A smile twitched at the corner of her mouth, and he had the sudden thought that she might actually just blurt it all out there at the table in front of all of his family. That she would just go ahead and say that he had given her an orgasm last night in her camper just to watch the world burn.
But no.
What was it she’d said to him the other night? That it hurt her, the way that he assumed that everything she did was simply down to shenanigans.
He was guilty of that.
As guilty as he was of the martyrdom she had accused him of.
That was his fault. Going around assuming that he had the correct read on her, but she didn’t have one on him. But then, it wasn’t arrogant so much as it was he didn’t really think he had a lot of secrets from the world. Or himself.
He was a simple guy. He worked on his ranch; he took care of his family. They needed less from him now, but that was basically still the focus of his life.
He went out when he really wanted to. Found a woman when he needed to. He liked steak and he liked beer. He cared about his friends. Not that he had that many.
And she was the most important among them.
So it wasn’t that he didn’t think she was smart enough to see through him, so much as he didn’t think there was anything to see.
She was making him question that slightly.
In making him question the way that he looked at her.
He did that with his siblings sometimes, didn’t give them enough credit for the years and what they’d done to change them. For the progression of time and how it had matured them. He wondered if he did the same to Sammy.
And if so, then he had to backtrack and figure whatever she was doing now... It wasn’t just to mess with him. Well, it was to mess with him for sure, but she must have another aim. One that served her broader purpose.
But it was difficult to think because she brushed against him again, and the electricity between them was the kind that made it hard to breathe or think. The kind that he’d only ever experienced with her.
When they were young.
He hated that. She was only two years younger than he was, but he’d felt ancient at eighteen, with the weight of the world on his shoulders, and a pretty sixteen-year-old that was at his same high school shouldn’t have seemed so out of bounds.
All those times she’d climbed into his bed, right at first, it had been like torture. Until he’d learned how to push it down. And then he’d spent seventeen years since pushing it all down. Until last night.
Until now.
“Glad to hear it,” he said.
“How is your baby thing going?” Rose asked.
Rose had ulterior motive embedded in her tone, and he was sure he’d have recognized it even if he hadn’t already heard her talking to Logan about it.
Iris grimaced. “You can’t ask someone how their baby...thing is going,” she said.
“Sure I can,” Rose said. “I mean the fact that we know it’s happening means that I can ask. Anyway, Sammy would ask any one of us.”
“Promising,” Sammy said, a smile touching her lips.
“See?” Rose said. “She doesn’t mind talking about it.”
“I have no problem saying I don’t want to talk about something if I don’t want to talk about it,” Sammy said. “I don’t really have a problem coming out and saying anything.”
“No,” Ryder said. “It’s whether or not you’ll say what you really feel. That’s the question.”
Their eyes held. And he could read the unspoken communication there. Asking him if he really wanted to get into this kind of stuff in front of people. Because while he didn’t think she was going to announce what had happened between them, he had a feeling she would push the line.
Well. Fine.
He shrugged.
“I mean,” Sammy said, all cotton-candy voiced, “it’s better than keeping everything shoved down deep and then dying someday of constipated emotions.”
“Is there popcorn?” Rose asked, her eyes bright.
Logan gave Rose a long, hard look.
“What?” she asked. “This is the most entertaining thing that’s happened here in a long time.”
“You mean, ever since Pansy lost her mind and is marrying an ex-convict?” Logan asked.
Clearly, his friend was attempting to shift the focus of the conversation, because even if Logan had the wrong end of the stick, he knew that there were