“Except for you,” he pointed out.
“It’s not the same.”
“How isn’t it the same?”
“I mean... Logan, I’m twenty-three. I’m not remotely ready to settle down or anything like that. I love my life.”
“Maybe Iris loves her life.”
That made her pause. She thought of her sweet sister, who only ever showed how funny and bright she was in a room surrounded by her family. Who liked to bake and knit and spend her evenings at home. And she just couldn’t get past the fact that she wondered if Iris had made the best of the box she’d been pushed into. Maybe it would have been who she was...eventually. But not as a young woman.
Maybe if she hadn’t had to raise Rose she would have dated.
Maybe she’d be settled at home knitting with a husband and children of her own and not...in a house that was, well, it was different now. Ryder and Sammy were married and it was Sammy’s house too now.
They’d be having a baby soon.
Even Ryder, who had devoted all that he was to taking care of them after their parents’ deaths, had found someone. Was moving on.
Iris remained.
And how could Rose ever...how could she ever move on if Iris didn’t? Knowing she might be the cause of her sister’s current situation?
“And so much of what she does is because she had to settle into that role too soon. She’s basically a spinster aunt and she’s only thirty-one.”
“Please say this to Iris, because I have a feeling it would go over really well.”
“I have said it to Iris,” Rose said. Okay, not in those terms. She didn’t want to hurt her sister’s feelings.
Logan shook his head and jerked his truck door open, and Rose climbed into the passenger seat beside him. “I’m telling you,” he said. “This is not a great idea.”
“I’m sorry, Logan, if this were a matter of cows, I might listen to you, but this is a matter of people.”
“And you think you have superior experience with people than me?”
“I think that you deliberately don’t have a lot of experience with people. You ranch, you drink, you sleep.”
“I do other things,” he said, his tone exceedingly dry.
“What things?”
He was driving, so he didn’t look at her, but again, she could feel what he was thinking. She didn’t know how he managed that. To make his feelings so clear to her that she could feel them inside her own chest sometimes.
She shifted uncomfortably, because she had a feeling that he was thinking of... Well, things she didn’t want to think about concerning Logan. He was her friend. Her coworker. She didn’t need to go thinking of him as a...as a man. Doing things men did.
“Never mind,” she muttered.
“Well, don’t ask if you don’t want to have a conversation.”
“I’ll bet you that they hit it off,” she continued, happy to step away from the more disconcerting part of the conversation.
“Fine,” he said. “You’re on.”
“If I win... If I win I get to set you up.”
“Not a damn chance.”
“So you’re afraid that I’ll win.”
He said nothing.
“You are,” she said. “You’re afraid that I’ll win.”
“Fine,” he said. “If you successfully hook the two of them up, you have my permission to seek out someone for me.”
She felt immediately flat. Because the fact that he agreed likely did mean that he didn’t believe that she was right about this. But she did. She didn’t need for his vote of confidence to be sincere.
“It’s a deal. You’ll see.”
“Oh, I imagine I’ll see plenty.”
And with that, Rose decided she was done with him. Done having the conversation. Sometimes there was no one more infuriating in her life than Logan Heath.
But he was her closest coworker. And in many ways, had grown into being one of her best friends. Except, an older, grumpy, superior best friend, who could be a serious pain in the ass sometimes.
So really, another brother.
She was going to succeed with Iris. And then she would set Logan up, too. She wouldn’t let him put a damper on her plans. On that she was determined.
CHAPTER THREE
“WHAT’S THIS I hear about going out to the bar tonight?”
Logan let out an exasperated snort as he was approached by his friend the next day. He stopped moving in the middle of scooping up a shovel of stall shavings. “Your sister is cooking up one of her harebrained schemes.”
He didn’t have to specify which sister.
Ryder knew without needing to be told.
And Logan could see a train wreck coming from a mile away. But Rose wasn’t going to be convinced. She wasn’t going to be convinced until she forced everybody into an awkward situation. She had done that with himself and Sammy, and thankfully the two of them were self-actualized enough—and not into each other enough—that it hadn’t bothered him at all.
Logan had known that it was Ryder who was in love with Sammy. And he had been reasonably confident that Sammy was into Ryder, and had absolutely no designs on Logan at all. It had been confirmed when Sammy had gotten pregnant, and the father was Ryder. Now the two of them were married, which was basically how Logan had always thought it should be.
And frankly, confirmed that he had a slightly better eye for these things than Rose.
In Rose’s defense, she was young.
As she had pointed out, thirty-two was too old for her.
At twenty-three, she was determinedly going around trying to write checks she didn’t have the experience to cash.
He tried not to remember the way he had felt when she’d said that. Thirty-two being old.
It had been like a barb under his skin. Made him feel like exactly what he had been concerned
