The Hero of Hope Springs Page 13

  “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 things happening between him and Sammy, which was something his younger sister would never pick up on.

  “Sure,” Rose said. “But if Sammy is going to call Ryder out, I want a front-row seat.”

  “You have one,” Iris said. “With steak.”

  She got up from the table and went into the kitchen, coming back with the steak that had been resting. There was salad and green beans, too, and for a moment everybody was occupied dishing food and tearing chunks of bread off the loaf that Iris had made.

  That meant that he and Sammy had a choice. They could call a cease-fire. Because with oral sex and an orgasm between them maybe it wasn’t the best idea to be pushing all this out in the open.

  But he wasn’t in the mood.

  “Better than trying to inflict your feelings on everyone else, I expect,” he said. “Then other people might die of them.”

  “Oh right. Me and my harebrained schemes. Always inflicting myself on people. That’s me. And yet...here you are. And here I am. So for all the trouble that I cause, you seem to need it. You seem to need me.”

  “Are we in the middle of a fight that we didn’t see the beginning of?” Iris asked.

  “Something like that,” Sammy responded.

  “I want to eat steak,” Logan said. “You have a problem with that?”

  “Can you not eat steak when there’s tension around you, Logan?” Sammy asked. “I didn’t realize that you needed to clear your chakras in order to enjoy your food. But I can burn some sage if you want.”

  Sammy had clearly correctly identified that Logan was on his side. And she was not happy about it.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” Logan said. And as if to prove his point he cut into the steak and took a bite.

  Sammy was tapping the edge of her ceramic flowered plate. These plates had been gifts that Sammy had brought with her. Ferreted out of various charity stores and yard sales. She had compiled enough dishes for the expanded family, including her.

  She had elbowed her way in. Made a place for herself.

  And he had put everything she did down to shenanigans. He did treat her like she was a kid. Like she was running with her arms in a windmill doing things that had no point or purpose. But these nonmatching dishes had a purpose. Like all the other things that she did.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  She blinked, her lips twitching. “What?”

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been poking at you.”

  “Somebody write this on a calendar,” Rose said.

  “I apologize, when I’m wrong.”

  “When you think you’re wrong,” Rose said. “Which is basically never.”

  “Well, I haven’t had the luxury of running around thinking I might be wrong. Because usually I just have to make decisions and stick with them. But I was picking on Sammy, and that wasn’t okay. So there. See? I can apologize.”

  “We’ll have to continue the conversation later,” Sammy said. And then she shifted, brushing up against him again, and he realized that was calculated, too.

  They finished eating, and then Sammy got up to get her pie from the kitchen. “I’ll help,” he said.

  “It’s just a pie,” she responded.

  She said it so sweetly that he was sure she was making him push the fact that he wanted to be alone with her.

  “There’s ice cream. Anyway, it’s chivalry.”

  The two of them went into the kitchen, and she leaned against the counter, crossing her arms. “Is there something you want to say?”

  He thought about pulling her into his arms and kissing the smirk off her face, but his sisters were in the next room, and it wasn’t the time.

  “You okay?”

  “Are you inquiring about my well-being postorgasmically?”

  “Yes,” he said, gritting his teeth.

  “I think the time to do that would have been when you actually did it. Instead of leaving me.”

  “It was the right thing to do at the time.”

  “Was it? Because it seems to me that if it was the right thing to do, it would be the right thing to do now, not just at the time.”

  “Are you mad at me for leaving?”

  She shifted her shoulders, making a strange little smirk with her mouth. “I wouldn’t say that I’m mad. I just... I don’t know. You’re my friend. I expected you to stay and talk to me.”

  “It was better if I didn’t,” he said, his voice rough. “Trust me on that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” he said. “I would have taken things further. And it didn’t seem like you were in the headspace to do that.”

  She huffed a laugh. “I was actually in a pretty great headspace to do that, all things considered.”

  “But it would have been taking advantage of that and it would have been too easy to make choices for you, choices for us, that would be better...discussed. And it didn’t seem like the best idea.”

  “So you just left me there to sort it all out instead of having a little bit of self-control?”

  He leaned in, grabbing hold of her chin with his thumb and forefinger. “I’ve had self-control for the past seventeen years. Last night wasn’t just a lapse in it. It was an absolute destruction of it as a concept. And I didn’t know what the hell I might do if I stayed there. So yeah, I figured that leaving was about the best thing.”

