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“Oh, like your fiancé?”
Her cheeks went a delicate shade of pink.
“Yes. Byron loves me for exactly how I am.”
Byron. Stupid name. Stupid guy, as far as he was concerned. They’d met when Charity had gone away to school, which was the only time the two of them had ever been away from each other. Byron was taking over for his own father’s veterinary clinic in Virginia, and he and Charity had had a long-distance relationship ever since.
He’d come to visit twice. Lachlan had taken against him. No grown man who wasn’t in a BBC production should wear that much tweed. He was somehow thirty and sixty-five all at the same time. While he could understand how that appealed to Charity’s aesthetic, it didn’t mean that he approved of itforher.
But then he wasn’t sure he would approve of any man in her life.
Which was selfish, and a little bit ridiculous. Especially given his current mission.
“We should all be so lucky,” Lachlan said. “Except the problem at the moment is I’m not husband material. I need to be made into husband material.”
His brothers had met their wives before they’d had any kind of reformation. But wouldn’t it be easier if he changed first? He wanted that settled thing. That easy thing. If he came to the table with a little more polish, that would be easier to find, surely.
He was determined to go about this in a somewhat scientific manner. He was going to fix himself, and start the process of searching the area to find a wife. A series of dates; that ought to do it. He’d never tried dating before. Hookups, sure. But dating, no. It had never interested him. It had never been his thing.
He was a goal-oriented kind of guy. And sex had been his goal, not relationships. But that was changing now.
“Well,well.” She looked...bewildered.
“I don’t like that look on your face. That look that suggests it will in fact be impossible to turn me into the kind of man that a woman could marry.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” she said. “You’ve never tried to be that kind of man before, so it stands to reason that you would be very bad at it initially.”
“That’s mean, Charity.”
She shook her head. “Impossible. I’m never mean.”
“That isn’t true. I am singularly acquainted with your meanness. In fact, I think I’m the only person on earth that rates it. Ever. I like to think that makes me special. But this was particularly wounding, and I feel the need to call you out on it.”
“Maybe it isn’t your arm that needed numbing.”
He laughed. “Oh, Charity, that’s what alcohol is for. In fact, it’s what I’ve been attempting to do for the last sixteen years.”
“You can start with alcohol,” she said.
He frowned. “I can what?”
“For the reformation,” she said, suddenly looking at him very seriously. “You should stop drinking.”
“Stop drinking?”
“Yes. At least to excess. It would probably be good for you to stop altogether at first. Do you really want to meet a wife with beer goggles on? It’s one thing to drink when you...do the things that you do. To select a woman while...inebriated is certainly a choice that you can make when you’re just spending the evening with her. But for your entire life?”
“Fair.”
She took a step away from him and began to pace the length of the cozy little room.
The house was in order, as always. Her father’s bug collection still hung on the wall, beetles and butterflies held in place with mean-looking straight pins. His knickknacks were everywhere, and she hadn’t moved even a single one.
“What exactly are you looking for in a...wife?” she asked, her tone hesitant.
He couldn’t really put it into words. All he had was the flash of a feeling. Something that swept over him, unfamiliar and nearly painful in nature. “Something normal.”
A little line creased the space between her pale eyebrows. “Normal. I’ve never really given a lot of thought to normal. I don’t think my dad was normal. I don’t think the life I’ve had here has been normal. But it’s been very happy.”
