PRIDE: A Bad Boy and Amish Girl Romance (The Brody Bunch#1) by Sienna Valentine Page A

nachos, because suddenly, I wasn’t hungry for anything but her. For this simple Amish girl who was turning everything I thought I knew on its head already, even after just one date.
    When she was done, I collected our baskets and stood, smiling reassuringly at her. “C’mon, darlin’,” I said, reaching for her hand, “let’s find your sisters and get you home.”
    Sarah smiled. And suddenly, everything we’d dealt with tonight had been worth it.
    She took my hand. I noticed that in the other, she clutched that stupid penguin I’d had to shoot way too many wooden ducks for.
    And that made me smile, too.

12

Sarah
    “ M orning , sunshine,” Hannah said as I shuffled down the hall toward her kitchen table. She raised an eyebrow when she saw my disheveled appearance. “Sleep well?”
    I hadn’t, in fact. Usually, I was a morning person. Force of habit, really—getting up at dawn was perfectly normal in our community. But I’d had an awful time getting to sleep after we’d come home from the fair, mostly because I was thinking about Reid and all the strange and wonderful things he’d made me feel—but there was something else, too.
    Rubbing my eyes, I sat down across from Hannah. “No,” I said. “How do you get any sleep at all with those lights outside your windows?”
    “The streetlamps?” she asked, and I nodded, staring longingly at her mug full of rich, dark coffee. Taking the hint, Hannah stood up and walked behind the kitchen counter to fetch me some. “Shit, that’s a blast from the past. I’d almost forgotten how much they freaked me out when I first got here. They’re different from candles and stars, huh?”
    She placed the mug down in front of me and I grasped it with both hands, warming myself. “Just a little.”
    Hannah brought over cream and sugar for me, which was disorienting in and of itself. Of course I’d seen store-bought sugar before, but we’d had fresh cream for as long as I could remember, and this carton of non-dairy liquid—how could cream be non-dairy, exactly? Didn’t it come from a cow?—smelled nothing like what I was used to. It didn’t taste like anything I’d ever had, either. I wrinkled my nose after taking a sip of my too-bitter coffee with the disconcerting aftertaste, but Hannah only spooned more sugar into the cup.
    “Was that the only thing that kept you up?” she asked me in that faux-innocent way she always did when she was fishing for something. It had always annoyed me as a girl. I’d never thought I would have come to miss it, but here I was, being annoyed by my sister after years of silence… and I was glad for it.
    “If you’re asking about my ‘date’ with Reid, then… yes. That was a factor.” I took another, wary sip and found the coffee a little more palatable. Still nothing like what we had at home, but at least there was caffeine in it. “Not in the way you might think, though.”
    Grinning, Hannah leaned her elbows on the table and set her chin between her palms. “Oh, really? Do tell.”
    I shook my head at her, but couldn’t stop my smile. “It… didn’t go as well as he’d hoped, I think. I was just so overwhelmed by everything around me, and it seemed like we were moving so fast, and… I panicked. I have a feeling I ruined his night.” I flinched, remembering the man who’d grabbed me and the violence Reid had endured trying to defend my honor. “He took a punch for me. Do you think I came off as ungrateful, after all that?” I had mentioned the incident with the man on our way home last night, but only because Hannah brought it up. Apparently Beth had already told her about it. Hannah seemed very concerned at first, but calmed down when I assured her it was nothing, and that Reid figured he was just a drunk trying to “cop a feel,” a term that I had to have Hannah explain to me.
    Hannah shook her head. “Nah. Reid took a punch for you ‘cause he chose to. You can’t blame yourself for that. And you