“If I tell you, you have to promise not say anything.”
“Rose...”
“I’m serious.”
“Fine,” Pansy said. “I promise.”
“It’s Logan. He kissed me. He kissed me, and I liked it. But he infuriates me. And, he’s not going to... I mean, it could never be a long-term thing with him, right?”
“Rose...”
“It’s okay. I don’t want it to be, I’m just saying I get that...with how things are the fact it would have to end would make things complicated. But I keep thinking if I’m going to learn something about sex...”
“Sleeping with a guy who is practically your brother is maybe not the best place to start.”
The words caught Rose off guard. Because she had caught Ryder and Sammy making out and had immediately recoiled in horror and accused them of practically being related. It was funny to hear somebody else say it to her.
“He’s not, though,” she said. “My brother. That’s the thing.”
“He lives at Hope Springs. He’s there on every holiday. You work with him every day.”
“I know,” Rose said.
“If he breaks your heart...”
“He won’t,” Rose said.
“You don’t know that,” Pansy said. “Because you can’t actually know how you’re going to feel until you actually... Until you actually do it. And then it will be too late.”
“I wish I could talk to Sammy,” Rose said. “Obviously she knew how to have sex without catching feelings.”
“You could talk to Sammy, but she would tell Ryder, and he would kill Logan before you ever got a chance to touch him.”
“I know,” Rose said. “And isn’t that part of the problem? This town is so small and everyone is so protective of me. Even Logan. He wants me. I know he does. But he wants to protect me from himself, which is basically the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s not dumb,” Pansy said. “It’s responsible. Because he understands what all of this could make you feel. And you don’t. My advice...” Pansy sighed heavily. “My advice is to listen to him. Because he knows what he can give.”
Rose frowned. “Didn’t West...”
Right as she said that, the door to the office opened. She turned, and her eyes collided with electric blue. Something twisted in her stomach, and then her brain caught up with what she was seeing. It was West. Her sister’s fiancé. But for a moment, she had seen that blue and all she had thought was... Logan.
She had thought before that the two men’s eye color was similar, but it had never impacted her like this. Obviously.
Her cheeks heated, getting prickly.
“You guys talking about me?” West asked.
“No,” Pansy said. “Everything isn’t about you.” She got up from her desk and moved past Rose, where she was still sitting resolutely.
West wrapped his arms around her sister, kissing her passionately. And Rose felt...prickly.
“I didn’t realize it was going to be a table for three,” West said.
“It’s not,” Pansy said cheerfully. “Rose was just going.”
“She didn’t look like she was going.”
“She was,” Pansy said.
Then she stretched up on her toes and whispered in his ear.
“Good to see you, Rose. We’ll catch you later,” he said.
Rose watched her sister and her future brother-in-law retreating quickly, and became more and more angry. It was clear to her that they were off to do some kind of amorous nonsense. After she had given Rose a puritanical lecture.
And she hadn’t even given her the chance to finish her sentence.
West had been very clear about what he could and couldn’t offer, too. It didn’t seem fair that Pansy would tell her she needed to listen to what Logan had said when Pansy herself clearly hadn’t listened when West had warned her off.
The problem was... The problem was... She just didn’t know if she wanted to take the step.
She felt increasingly sorry for herself, sitting there with a sandwich in her hands that wasn’t hers. She had gotten mustard on it, because Pansy liked mustard. And she didn’t. So here she was with a sandwich she couldn’t even eat. And she hadn’t liked the advice she had gotten. Not at all.
It would have been better if Pansy would have told her to go for it so Rose could have argued against that.
Instead, she felt sullen and rebellious, and on the verge of making a decision that might compromise everything she was. Everything her life was made out of.
Maybe that was dramatic.
It was one kiss, after all.
It was one kiss, and she could let it go.
But it had opened up a flood of thoughts and ideas inside of her that she never had before.
Being near Logan was like being near a furnace, and avoiding him was a feat that took complicated dance steps given the way their lives were arranged.
Maybe if she did nothing it would fade. Maybe if she did nothing she would be able to regroup and go back to the way things were. But the problem was she doubted it.
It will be worse if you kiss him again.
Or if she slept with him.
She looked around her sister’s office. At all the things that Pansy had achieved.
A career. A fiancé.
Rose swallowed hard. For the first time, she felt genuinely left behind.
She hadn’t felt that way. She had focused on the fact that Iris might feel left behind. That she might feel alone in the aftermath of her siblings finding love. Especially as an older sister.
And Rose had resolutely not thought of herself.
Because it wasn’t even fair of her to feel it yet. Not when Iris wasn’t...solved.
Stupidly, sitting there in a plastic chair, holding a sandwich, with her sister’s achievements plastered on the wall in front of her, and their father’s before her, she wanted to cry.
Rose was proud of herself. Of the work she did on the ranch. She was. That wasn’t even it.
She just felt the same. And changed all at once.
She didn’t know how those two things went together. But they did. Because Rose, Rose herself, was in the exact same place she had been
