Page 25 of A Forever Kind of Rancher

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi, yourself.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I decided to come back for lunch today.”

“Oh. Let me... I’ll make something for you.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I’m not taking charity from you,” she said.

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“All I’m doing is very slowly folding your laundry,” she said, holding up his socks.

“All right. Well, I hate to interrupt the very serious business of sock folding. But if you really want to make me a sandwich...”

“I really do.”

She went down the stairs, and every step she took closer to him made her heart start to beat just a little harder.

Damn that man.

And damn her for being so...thrilled by it. She felt like a teenager. The kind of teenager she had never been. Because she had never indulged in flirtations, and she had certainly never experienced that wild, reckless feeling she heard people describe when they were in situations where no one was there to stop them from doing something stupid.

She felt it now. There was nothing to stop her from closing the space between them and wrapping her arms around his neck. There was nothing to stop her from touching him.

Nothing. Except for good sense. And the fact that there was no way she could carry on a physical-only affair under the watchful eyes of her far-too-perceptive daughters.

And there was no way she was going to put them through something like that when their lives had just been upended.

So yeah. Nothing stopping her.

It made her want to laugh.

She had behaved for her mother, of course, who had been deeply afraid of her becoming a single mom and struggling the way she had.

And now she had to behave herself for her daughters. Caught in between a mother-daughter relationship always, she supposed.

It can be a secret.

No. They would figure it out. That was just asking for the kind of sitcom hijinks she did not want to be embroiled in anymore. She’d reached her limit. Dirty pictures being texted to her of her husband’s affair, and her busting out his headlights, were either a police procedural or high comedy, depending on how you looked at it, and she wanted no part of either.

“What’s for dinner tonight?” he asked.

“Spaghetti,” she answered.

He grinned, and she felt like he’d touched her.

She looked away and beat a wide path around him to the kitchen.

“I could get used to this,” he said.

“I probably shouldn’t stay more than a month,” she said, reiterating what she’d told him before. On the phone. Before she had agreed to come.

“The cottage is awfully nice, and it’s there for you as long as you want. Don’t feel the need to move on quickly.”

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