The order of things was a damned goddess as far as Ryder was concerned.

“You live in a camper,” he pointed out, because if he knew one thing about Sammy it was that what seemed logical to him didn’t always track with her line of thinking.

“So?” she asked. “Have you seen how much space babies take up?”

“Sammy,” he said. “You don’t...”

“I’m not going to go and buy one tomorrow,” she said. “I’m thinking about having one.”

“Are you with someone?” With Sammy standing there in white, her blond hair lit up by the streetlamps, he was forced to imagine her in a wedding gown. With a man standing beside her. And suddenly, he could easily see a baby in her arms. Cradled close to her breasts. For some reason, the image made his stomach turn sour.

“No,” she said.

The image still refused to vanish, in spite of her assurance that there was no man.

Sammy was a free spirit. The idea of her being tied down to some kind of domestic... Well, he knew what it was like. There was a reason he had no interest at all in getting married. And having a family of his own. He’d raised children. He loved them, with everything he was, and he had stood at the front lines of life protecting them for years. He didn’t want to do it again. He knew what a grim parade of responsibility it could be, and Sammy had no real idea. The relentlessness of it.

How sometimes you just wanted to go to sleep but you had two little girls having nightmares. Teenage boys sneaking out.

One time Colt had up and disappeared for two days. The fight they’d had after that had been extreme. Ryder was only three years his senior, but he was in charge. And all he could think of was...

The responsibility had been left to him. Whether or not their parents had intended that, it didn’t matter. His aunt and uncle were gone, and it had been up to him to keep Colt safe. And at fifteen Colt had most definitely felt like they were essentially the same age. But Ryder felt a burden of responsibility that his cousin would never have understood.

Because Ryder was in charge.

Because he was the one who was supposed to protect everybody. And it didn’t stop. Twenty-four hours a day, it didn’t stop.

Hell, it didn’t stop now that they were adults. And it was ridiculous because he wasn’t a father.

He had just been a kid who’d had to become a man very, very quickly.

And Sammy had no idea what she was signing herself up for.

“As someone who had the benefit of parenthood without all that baby fever stuff, let me tell you, it’s not fun.”

“I don’t need it to be fun,” she said. “It’s not like I’m wanting a baby as an accessory. I just want... I want to make a home and a family. I don’t think that’s weird. I want a baby. That’s... Biologically we’re kind of geared toward wanting that. At least I am. I understand that you had your fill of it. And I don’t blame you. I don’t blame you for not wanting to do it again. But I’ve never done it. You’ve taken care of me most of my life, and before that I was by myself. No one took care of me. I want to take care of someone else. I want to... I know it doesn’t make sense necessarily, but there’s something I need to heal. Something that was broken by my parents. I can’t have a mother-child relationship with my mother. You know that. But I can have one with my own child.”