Saint chomped down on her lower lip and fiddled with her hair. “It’s not that funny.”
Royal patted her friend on the shoulder. “I told you that you were being ridiculous. That boy is sprung on you. He would keep you in his pocket if he could.”
I nodded in agreement. “He would. He talks about how great you are, about how the new shop wouldn’t have gotten off the ground if it wasn’t for you. Just go for it. You don’t want to look back and realize you wasted time with someone that matters to you.”
That of course had all eyes on me, so I picked up the hot-pink drink in front of me and met Cora’s questioning gaze head-on.
“Are you speaking from experience, Salem?” There was laughter in her tone but something deeper as well. I knew she was really close to Rowdy, looked at him almost like a little brother, so I wasn’t going to play coy with her.
“Rowdy and I have a lot of lost time between us. I don’t know that I would do anything differently necessarily, but I do know that when I look at him now I see a lot of things I wish I had been around to experience.”
“What exactly is going on between the two of you?” That came from Ayden and she didn’t have any humor in her tone. Rowdy was her man’s BFF and she wouldn’t tolerate me playing around with him. It was clear in her amber eyes and the firm set of her mouth.
I shrugged a shoulder. “He calls it getting reacquainted.”
One of her dark eyebrows shot up until it almost touched her superstraight bangs. “What do you call it?”
I was going to answer when Shaw suddenly interjected and I realized she was the peacekeeper of the group.
“Leave her alone, Ayd. None of us have any room to talk when it comes to figuring out what is happening with these guys. It was like walking across a shaky bridge with no handrails hanging over the steepest canyon trying to get from where we were to where we wanted to be with all of them, so lay off of Salem. Rowdy is happy, he’s not out sleeping with half of Denver anymore, so why doesn’t everyone just leave it at that?”
I didn’t love having the fact that Rowdy’s salacious ways were well known and thrown into the mix but I couldn’t pretend he had been saving himself for me. I sighed and ran my finger around the rim of the glass.
“There’s a lot of history we have to wade through, so for now I’m just taking it day by day. I came to Denver mostly because he was here, but once I got here I found out some stuff about him and my sister I didn’t know, and that’s been challenging to work through.”
Cora tsked and reached for her plate of food. “He’s always been hooked on this idea that there is one true love. We’ve all tried to tell him that’s silly and that there are a million wonderful women in the world that would be happy to have him, but he’s been adamant—at least he was until you showed up. His tune changed real quick then.”
I sighed again. “He asked my sister to marry him when he was eighteen and she turned him down.”
A collective gasp went up from all the other girls that again had the other restaurant patrons looking in our direction.
I shook my head ruefully and forced a lopsided grin. “I knew he had a thing for her, a crush, I thought. I had no idea he was thinking forever and ever with her. I worry that he might have lingering feelings that he can’t separate from this thing we have going on now.”
Cora snorted and poked the end of her fork at me. “We all do dumb things when we’re eighteen. You don’t even wanna know about the guy I was with when I was eighteen. It was just a mistake born out of loneliness and insecurity. We all made them back then.”
Ayden nodded vigorously. “I made really bad choices way before I turned eighteen and my idiot brother had already been locked up more than once by the time he was that age. It isn’t fair to hold the past against him.”
Saint even chimed in. “Nash broke my heart into a million pieces right around the time he was eighteen. It almost kept me from giving him a fair chance when he came back into my life last year. That would have been the worst mistake I ever made.”
I sighed again and picked up my drink to finish the last little bit of it. I needed another and maybe another when I started thinking about Rowdy and his feelings for my sister.
“It’s my sister.” That was a complication I don’t think any of them could really grasp, because as much as I cared about Rowdy, there was no way I was ever going to not have the same blood in my veins as, and undying loyalty to, Poppy.
“What does he say about it all now?” Man, I really did love Shaw. She was always so levelheaded and her entire demeanor was just so loving and open. She was going to make a spectacular mother even if the kid turned out as wild and unpredictable as its dad.