worry like that to her plate? Why, when in the context of friendship the two of them were so solid?
Unbreakable.
Suddenly, in her mind the scale of what they were appeared, and it seemed so much more precarious than she would like. Like if something was added to it that brought them out of balance all of it could crack, crumble and dissolve.
That if love was added to it, the hope of it, the demand for it, it finally would destroy things.
Good thing she didn’t want it. Good thing she found no security or satisfaction in it.
Good thing her father had broken her of the desire to ever enter into a conversation about love.
Miriam was a nice woman, but she sold wedding dresses, and she didn’t have a ring on her finger.
Sammy realized again that she didn’t, either, and felt irritated about it.
You told him you wanted to make your ring.
Well, suddenly, she didn’t. Suddenly, she wanted him to choose one and give it to her.
She squeezed her eyes shut, her whole face feeling scratchy for some reason.
Everything was fine, and she was not going to allow a bad case of bridezilla fever to infect something that she was so certain about otherwise.
She simply wasn’t going to.
Wanting a wedding, and what their marriage was, were definitely two different things and she needed to be careful not to get them twisted up. She would have a wedding gown, and that was fine. She had wanted one, so she had one. If she wanted to have a little dress-up and glamour situation happening, that was fine.
She rationalized as they wandered from the car to Sugarplum Fairy’s, the bakery that had opened a couple months back across the street from their favorite coffee shop.
She decided that she was far more likely to find answers in the cupcake she ordered than she was in the tangle of thoughts whirling through her mind.
She didn’t need to untangle them, either.
Because if one thing was certain, it was Ryder. He was always certain, and he was always steady.
She could count on him if nothing else.
And that made her feel relieved indeed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
RYDER DIDN’T TAKE asking for advice lightly. In fact, he never took advice, so the fact that he was doing it at all spoke volumes about how out of his depth he felt.
But he’d never been married before. And it had hit him at the barbecue that he had to figure that out.
He didn’t start a workday on the ranch without a plan. He’d never gone out onto a football field without knowing the plays.
He needed to figure out some husband plays.
West was in love. West was marrying Ryder’s sister. And West was also a degree removed from Sammy in a way that Logan and the others weren’t.
And that was what brought him to his future brother-in-law’s side at the Gold Valley Saloon that evening, only a couple of days before his wedding.
“She says that she doesn’t want a ring,” he said. “But it doesn’t feel right to me.”
“She says she doesn’t want a ring?”
West repeated his own words back to him, and Ryder found it astonishingly unhelpful. “Yes,” he said. “Well, I mean, she said she doesn’t want me to get her one. She wants to make it. You know, she’s into all that artisan stuff. It’s kind of her thing.”
“Sure,” West said. “But...a woman shouldn’t make her own wedding ring. That’s like making your own birthday cake or...hell, buying your own Christmas presents, I guess. It’s dumb, essentially. And I would think that most women would actually be not okay with it at all.”
“But she said she was.”
“Danger, Will Robinson. That sounds like one of those things.”
“Sammy doesn’t do that stuff. She doesn’t play games.”
“Maybe she didn’t when she was your friend. But now she’s your fiancée. The future mother of your baby. And that means games come into play.”
“Are you telling me my sister plays games with you?”
West lifted a shoulder. “We play games with each other. Even if we don’t mean to. That’s how it all works sometimes. Because suddenly when you’ve got your feelings in the mix it’s easier to play games than outright say it. Half the time I’m convinced the game is with your own head. I bet she’s not tricking you on purpose, but she’s probably afraid to ask in case you don’t want to do it.”
“Look. That’s all fine for you two, but she and I have been friends for about a thousand years.”
West leveled a serious look