“How’s the booth going?” he asked.
“Good,” Iris said. He didn’t think it was his imagination that Iris seemed...a little bit chilly. So, maybe Rose wasn’t completely off base with her discomfort.
“Great,” he said. “We’re just taking a break.”
“Yeah,” Rose said, shaking her diminished nut cone.
“We haven’t had time for a break,” Iris said. “We’ve been busy.”
“Great,” he responded. “Well, we won’t keep you, then.”
“Bye,” Sammy said, waving them off.
When they were out of earshot, he turned to Rose. “So she’s really mad at you?”
“I think so,” Rose said. “And I don’t know how to begin to fix it.”
“Do you think she liked him that much?”
“She was starting to. And it’s all bad because I know she’s never put herself out there like that before. But... When I... When I told her...her face, Logan. And she’s been chilly ever since. And I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Well,” he said, “we can’t fix it right now. And you can’t fix it until she tells you what’s going on.”
“I know,” she said.”
“So, I guess that just leaves us with only ourselves to worry about.”
Rose looked up at him, her eyes shining bright, filled with some unnamed emotion.
It wasn’t really excitement. It wasn’t really fear.
It was something else altogether, mixed with a kind of admiration he didn’t think he deserved.
“I guess so,” she said.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get back to the booth.”
There were still a few hours of torture left to go before he’d finally have Rose, naked in his arms.
He’d waited five years.
He could handle a few more hours.
Then she would be his all night.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THERE WAS A time in every woman’s life when she looked at her underwear drawer and found it lacking. At least, Rose assumed this was something that happened to every woman. She had never looked at underwear before and considered what someone else might think of her in them.
It was a little bit annoying, knowing that beyond cleanliness, she doubted men considered it at all. Or maybe they did. She didn’t actually know. Their options were limited, sure. But maybe there was some consideration given to if they were going to wear standard tighty-whities or something a little bit more provocative like a pair of tight black boxer briefs. Again, making assumptions about which would actually look more provocative.
She had seen men in underwear on underwear packaging, but that was about it.
Whether he was worried about it or not, she was going to see Logan in his underwear. And he was going to see her in hers.
She stared at her underwear drawer, as if it might magically make something sexy appear.
Nothing. Not a single scrap of lace.
Show up. Be you.
Yeah, he said that. But hers were plain white and from a variety pack. Both the panties and the sports bras.
Her hands felt numb. She didn’t know why. She opted for the underwear that had a slight bit of scalloped edging on the waistband and legs, and delicate pink roses. Again, from one of those packages. It had probably come with white and gray, something serviceable that tended to be Rose’s go-to. She was grateful now for the hint of floral.
The bra...
Well, she decided to put on a real bra that clasped in the back. She did have two of those. A nude color and a white one. She went with white, just because it matched the panties.
She had never wondered what a man might think of her underwear, or her body. And now she found herself staring in the mirror above her dresser—a dresser that had once belonged to her mother—and giving her body a critical once-over.
She had a decent rack. Kind of narrow hips, and muscular thighs from all the riding that she did. Her arms and midsection were toned. Not bad, all things considered. She’d never been near any kind of waxing. She hoped he didn’t mind that.
The thought made her brain short-circuit, and she knew if she didn’t get dressed and get away from the mirror immediately she was going to talk herself out of this whole thing.
Waxing.
And Logan seeing anywhere that she might need to wax.
Her hands went from numb to sweaty and numb in record time.
Then she slapped her hands down on the top of the dresser and decisively grabbed a pair of jeans and a red sweater. It was her Christmas sweater. One of the nicer things she owned. Not a T-shirt, not plaid, and not a work jacket.
She left her hair down.
Then she turned and started to walk out of her bedroom, down the stairs and into the living room. The dogs were shuffling around down there, making more commotion than she would have liked.
“Settle down,” she hissed.
That was when Sammy came in from the kitchen with a bowl of ice cream in her hand.
“Are you going out?”
“I... Yeah,” Rose said.
Prickles crawled up the back of her neck and she gritted her teeth, hoping the prickles didn’t bloom into a full-blown blush that bled into her face and made it painfully obvious that she was up to something.
“Where?”
She tried to think. It couldn’t be the saloon, because there was every chance that someone from her family would be there.
And if she wasn’t there, then they would wonder where she was.
Maybe this was the real reason she had never had sex before.
Maybe it wasn’t her profound emotional issues.
Maybe it was just the problem of having a large family in a very small town.
There weren’t very many corners for her to hide in. Her family filled up too much of the space.
“Meeting a friend. From high school,” she said.
She had a couple friends in high school on the drill team. And she did often meet up with them for dinner or a drink when they came to town, usually around the holidays, so
