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Ready.
And she stood and waited at the living room window. Waited to see his truck coming up the driveway. She was excited to go to Mapleton; she hadn’t been in a long time, and they had great restaurants. She wondered what he had picked.
They almost only ever went to Becky’s or Smokey’s. The café or the tavern. And both essentially had the same kind of food; it was just that one had more alcohol, and since that didn’t matter to Charity, which restaurant didn’t really matter, either.
But this would be different. Totally different...and she was very much looking forward to it.
Then she saw it. The front of his big, black truck, coming up the drive, and a little flutter of excitement ignited in her stomach.
She found herself standing there, just smiling. She looked over at the chair where her father should’ve been. “I’ll make sure to order the flourless chocolate torte. It has to happen, because it’s a nice restaurant. And that’s what you said. If it was a good restaurant, it would have a flourless chocolate torte.”
Her eyes felt an immense amount of pressure behind them. Then she turned back, where Lachlan had parked and gotten out of the truck.
She watched as he walked toward the front door. He was wearing black jeans, a black button-up shirt and a black cowboy hat. And for just one moment she felt disoriented. Out of place in her reality.
It was like she was watching a movie, watching an outlaw walk with the horizon against his back. And it suddenly felt silly that she had thought she wouldn’t look half so out of her league sitting across the table from him because he was...
He was him. Uniquely and utterly him, and she had never seen the light of him. Even having known him all her life, she felt right now like she had never seen anything like him. There was a well of insecurity that had bubbled up in her chest, and she didn’t quite know what to do about it, because it was completely foreign to her. She didn’t have insecurity about her looks, because her default was just not thinking about them at all. Except she had just spent a considerable amount of time thinking about them and now...
He was at her front door.
He knocked.
She scrambled over to it and pulled it open.
His eyes were startlingly blue, particularly with all the black.
His jaw was clean-shaven, and she couldn’t remember the last time that had been true.
She wasn’t sure she liked it. Except she did. Except she missed the way he usually looked. Except he looked special.
Special to go out withher.
“Hi,” she said.
He didn’t seem like he was having similarly frantic thoughts playing around in his head. Instead, he looked her over. Very slowly.
“You look nice,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said. And for some reason the words felt deflating. Almost disappointing. She had no reason to feel that way. As if she was expecting... What? Some kind of intense declaration? She didn’t even want that. A declaration of what anyway? Something more thannice? That was ridiculous. She didn’t need anything more than that. Anyway... What would that even be?
“Do you need a coat?”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Suit yourself.”
They went to his truck, and he opened the door for her. “Chivalry? Good?”
“Yes,” she said after pausing to think for a minute. “I think that’s very good.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear that I pass muster.”
She climbed into the truck, and he closed the door firmly behind her. He got in while she was buckling, and she noticed that he smelled spicy again. That cologne.
She wrinkled her nose.
“I made a reservation for us at a place called Amuse. Sounds ridiculously impressed with itself, but I figured that’s what you want. Nobody wants to go to a restaurant with low self-esteem.”