  Seventeen years. That was...that was too much for her to take on board. It made it hard to breathe. So she had to push it aside. “You wouldn’t have done anything I didn’t want you to,” she said.

  He lifted a shoulder. “You know that for sure?”

  “Yes.”

  She turned away from him and took her pie off the counter.

  “Get your ice cream,” she said.

  He opened up the freezer and grabbed the gallon, following her back into the dining room, and that was the end of their conversation.

  But it wasn’t really the end.

  Because they would be talking about this more later. Of that he was sure.

  One thing he knew, he had done something wrong, and Sammy was mad. Hell had no fury like a woman scorned. And hell’s fury ran from Sammy Marshall when she was pissed. If he had half a brain he would do the same. Except he couldn’t, because he had been the one to cross the line, so he would have to be the one to put it back, he supposed.

  And let her go off with another man?

  Hell, no.
All right, maybe there was no moving the line back.

  Ryder didn’t like not having a plan. He liked to be in control. As best as he could. Mostly because life had proven to him that plans and control were a joke, so it made him want to cling to the idea of them even more. If he could build a facade of them, there would at least be that.

  And right now he had no idea in hell where things went from here. And not knowing that made him feel like he didn’t know much of anything at all.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  HE WANTED HER. And that changed everything.

  Through all of this Sammy had imagined that he was acting out of some weird, misguided sense of chivalry. And he might very well be, in part, because it was Ryder, and that was how he was.

  But he wanted her.

  Last night his reaction to everything... Well, obviously he wanted her, but initially she had thought it was just a man responding to a woman’s body. After all, that stuff was easy for them. It really was. It was why all the men that she’d ever had sex with had come, and she hadn’t. Because they didn’t need to want her in any kind of particular way, she just needed to be there.

  Show up, bring boobs.

  But she had the feeling now that Ryder wanted her. Her. And no man had ever made her feel like that during sex. And all right, they hadn’t had full-on intercourse-type sex. And she hadn’t seen him naked. And she wasn’t really sure he had seen her so much as had his... Well, that was the most intimate thing she had ever done.

  And it had felt wonderful. Wonderful. And nothing had ever felt like that for her. She had never been able to let go with a man like that. Moreover, she hadn’t wanted to. And she had resisted at first. Resisted letting Ryder carry her off into that dark unknown with his arms around her and his tongue...there.

  And all today she had been thinking... Why shouldn’t she have that? She had some power here. He wasn’t just coming after her because he wanted to save her from herself. No, he had offered because he wanted her. You couldn’t do that to a woman and not want her; at least she didn’t think so. Sex was one thing, tasting her like that was another. Certainly none of the men she’d been with had ever been... Well, some of them had tried, and she had immediately crawled off the bed. Nearly out of her skin.

  The whole thing just had never appealed to her.

  But Ryder had done it and...it was like her world had been burned to the ground. But not in a bad way. She had just been standing there watching everything go up in flames around her, and it had seemed beautiful and warm and wonderful.

  She had gone up right along with it, and it had still seemed wonderful.

  It made her feel different about the whole thing. About him. About his offer.

  They were friends after all. Maybe they could manage to be friends with benefits. Maybe they could be friends who had that kind of sex and a baby between them. She had avoided him after dinner, which was maybe a little bit mean. But she was mounting a campaign. She had an idea. Then the very thought of what she was about to do made her feel sick inside, but it had to happen. Because she had to know. Before she made any kind of decisions about whether or not he would be the one. Before she decided how much she was willing to bend and break with his demands...she had to know.

  She dotted the insides of her wrist with perfume and looked in the mirror. She didn’t have any makeup on, but she often skipped makeup. Instead, she pinched her cheeks and wet her lips, fluffing her hair and looking at the woman in the mirror.

  The woman who was about to take a step with her friend that she wouldn’t be able to take back.

  Last night was that step.

  Or maybe it was several steps ago. When she had asked if he would be the father of her baby.

  Or maybe before that when she had told him about her plan in the first place.

  Maybe it had all changed sometime before she could even remember. Maybe there had just been the slow, inevitable walk toward something new. Something different. Maybe no matter how badly you wanted to stay in one place, the way things moved around you meant you couldn’t.

  She was filled with maybes and she didn’t have a lot of answers. But that was the story of her life.

  She was on a quest for something more concrete; if she wasn’t then she wouldn’t have embarked on the whole baby endeavor to begin with.

  Ryder was the strongest, most solid man she knew. And so on that score she could see the value in agreeing to what he had asked her to agree to.

