dishes with flowers on them.
It was strange that they’d lived next door to each other for years and never met Sammy. And then she’d pulled her little camper onto the property and taken up residence like she’d always been there.
Whatever her relationship to her parents, Pansy knew it was flawed.
She could sense Sammy had come from some darkness. There was a reason she was part of them. Part of Hope Springs. A reason she’d used this place for a refuge.
But for all the world to see, she was sunshine and light.
Also, nosy.
“Who was the guy you were with last night?”
Logan.
She’d been so focused on Sammy she hadn’t looked to the obvious problem.
She should have known that he was going to make this difficult. That he wouldn’t be able to let go of the fact that she had been sitting at the table with the man he didn’t know.
“My landlord,” she said, opting for directness, because the shadier she was, the more Sammy would ferret.
“Your landlord?”
“Yes. He just bought Redemption Ranch. He’s been doing some work on my house. We were just talking about that. Sorry to disappoint you.”
“It’s just the way that you warned me off of coming over there I figured you were trying to hook up.”
Ryder looked at Logan and scowled. Logan looked back. “What?”
“Do you need to say things like that?” Ryder asked.
Sammy tapped Ryder on the shoulder. “Calm down. She’s an adult woman.”
“Sure,” Ryder grimaced. “But that doesn’t mean that I need to know about anything.”
“There’s nothing to know about,” Pansy said.
“You had a beer with West Caldwell?” Iris asked. She had half a mind to dive under the table and bite her sister on the leg.
“And his broad shoulders?” Rose asked, an impish smirk on her face.
“Rose...”
“Why are we talking about some guy’s shoulders?” Ryder asked, looking appalled.
“Sorry you don’t have your boys’ club right now,” Sammy said, looking cheerful. “You guys are outnumbered very handily with Colt and Jake being out of town.”
“I don’t like it,” Ryder said.
“You don’t like anything,” Sammy said.
“Not true,” he said. “I like having dinner uninterrupted by conversations about my sister’s dating life.”
“There’s no dating,” Pansy said.
The subject died after that, but once dinner was over and Ryder and Logan had vanished Sammy rounded on her in a flurry of blond hair and flowing skirts. “So what happened with Mr. Broad Shoulders?”
Iris and Rose looked at her keenly. Because they knew as well as Pansy did that if there was anything to say Sammy would be able to badger her into saying it.
She had a decision to make. Whether or not she was going to resist Sammy’s relentlessness or if she was going to accept the inevitable.
“I kissed him,” Pansy said, deciding on surrender.
Iris and Rose made very loud sounds, and Pansy looked worriedly toward the living room. She did not want to draw Logan and Ryder’s attention.
“You made that almost too easy,” Sammy said, looking disappointed.
And the only joy that Pansy could get out of any of this was that she felt she had perhaps mildly defeated Sammy.
“Well, I knew you were going to figure it out,” Pansy said. “I’m a terrible liar and I always have been. And you are absolutely shameless.”
Sammy grinned. “It’s true.”
Sammy was the biggest source of sex ed for Pansy. Sammy was the one who’d given Pansy a vibrator on her eighteenth birthday, which Pansy had immediately hidden in a drawer.
She’d never used it. The thing terrified her.
But that didn’t mean she’d never...that she didn’t know her way around her own body. But unlike Sammy she could never be so open about it. So free and easy.
The emergence of her sexuality had been scary for her. Caught between the desire to follow rules, to pursue her goal, and the very real burgeoning of her hormones, along with the fear of caring for someone outside her family, had kept her pretty paralyzed on that front.
And now West, and whatever West made her feel, seemed to sort of...circumvent a lifetime of caution and...well, keeping sexual feelings to her damn self.
“I knew it,” Rose said. “I knew you liked him.”
“I don’t like him,” she said. “I don’t... I don’t know what I am.”
“Normal?” Sammy asked, lifting his shoulder.
That word diffused it. Made it feel like it must not be that big of a deal. And Pansy wasn’t sure how she felt about that, because it had felt earthmoving and singular, and like a gigantic mistake that she shouldn’t have committed. And Sammy was acting like it