That was the wrong way to think about it. That made a flush creep out over her skin.

She was not going to think about her friend that way. Not anymore.

But for some reason, she couldn’t just banish these thoughts. And they played over and over in her mind. Her best friend in a towel. Her best friend talking about orgasms. Her best friend offering to be the father of her baby.

And by the time she woke up the next morning her entire mind was a tangle of all these thoughts, and she wasn’t any closer to sorting out anything.

There was only one person she could talk to about this.

She got up and angrily dragged herself toward the main house.

Thankfully, she knew that she had missed Ryder for the day.

But Iris would be there.

Iris would be in the kitchen at this point heating up something delicious for breakfast.

Sammy walked into the main house without bothering to knock and angrily stamped toward the location of her friend.

“Wow,” Iris said when Sammy appeared in the doorway. “You look rough.” She winced. “Did you...sleep rough?”

She had a feeling that was her friend’s delicate way of asking if she’d hooked up.

“I did, but not the way you mean.”

“What’s going on?”

“I’m in a fight with your brother.”

Iris cleared her throat. “Well, after all that the other night I can’t say that I’m surprised.”

“It’s not his business,” Sammy said.

“Sammy,” Iris said, affecting a humorous, deep voice. “Everything the light touches is his kingdom. He absolutely is going to think that this has everything to do with him. You’re part of his... His whole thing here.”

Except, she didn’t really think she was. She was a part and different. And she didn’t think that just because he had essentially proposed marriage to her. But because of the way he had talked to her about sex.

It wasn’t the same.

And that wounded her in a strange way, too, because it made all this feel precarious.

And she didn’t like it.

“I know,” she said, feeling it was best to gloss over any of her internal rambling. “But I don’t like it. And he...”

She didn’t know how to tell Iris, actually. That was the problem. Standing there now, pondering it, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to.

Because Ryder saying yes to the baby meant he was saying yes to the two of them having sex.

That thought, cold and blatant, stopped her cold. And she knew she wasn’t supposed to think of any of this in those terms.

Because it was all supposed to be about conception, of creating life and babies. But he had brought up orgasms. So now there it was.

He had brought up marriage, so that was something else entirely.

And she was suddenly caught in a place where she didn’t want to say what was on her mind. Where she didn’t want to talk about everything that had happened the night before. Usually she would, and count on a little bit of shock and awe.