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He was something so separate from her, something so different than she could ever be, that sometimes being friends with him was like being friends with someone from a totally different culture.
Sometimes she went with him and observed his native customs. She’d gone to Smokey’s Tavern with the group of McClouds quite a few times, but she’d always found it noisy and the booze smelled bad. It gave her a headache.
And she didn’t dance.
Lachlan had women fighting to dance with him, and she thought it was such a funny thing. Watching those women compete for his attention, for just a few moments of his time. They would probably never see him again.
She would see him again the next day and the day after that, and the day after that.
“What did you do?” she asked, looking at the nasty gash.
“I had a little run-in with some barbed wire.”
He was at the door now, filling up the space. He did that. He wasn’t the kind of person you could ignore. And given that she was the kind of personalltooeasy to ignore, she admired that about him.
“We’ve gotta stop meeting like this,” he said, grinning.
She’d seen him turn that grin on women in the bar and they fell apart. She’d always been proud of herself for not behaving that way.
“I wish we could, Lachlan. But you insist on choosing violence.”
“Every day.”
“You could stop being in a fight with the world,” she pointed out.
“I could. But you know the thing about that is it sounds boring.”
“Well... A bored Lachlan McCloud is not anything I want to see.” She jerked her head back toward the living room. “Come on in.”
He did, and the air seemed to rush right out of her lungs as he entered the small, homey sitting room in her little house.
She still had everything of her father’s sitting out, like he might come back any day.
His science-fiction novels and his medical journals. His field guides to different animals and the crocheted afghan that he had sat with, draped over his lap, in his burnt orange recliner, when at the end of his days he hadn’t been able to do much.
She had been a very late-in-life surprise for her father.
She’d been born when he was in his fifties. And he had raised her alone, because that had been the agreement, so the story went. Amicable and easy. Which made sense. Because her father had been like that. Steady and calm. A nice man. Old-fashioned. But then... He had been in his eighties when he’d passed. He wasn’t really old-fashioned so much as of his time.
He’d homeschooled her, brought her on all his veterinary calls. Her life had been simple. And it had been good.
She’d had her dad. And then... She’d had Lachlan.
And there was no reason at all that suddenly this room should feel tiny with Lachlan standing in it. Because he had been in here any number of times.
Especially in the end, visiting her dad and talking to him about baseball.
She sometimes thought her dad was the closest thing that Lachlan had to a father figure. His own dad had been a monster.
Of course, the unfairness of that was that Lachlan’s dad was still alive out there somewhere. While her sweet dad was gone.
“It’s quiet in here,” Lachlan said, picking up on her train of thought.
“It would’ve been quiet in here if Dad was alive. Until you two started shouting about sports.” She grinned just thinking about it. “You do know how to get him riled up.” Then her smile fell slightly. “Did.You did know.”
“I could still rile him up, I bet. But I don’t know that we want séance levels of trouble.”
She laughed, because she knew the joke came from a place of affection, and that was something she prized about her relationship with Lachlan. They justkneweach other.
