Page 17 of A Forever Kind of Rancher

She almost wished he was being high-handed. So she could get ahold of herself.

The kindness was almost too much.

You really can’t be pleased.

Well, maybe in her position that was fair?

They pulled up to the house, and she realized she hadn’t been conscious of where they were at all.

He killed the engine, but didn’t get out of the car, and she did something foolish. Very foolish.

She turned her head and looked at him.

And it was like all the space around them became less. Like it contracted and sank beneath her skin. Shrinking around her lungs, her heart, her stomach. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think.

She could only see Boone.

His blue eyes.

That moment at his brother’s wedding when they’d seen each other across the room was suddenly alive again in her memory. Because they’d seen each other that night. They hadn’t simply looked at each other for a moment across a crowded space.

The two things were different.

They were so different.

She hadn’t truly realized it until now.

She tried to breathe, but she couldn’t. Because everything in her was too tight. Too bound up in him.

Bound up in him...

And that did it. Like scissors cutting a string. Everything in her released.

Because she’d thought about being tied up in someone just recently.

It was the very way she’d thought about her relationship with Daniel.

She hadn’t left to get tied up again.

She couldn’t afford that, not ever.

She found herself practically dumping herself out of his truck, her boots connecting with the dirt and sending a cloud of dust up around her.

“I’ll go get changed and then start work,” she said, trying to sound bright, and like nothing had happened.

“Okay,” he said. “Do you need me to show you the lay of things?”

“No. No you go ahead and get started on your day.” She didn’t want to wander around the house with him.

She wished she could pretend.

She wished she could pretend that her strange moments of attraction were indigestion. Or at the very least that they were infrequent, or one-sided.

But if she’d ever been able to trick herself into thinking her attraction to Boone wasn’t mutual, he’d destroyed that with a glance the night of his brother’s wedding.

Because that moment had contained so much deep truth, she’d had to turn away from it.

Because that moment had been filled with an acknowledgment they’d both spent fifteen years turning away from.

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