her mother would never have used the kind of language that Sammy did.
But Sammy wasn’t judgmental. She was relaxed and happy and smiling and she would be the one to make any feeling Pansy had feel normal.
She had a feeling Sammy would suggest they dance out under the moon or something to commemorate the experience.
She decided against calling Sammy. She could call Rose. And Rose would crack a dirty joke and ask for details, and then start scheming ways for Pansy to end up married to him or something.
The thought made Pansy cringe. She didn’t want to share details.
She wasn’t even ready to go back over details in her head.
Iris would let her talk. But Iris might judge her little bit.
She decided against calling anyone.
She crawled underneath the covers and West’s question echoed in her mind.
Did anyone ever tuck you in?
She had just done the most intimate thing she’d ever done with another human being.
He’d been inside of her.
And somehow, it had left her feeling impossibly lonely.
More lonely than she’d ever been.
Or maybe she was just crushingly aware of it.
Of what she’d lost. Of what she wished she had.
She wondered what it would be like if West had come home with her.
If he’d gotten into bed with her.
What then? What would it be like to fall asleep in those strong arms?
That was the last thought she let herself have before she went to sleep.
But in her dreams, she was alone.
* * *
WEST WAS UP with the sun the next morning, and he made sure that Emmett was up with him. It was his first day at the school on the Dalton property. And West figured it was as good a time as any for him to go and spend some quality time with his brothers.
The ass crack of dawn, after a night spent not sleeping, which as far as he was concerned was pretty damned unfair considering the strength of the orgasm he had.
He was a man who’d been dead below the waist, for all intents and purposes, for the last few years. You’d think that he would’ve been able to hijack the benefits of his climax. But no.
He’d been worried about her. All damned night.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been worried about another person other than Emmett.
But hell, he was worried about her.
He had a feeling, though, that him showing up at her house unannounced in the middle of the night wouldn’t have been taken too kindly.
So, he left her alone.
He’d tossed and turned for a while, then gone downstairs and got a beer and sat up, watching TV till he fell into a half sleep on the couch that had lasted until about 5 a.m. And now, he and Emmett were just pulling into the ranch property.
“Are we early?” Emmett grumbled.
“Yep,” he said. “You sure are. But, it’s good to be early on your first day.”
“Is it?”
“When I was a kid I used to stay up late and watch these old reruns on the Disney Channel. There was stuff from... I don’t know, the nineteen fifties, probably. They used to talk a lot about work ethic. Show up fifteen minutes early at least,” West said. “I took that to heart.”
“We are more than fifteen minutes early.”
“Maybe,” West said. “But I don’t think the literal time is as important as the concept. You want to set yourself apart. You want to make sure that you work harder.”
“Why would I want to work harder?”
“Because nothing in life gets handed to you, Emmett. No one is standing around waiting to give kids like us a handout. So we can either stay in the exact same place our parents put us, or we can figure out how to do something different.”
“I’m not better than where I came from,” Emmett said. “I expect you think you are.”
“I don’t know that I’m better, but I want better. What kind of life do you see having?”
“I don’t know,” Emmett said.
He knew what that was like. To be afraid to think too far ahead. When you were a kid whose life was governed by the adults that were supposed to take care of you, you didn’t the hell know what might come next.
But until you got past that, until you could get to a place where you could dream... You were stuck.
“You’re being given an opportunity here,” West said. “Make something of it.”
“Why do you care?”
He didn’t know. He really couldn’t answer that, because in the grand scheme of things he didn’t care about