Page 71 of Always Been His

I reach for them. “What are we doing?”

“I’m behind on the afternoon batch by forty minutes,” she replies, “because I spent my entire morning stress-baking instead of regular-baking, and they are not the same thing.” She pulls a ball of dough from the proofing drawer and drops it onto the floured surface between us with a decisive thud. “You’re going to help me roll this out, you’re going to start from the very beginning, and you are going to leave absolutely nothing out.”

She holds out the rolling pin.

I take it.

“Starting,” she continues, dusting her hands with flour and leveling me with a look that is three parts curiosity to one part residual fury, “with what exactly happened in my backyard. In the rain. And don’t skip anything but gross details. I totally don’t want to know my brother’s dick size.”

I wrap the apron around my waist. “Deal.”

I tell her about our first kiss, the awkward interactions after, sex on the beach minus the gritty details, the five-minute calls, the alley, everything. I even tell her about Boston, about what Nicki did, about the two years of silence, why it happened, and what it cost us both. I tell her about my conversation with the lawyer this morning, and the fifty million, and the lupine field last night, and how this whole time all I wanted to do was talk to my best friend about it.

“He has been in love with you since we were kids and he went and found a flower field about it,” Iris scoffs, whisking the butter mixture with more force than it needs. “Like a Victorian poet.”

“He really did,” I snort, pressing my fingers into the dough.

“The ring,” she murmurs, setting the whisk down and reaching across the counter. “Let me see it.”

I hold my hand out. The pearl catches the kitchen light, the blue sapphires on either side of the stone sitting small and perfect and nothing like anything Echo has ever worn.

“Oh,” Iris breathes.

She holds my hand in both of hers and turns it slowly, studying the ring from every angle, her thumb tracing the edge of the gold band.

“Sienna Reneé Rhodes.” She looks up at me with her eyes soft and wet at the corners. “It’s like we’re already sisters.”

“We’re totally sisters, with or without the ring,” I reassure her.

“I’m still mad,” she adds quickly, releasing my hand and going back to her buttercream.

“You’re allowed to be angry.”

We work in silence for a moment, her at the butter and me at the dough, the kitchen settling into the warm rhythm of two people who have been in the same room together enough times that the quiet between them has its own texture. It isn’t fully comfortable yet. There is still something sitting in it that hasn’t been resolved. But it is closer than we have been in seven days, and I can feel the distance closing with every minute she doesn’t kick me out.

“I’m going to be angry for a little while longer,” she announces. “And then I’ll be over it because this is more sweet than sexy, so I can’t be madder than the crime.”

“Completely fair,” I murmur.

“But I can’t be mad for too much longer because that would make me a hypocrite,” she mutters, looking down at the dough.

“Hypocrite?” I stop kneading and look at her.

“Dom and I have been seeing each other,” she admits in a small voice.

“What?!”

“Since his birthday,” she continues, her voice careful and even, the way it gets when she has been practicing something out loud in private. “Nothing official. We agreed not to make it into anything real.”

“Is he keeping you a dirty secret?” I snarl, hardening my eyes at her, “because I will kick his ass.”

Dominic Russo may be Grayson’s best friend, but Iris Douglas is the kind of woman who deserves to be someone’s whole announcement, not a quiet thing kept in the back room. Grayson would burn the whole town down over this, and so would I. Nobody gets to tuck Iris away like something they’re not sure about.

“No,” she replies, testing the buttercream, and still not looking at me. “He’s leaving for law school in two weeks, Sienna. Two weeks. We both knew what would happen. There’s an expiration date on it, that’s the whole point.”

“Iris,” I venture.

“Don’t,” she warns. “You slept with my brother, don’t forget.”