  But beyond that... Beyond that was the way he’d made her feel, and when had anyone in her life touched her and made her feel that good? They hadn’t. Not ever.

  Didn’t she deserve that?

  Buried in all those thoughts was a concern about the way he had called her selfish. And if maybe this line of thinking was selfish, as well. But she wasn’t sure she cared. She wasn’t sure she could afford to care, not now.

  Because now that the idea was in her head, that it should be him, now that he had touched her the way he had, kissed her...

  And none of it was simple, because it was all bound up into many things. Because he was her friend, and because they had never done anything like this before. Because she had never felt anything like that before with anyone, because all of this was linked to the idea of having a baby together, and then because of him, the idea of maybe getting married...

  Yeah, it was a little bit complicated and she wanted to reduce it right now.

  To sensation.

  To the way that he had made her feel, because it was new, and it was amazing, and it was different from anything she had ever felt before.

  She opened the door to the caravan and walked outside, the warm summer evening washing over her skin. Her nipples pebbled beneath her thin top. She wasn’t wearing a bra. She often didn’t wear a bra; she didn’t have breasts that were much of anything to write home about, so there wasn’t a point when she wore tank tops. No use fussing around with strapless bras and things like that when she might as well just forgo.

  But she happened to know tonight that the white tank top she was wearing was a little bit see-through. As was the skirt that she had put on.

  She had put on underwear, but only because she had a pair of very cute white lace panties that she thought he might like.

  The idea sent an arrow of pleasure shooting straight through her core.

  She didn’t think she’d ever thought about sex and attraction in these terms before. The idea of wearing things for men... Well again, she just assumed that men kind of wanted whatever woman presented herself as available. So she had never gone out of her way to make herself particularly attractive to a particular sort of man.

  She tended to attract the kind of man that she liked. She gave off a bohemian vibe, and she often worked at arts-and-craft fairs and farmers markets. She was primed to manifest the kind of man who frequented those places.

  But that meant she didn’t really try in a specific sense. But she didn’t know what Ryder liked. Apart from the fact that she was now convinced that he liked her.

  She had never known any of the women that he had slept with.

  And if pressed, she would have said that he probably liked a neat, practical woman. One with contained hair. Possibly a brunette. Who favored T-shirts and jeans.

  Except that he wanted her. She was sure. And she had only become more sure over dinner tonight.

  And when he’d said...when he’d said he’d had seventeen years of self-control.

  Seventeen years.

  All this time.

  It was mean of her to do it like this, she knew.

  And maybe even a little bit cowardly. Because they could have talked about it. They talked about everything, though. And she was kind of tired of talking, because it hadn’t gotten them anywhere interesting. No, last night had been the big advancement, and he hadn’t been using his tongue to form words.
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br />   Heat spread through her body and she picked through the tall grass, heading toward the main house. But she didn’t go to the front door. Instead, she crept behind the large oak tree that stood on the side of the house. She hiked her skirt up, another reason to wear underwear if she could ever think of one, and leveraged herself up onto the lowest branch. Then she began to climb. Higher and higher until she reached the second floor. Until she reached a very familiar window.

  She hadn’t done this since she was maybe...nineteen? Probably the last time she had ever done anything quite so silly as climb through this window and get into bed with him. But she was doing it now, and it wasn’t for innocent reasons. Of course, he might have locked the window, which would ruin her plan.

  And she had no other backup plan except maybe coming to the front door.

  Which she was not above doing.

  She made it to the top of the tree, and shinnied out on the branch toward the window. She reached out, testing it and finding that it gave easily. And then, with as much grace as she could muster, she slipped through the opening and into his bedroom.

  She swallowed hard, looking down at his sleeping form.

  She’d never thought about doing this. Not once. She had no idea how she hadn’t thought of it. Especially when she had come in here so many times as a hormone-ridden teenager.

  But Ryder had never been about hormones. He’d always been about safety.

  And if she contorted she could pretend that there was an element of wanting safety and security here, too. But that wasn’t the why of it. It was because she wanted—no, needed—to touch him.

  Her breath caught in her throat. Now that she was there... Well, now that she was standing here she didn’t know what to do next. Her certainty was gone, and he was so often her source of certainty that feeling this way about him was... It was terrifying. But the only way was through; she knew that.

  So she had to make a choice.

  She wrenched her shirt up over her head, and then pushed her skirt down her thighs, so that she was wearing only that pair of lace panties.

  Then she heard him stir.