Well, she didn’t want that. She wanted him to be him. So she would have to be her.

With great purpose she stood up and began to put her jewelry fixings away. Then she went upstairs and found the sexiest white lace lingerie that she had. And she had quite a bit. She liked white, and Ryder seemed to very much like her in white.

He liked her even better out of it, and she intended to go ahead and tempt him.

She tiptoed out of the house, her sexy secret concealed beneath the gauzy white dress, and began to go on a quest to find her husband.

* * *

HE WAS WORKING outside the barn, sweat pouring off him, when his wife approached.

Things hadn’t been great in the days following his revelation. Not between them.

He had thought that it would be easy to throw the words out there and not ask for anything back. And he could see that no matter what she said about labels and how words didn’t change anything, they had. Because for the past few days his Samantha had been running scared from him, avoiding his touch, avoiding his kiss. And he wasn’t going to push. Not here, not now. There had been a time when he would have. But not on this.

He couldn’t. Because there would’ve been no pushing him into this revelation, either.

He had a lot of theories about why it had happened, at the Mustard Seed Diner, over a hamburger. Why the words had rolled through his soul like the first rumblings of thunder before a catastrophic storm.

Because love was like that, he supposed.

That it could be there, growing inside you and you wouldn’t know. For all that time.

At least, that was how it was for him. But Logan telling him that he was in love with Sammy hadn’t made him understand the words for himself. And the first time they’d made love, when he’d known that joining his body to hers had changed the fabric of what he was forever, hadn’t spoken those words to him, either.

Wedding vows hadn’t done it.

Because there was nothing on the outside that could ever make you see. Not when you didn’t want to.

It caught him in the moment she had bitten into a french fry. The most innocuous and normal thing he could even think of.

But every moment, every scent, every sight, was more beautiful because of her. There wasn’t a breath he could take that wasn’t infused by the loving of her. And the simple truth was it was so deeply a part of the entirety of who he was that the words hadn’t formed around it until all those changes had happened. It had taken every last one of them. Sex. Pregnancy. Marriage. Fear. And in those spaces, the words had finally found purchase on his soul.

And now they were imprinted there, he couldn’t unknow it. That he loved her more than he loved anything.