“But it would have been taking advantage of that and it would have been too easy to make choices for you, choices for us, that would be better...discussed. And it didn’t seem like the best idea.”

“So you just left me there to sort it all out instead of having a little bit of self-control?”

He leaned in, grabbing hold of her chin with his thumb and forefinger. “I’ve had self-control for the past seventeen years. Last night wasn’t just a lapse in it. It was an absolute destruction of it as a concept. And I didn’t know what the hell I might do if I stayed there. So yeah, I figured that leaving was about the best thing.”

Seventeen years. That was...that was too much for her to take on board. It made it hard to breathe. So she had to push it aside. “You wouldn’t have done anything I didn’t want you to,” she said.

He lifted a shoulder. “You know that for sure?”

“Yes.”

She turned away from him and took her pie off the counter.

“Get your ice cream,” she said.

He opened up the freezer and grabbed the gallon, following her back into the dining room, and that was the end of their conversation.

But it wasn’t really the end.

Because they would be talking about this more later. Of that he was sure.

One thing he knew, he had done something wrong, and Sammy was mad. Hell had no fury like a woman scorned. And hell’s fury ran from Sammy Marshall when she was pissed. If he had half a brain he would do the same. Except he couldn’t, because he had been the one to cross the line, so he would have to be the one to put it back, he supposed.

And let her go off with another man?

Hell, no. All right, maybe there was no moving the line back.

Ryder didn’t like not having a plan. He liked to be in control. As best as he could. Mostly because life had proven to him that plans and control were a joke, so it made him want to cling to the idea of them even more. If he could build a facade of them, there would at least be that.

And right now he had no idea in hell where things went from here. And not knowing that made him feel like he didn’t know much of anything at all.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

HE WANTED HER. And that changed everything.

Through all of this Sammy had imagined that he was acting out of some weird, misguided sense of chivalry. And he might very well be, in part, because it was Ryder, and that was how he was.

But he wanted her.

Last night his reaction to everything... Well, obviously he wanted her, but initially she had thought it was just a man responding to a woman’s body. After all, that stuff was easy for them. It really was. It was why all the men that she’d ever had sex with had come, and she hadn’t. Because they didn’t need to want her in any kind of particular way, she just needed to be there.