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The scary thing wasn’t their dad hating them. It was that...it had been love, as far as he’d been able to show it. Possessive, controlling. Harmful.
The scary thing was...he’d seen his father show remorse. And do it all over again. So what Lachlan knew was he had to be vigilant. To never let anything awaken that inside him.
And he knew he had the capacity for it. He did.
He knew one truly good person in this whole world. Truly good, truly pure, truly lovely, and that was Charity Wyatt.
It was why he was proud of her being the thing he’d tested himself against back when he was sixteen. Because he’d wanted her then. He could remember the moment he’d felt like...he’d wanted to keep her. All for himself. A wild, fiery sort of feeling that had made him think of his older brother, locked in that shed, and his dad looking on with cold, dead eyes.
So he’d become her protector. Her friend. He’d taken his sick, toxic desires and he’d made them into something new. He’d put walls up where they needed to go and he’d won.
She had shown him, all the way back then, that he could be like his dad.
She’d been his cure, too.
If anyone would know how to...change him, it would be her.
Granted, she had been his best friend for a number of years and had never even suggested that he change.
Their friendship didn’t make any sense, not on paper.
She wassweet. She didn’t have any artifice or cynicism about her. She was funny, but artless. He liked that about her.
She wore long dresses with tennis shoes and ankle socks, and he was only human, so particularly when he had first met her, he had wondered what it would be like to get past that innocent exterior. To be the one who taught her how to be bad...
But she was just too good. And there were so many bad and broken things in the world. So many dirty and degraded things. He among them. So he had promised himself—when he’d been seventeen years old—that he would protect her at all costs. Even from himself.
He’d made spare few vows in his life.
The first was to never subject a woman to the kind of obsessive bullshit his father had tortured his mother with.
The second was to never let his own damage harm Charity in any way.
Which was how, even with fifteen years of friendship with him, she remained as lovely and pure as she’d ever been.
Which was why he needed her help.
“Reform you?” She tilted her head and looked at him, blinking, her pale lashes, tipped with gold, fluttering as she did.
“Yes. I’ve been thinking about it. I’m going to start looking for a wife.”
She tilted her head again. She was beginning to look like a particularly confused sparrow. “A wife?”
“Yes. A wife.”
He stood up and looked around the place. He would be lying if he said the death of her father didn’t have anything to do with this. Doctor Albert Wyatt had been a good man. One of the best ones that Lachlan had ever known. There was something about losing him, something about that particularly poignant passage of time, that had... It had done something to his heart.
There weren’t very many people in the world he cared about other than his brothers.
He would die for Charity.
He’d been fond of her old man, too.
It was a weird thing, grief. He wasn’t all that familiar with it. He had lived his life to a steady drumbeat of loss and change and fear.
Watching a good man die was a totally different thing.
“Why do you have to reform to get a wife? Shouldn’t you marry somebody that likes you the way that you are?”
