For all the good they’d done raising her, she might as well have lost them.
“See you tomorrow,” Logan said.
“Bye,” Rose said.
“We’ll hang out for a while,” Pansy said.
Though, he could tell by the way West was looking at his fiancée he was hoping to make it an early night, for pretty obvious reasons.
Logan’s stomach tightened up. Because that would mean being alone with Rose. And he didn’t like that. Not one bit. He’d already played with fire when it came to late nights and a little bit of beer with her. And she had no idea how close she’d come to being burned.
No. He’d never burn her. He wouldn’t. Never once had he thought seriously about acting on any of the feelings that he’d experienced for her over the last couple of years. But he’d been in situations where they had been closer to the surface than he wanted them.
And he wasn’t about to put himself back there again.
“I’m going to make a move,” Rose said, as Ryder and Sammy filed out of the saloon.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
And that was when the irrepressible brunette scampered across the saloon and approached Elliott Johns.
He gritted his teeth and watched in horror as she began to talk to him, and Logan could see interest lighting up the other man’s face.
He was also absolutely certain that Rose was over there being an ambassador for Iris, and only for that reason.
Elliott clearly thought otherwise.
Oh, Rose. You don’t know what you’re playing at.
About thirty seconds later, they were crossing the bar, and she had brought him back to the table. “Logan, will you get another beer? Elliott is going to join us for the evening.”
CHAPTER TWO
ROSE FOUND ELLIOTT to be perfectly pleasant. He was friendly and polite. His hands were very clean. Rose thought this notable because often she was around men whose hands were not clean. Not that they didn’t wash their hands. But there was a sort of ingrained dirt in the hands of a cowboy. It got down underneath their nails so deep the nail would probably have to come off in order to get the grunge. She understood.
She was a cowgirl. It wasn’t like her hands were much cleaner.
Anyway. She noticed clean fingernails.
Rose imagined that her sister Iris would, too. Iris was not a cowgirl.
Iris was the soft, steady maternal figure in her life. She’d had Sammy too, who had moved in with them the same year their parents had died, and become friends with Ryder. A free-spirited earth-mother type. She infused the house with fun. Iris brought dependability. Made sure Rose’s hair was brushed for school, that her clothes had been neat and washed.
She’d mended holes in socks and kept the first aid kit stocked.
Sometimes she gave her sister a little bit of a hard time for being quite so staid and sensible. She was practical all the way down to her shoes. It was part of Iris’s charm. And for as long as Rose could remember Iris had been the soft touch in her life.
After the loss of their parents, between Iris and Sammy they had all been very well cared for, for a ragtag group of orphans.
Rose had been too young to give back.
She had been reliant on Ryder and Logan to keep the ranch going, to keep income coming in. Colt and Jake helped with that later, often sending money back from the rodeo. She had been dependent on Sammy and Iris to cook for her.
And of course Pansy had been... Well, she’d been younger too, but she had been Rose’s older sister. Someone she had looked up to. Pansy had taught her to take their hardships and make purpose out of it.
Rose wasn’t sure what she’d done for anyone. At least beyond being a little bit of a burden. Not that she blamed herself. Not really. She had been six years old when her parents had died.
But she could make up for it now. She worked Hope Springs Ranch along with Ryder and Logan, with the occasional help of their cousins Jake and Colt.
She was invested in the happiness of her family. Makeshift and otherwise.
Granted, she had been wrong about Logan and Sammy. She grimaced, remembering that just five short months ago she had been advocating for the two of them to get together. But it had honestly never occurred to her that Sammy would hook up with Rose’s older brother. The two of them had been best friends for so long that Rose had figured they saw each other as brother and sister.
They clearly did not.
Still, she had a feeling about this. She had a feeling about Elliott. Elliott and his clean hands, and his very nice manners. After she had invited him to come sit down at the table he had offered to buy her the next beer that she had.
“So,” she said, “tell me more about water filtration systems.”
She could feel West and Pansy looking at her with great skepticism, and she could feel Logan next to her. He was vibrating with some kind of repressed energy that she couldn’t name.
“Well,” he said, “the things they’re doing with whole house filtration systems now are very interesting.”
It was not interesting.
But he was very competent and knowledgeable about the subject, and on some level she supposed she had to respect that. Even though she was citing football statistics in her head, and thinking about... Literally anything but what he was saying. Like picking dirt out of a horse’s hooves. Cleaning out her own fingernails. The current market price of hay...
“I
