“And you,” I replied.

She let me go.

Boone and his dad bumped into each other as they both tried to pull out my chair.

Like father, like son.

They shared a grin and Porter backed off.

I sat at the square table, boy, girl, boy, girl, which meant I was facing Anne-Marie.

Boone tucked me under, and I did another quick scan of both his parents just to make sure I was seeing what I was seeing, and noted right off Boone got his father’s body, and his mother’s hair and eyes.

For the first time, I wondered what his brothers looked like.

“Was that Mag at the door?” his mom asked.

“Yeah, he couldn’t stay. He says hi,” Boone answered.

“Evie was in the car, my friend, his girlfriend,” I explained. “We’d been shopping. I think he was ready to get home.”

“Ah,” Anne-Marie murmured, clearly having experience with men and shopping. Then, “Your friend, Mag’s girlfriend?”

I didn’t want to get into the whole Lottie-matchmaking thing, considering it might lead to the whole I’m-a-stripper thing.

Fortunately, Boone had a ready response.

“We got mutual friends,” he said.

“Ah,” Anne-Marie repeated her murmur.

“So, Boone tells us you’re flipping a house,” Porter launched in.

“Yeah,” I confirmed, picking up the menu in front of me for something to do with my hands, but I didn’t study it.

“We’d love to see it while we’re here,” Anne-Marie noted.

I smiled at her. “That’d be great.”

She smiled back.

The server appeared and asked if I’d like a drink.

“Gin gimlet,” I ordered. “Hendrick’s please.”

“A girl who knows her gin,” Porter stated approvingly.

“I don’t know my gin, really,” I admitted. “I just know I like Hendrick’s better than Bombay, Tanqueray or Beefeater.”

“What he means is, a girl who likes gin, so he’ll have someone to drink it with,” Anne-Marie shared, which meant that martini in front of her was vodka.

“And if she likes Hendrick’s better than all those, she knows her gin,” Porter asserted.

Anne-Marie shook her head in a men and their pretentious ideas about booze gesture.

I grinned at her.

“After I put this drink order in, would you like me to get some appetizers going for you?” the server upsold.

I looked at my menu.

The Sadlers ordered oysters.

I figured out what I wanted for my meal, and oysters had no part in it since I tried one once, it moved in my mouth, and I was done with oysters forever.

I then set my menu aside.

“That’s a very pretty top,” Anne-Marie noted.

“Thanks, and you’re just very pretty,” I replied. “You remind me of Ralph Lauren’s wife. Though obviously younger.”

Her brows went up. “Ricky Lauren?”

“Have you seen her?”

Her face warmed and she was even more stunning. “Yes, and that’s quite a compliment, thank you.”

“I wonder if she knows she’s lookin’ in a frickin’ mirror at herself thirty years older and complimenting her own reflection?” Porter asked Boone.

Boone started laughing.

Anne-Marie snapped, “Porter!”

“Darlin’, she’s got blue eyes, you got green, and thirty years on her. She’s not blind,” Porter returned. He turned to me and winked. “We Sadler men have a definite type.”

Now it was me who started laughing.

“Porter!” Anne-Marie snapped again.

“What?” he asked her.

“You don’t discuss a lady’s age…ever, and you don’t tell your son’s girlfriend she looks like his mother,” she pointed out.

“Again, she’s not blind,” Porter pointed out in return.

“Oh, my goodness, what is she thinking of us?” Anne-Marie asked the ceiling.

It hit me then that they might be nervous too.

“I think your husband is funny and I think it’s an amazing compliment that anyone would say I look like you,” I told her. And when she turned her attention to me, I finished, “And that isn’t blowing sunshine because I really like your son and I really want you to like me. You’re just that stunning.”

Her face warmed again, and I had a feeling it wasn’t because I told her she was stunning.

Okay, so maybe this wasn’t going to be as bad as I thought.

Maybe it was going to be awesome.

If we could steer clear of the stripper thing.

At least for a while.

Like, as long as it took for me to get my house-flipping biz up and running and I wasn’t stripping anymore.

Porter cleared his throat.

Boone squeezed my thigh.

Porter gave us a break by talking about the Phillies’ chances that season (they sounded grim). Then Boone and he had a mild argument about how Boone was now a fan of the Rockies, which Porter clearly thought was an alarming display of disloyalty. Boone obviously disagreed. My drink was served, their oysters were served, and we all ordered our mains.

After the server walked away, casual as you please, before slipping an oyster delicately in her mouth, Anne-Marie noted, “So, Boone tells us you dance at a gentlemen’s club?”

Oh shit.

Boone got tense.

My body got so tight I thought it would snap in two.

“Annie,” Porter growled.

“As I shared earlier, if she thinks she needs to be embarrassed about that, I don’t know why,” Anne-Marie said shortly to her husband. “And she needs to know we feel that way and get it over with.”

She looked to me.

And then she laid it out.

“When I was young and in college, I thought my mother’s generation did all the work. Burned their bras, yada yada yada.” She circled her now-empty oyster shell. “Then the first job I had, my boss called me ‘Sunshine.’ The whole time I was there, even in meetings, he’d say, ‘Sunshine brought this to our attention.’ Or, ‘Sunshine found it in the brief.’ It was humiliating.”

“Oh my God, I’ll bet,” I replied.

“I worked for a lawyer. I was a paralegal,” she informed me. “I asked him to stop. And he told me to stop being so sensitive. It was a compliment. I had a sunny disposition. I tried to explain it didn’t feel like a compliment and again asked him to refrain. He was not pleased I was telling him how to behave, even if what I was telling him was how I wished to be addressed. Within a month, I was laid off. But before that, it was clear I’d been branded a troublemaker. In order to stay employed, the next time something like that happened at another job, and it happened, I kept my mouth shut.”

That was the worst.

“I’m so sorry,” I said like I meant it, because I so totally did.

“What I’m saying is, Ryn, that a woman who judges a woman on the decisions she makes about her life is no woman at all. Even if you grew up your whole life wanting to be an exotic dancer, that would be your choice and the instant a woman makes another woman feel badly about her choices, or worse, tries to take them away, we’ve lost.”