn’t see another way to do that.”
“You are perfectly willing to engage in any kind of workaround available to you to get what you want. You are stubborn, and you are very confident.”
“But it doesn’t come across,” she said. “People don’t... They don’t see me the way that Ifeel. I think it’s partly because of the way that I dress. Or the way that my dad taught me to dress? That sounds weird.”
He looked at her. “I guess you just never really thought about it.”
“That’s it,” she said, feeling illuminated. “I don’t think about it. My dad always put me in dresses, so I wear dresses. Unless it’s absolutely impractical to do so, of course. But I think it makes me look younger, which I think is impacting my ability to do my job.”
“Alternatively, I could just go punch Ed Forsyth in the face.”
“No. I don’t need you to do that.Ineed the willingness-to-go-punch-someone-in-the-face energy that you have. I can’t have you fighting all my battles for me.”
Especially if she didn’t stay. But she didn’t say that last part. She wasn’t ready to have that conversation with him.
But then... With him getting married...or at least planning to, he probably wouldn’t care. It made her feel sad to think about it, though. She supposed that was what friends did. They grew up and grew apart. But she and Lachlan had had a lot of being grown up without having that happen. They were in their thirties. Their lives had been the same in many ways since they’d met. Until her dad had died. That had shiftedherentire foundation.
She wondered if it had shifted his.
The biggest thing for him was probably his brothers getting married. It was completely understandable that it would make him take stock of his life and want to do things differently.
“Yeah. I’ll help you. Though honestly, any woman willing to take a needle that size and jam it into a horse’s ass has all the confidence she needs.”
She held the needle up. “Okay. I need transferable ass-injection confidence.”
Her cheeks immediately colored, because she did not say words like that as a habit.
Lachlan had introduced profanity into her life, but she had never truly adopted it. She had just collected his colorful sentences like guilty trinkets in the back of her mind. She had been fascinated by that part of him. By the way he was... Somewhat feral.
“Charity Wyatt,” he scolded. “Such language.”
A grin spread over his face and she wrinkled her nose, which was her knee-jerk reaction to these kinds of moments with him. It did something to jar the tension that always started to mount in her chest. It wasn’t a feeling that she liked. And it was something that only seemed to be caused by Lachlan.
She was very good at pushing it aside. Ignoring it.
She administered the first vaccine, and Lachlan took the horse back to its stall. Then he got out patient number two.
