“Promising,” Sammy said, a smile touching her lips.

“See?” Rose said. “She doesn’t mind talking about it.”

“I have no problem saying I don’t want to talk about something if I don’t want to talk about it,” Sammy said. “I don’t really have a problem coming out and saying anything.”

“No,” Ryder said. “It’s whether or not you’ll say what you really feel. That’s the question.”

Their eyes held. And he could read the unspoken communication there. Asking him if he really wanted to get into this kind of stuff in front of people. Because while he didn’t think she was going to announce what had happened between them, he had a feeling she would push the line.

Well. Fine.

He shrugged.

“I mean,” Sammy said, all cotton-candy voiced, “it’s better than keeping everything shoved down deep and then dying someday of constipated emotions.”

“Is there popcorn?” Rose asked, her eyes bright.

Logan gave Rose a long, hard look.

“What?” she asked. “This is the most entertaining thing that’s happened here in a long time.”

“You mean, ever since Pansy lost her mind and is marrying an ex-convict?” Logan asked.

Clearly, his friend was attempting to shift the focus of the conversation, because even if Logan had the wrong end of the stick, he knew that there were things happening between him and Sammy, which was something his younger sister would never pick up on.

“Sure,” Rose said. “But if Sammy is going to call Ryder out, I want a front-row seat.”

“You have one,” Iris said. “With steak.”

She got up from the table and went into the kitchen, coming back with the steak that had been resting. There was salad and green beans, too, and for a moment everybody was occupied dishing food and tearing chunks of bread off the loaf that Iris had made.

That meant that he and Sammy had a choice. They could call a cease-fire. Because with oral sex and an orgasm between them maybe it wasn’t the best idea to be pushing all this out in the open.

But he wasn’t in the mood.

“Better than trying to inflict your feelings on everyone else, I expect,” he said. “Then other people might die of them.”

“Oh right. Me and my harebrained schemes. Always inflicting myself on people. That’s me. And yet...here you are. And here I am. So for all the trouble that I cause, you seem to need it. You seem to need me.”

“Are we in the middle of a fight that we didn’t see the beginning of?” Iris asked.

“Something like that,” Sammy responded.

“I want to eat steak,” Logan said. “You have a problem with that?”

“Can you not eat steak when there’s tension around you, Logan?” Sammy asked. “I didn’t realize that you needed to clear your chakras in order to enjoy your food. But I can burn some sage if you want.”

Sammy had clearly correctly identified that Logan was on his side. And she was not happy about it.