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“The server will be with you shortly,” the woman said.
She settled into the seat and smoothed her dress down, looking around. “This is much...more than I expected.”
“And if you were a woman I was on a date with?”
“I would be extremely impressed with your taste. Iamextremely impressed with your taste. I didn’t know that you... I didn’t even know you knew about places like this. I’ve never seen you anywhere fancier than Smokey’s Tavern.”
“I have hidden depths, Charity. I’m sad that you didn’t know that.”
She had no reason to know it. Not one.
But she did now. Because they were on a date.
A date that was for another woman. A date that was like a dress rehearsal, but still.
She wondered then what Byron would think about this. If she had told him that she was going out to dinner with Lachlan, would he be...jealous?
The concept of jealousy was entirely foreign to her. She had certainly never thought of it in context with herself. She’d definitely never thought that Byron might be jealous. He was far too measured.
Lachlan was her friend, and he knew that. Lachlan was just her friend.
She grimaced internally. She didn’t like that.Just friends. Like he was less important somehow than Byron. Which was absolutely not true. Of course it wasn’t. No one was more important than Lachlan.
As of now, he was the person who had been in her life longest. He was her foundation. Her bedrock. Especially with the loss of her father, that connection to him was more important than anything else ever had been. He was one of the relationships that had made her. In fact, without him she didn’t even know who she would be. There wasn’t another person alive she could say that about. Not a single one. There was nojust a friend.
Not with him. There never could be.
The server appeared then and brought them a very brief one-page menu. She perused it for a moment and decided on the house-made pasta with spring peas and butter sauce, which made her stomach growl just thinking about it. They were immediately brought a warm basket of bread, and Lachlan ordered the glass of wine he had mentioned earlier.
She got a sparkling water.
The bread practically melted in her mouth and she found herself making an extremely undignified noise as she chewed. “It’s just so good,” she said.
“So again, I get points?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Tell me about yourself.”
“What?” she asked.
“I am having dating conversation,” he explained, very slowly.
“Tell me about yourself. That is an extremely open-ended question.”
“Yeah. So that you can talk about yourself, but in whatever manner you want.”
“That wouldn’t work for me. It’s just way too broad. You have to be like—tell me about your childhood. Or maybe even more specifically your fifth birthday.”
“Do I want to know about your fifth birthday?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Ask the question you want the answer to, Lachlan. That seems like it would be the better part of valor here.”
“Okay,” he said. “Tell me about your fifth birthday.”
“Well...” She frowned. Because she actually had to think. “We set up a picnic table out back, and my father made me a cake. He used raspberries from the garden to color the frosting, and it was the most glorious shade of pink, tart and very pretty. He got me a stethoscope. Not a toy. A real one. I loved it. I used to put it on him, on myself and on all my stuffed animals.”
“No friends?”
