Page 8 of One Night Rancher

It would be like...

Almost like a family.

She shook that intrusive thought off. She hadn’t expected it. And it wasn’t particularly welcome.

Then she heard the sound of an old truck pulling up to the place and she turned and saw Jace.

“Hi,” she said, even though he was still in the truck. She waved, so that he knew that she had greeted him.

She immediately felt kind of silly.

She cleared her throat and tucked her hair behind her ear.

She still felt like a lanky, gangly teenage girl around Jace sometimes. And that was silly. But then... The whole thing with him was often silly. She was comfortable with him. More comfortable than any other living human being. But at the same time, there were moments of intense awkwardness. Moments where she was so deeply aware of what she felt.

And in those moments she became unbearably self-conscious. In a way she just... Never was around other men. She thought it was funny that she tended to make them self-conscious. She wasn’t overly concerned with her appearance, and she didn’t spend a ton of time on it. But, she liked to put on a little bit of makeup and enjoyed a little bit of cowgirl bling. Studded belts and tank tops with a little bit of rhinestone energy.

She liked the attention that got her.

She never worried one way or another if random men thought she was pretty. If they did, great. If not, she didn’t care.

And yet, all that insecurity came back to her sometimes when she stood there looking at Jace. And she could never really quite reconcile all of those things. The fact that in general she was more confident than she had ever been and the fact that she was often the most comfortable around him. Then also the least.

He got out of the truck, and she shoved all of those things off to the side.

“I hope you brought a sleeping bag,” she said.

“Yeah I did,” he said.

“I brought a space heater too,” she responded. “You know ghosts can really bring down the temperature.”

She watched his facial expression as he made the clear, deliberate decision to ignore her ghost comment. “Are we meeting anybody?”

“Other than ghosts?”

“Cara.”

She smiled. “No. We got sent a code to open up a lockbox on the back door. So let’s go hunting for it.”

She went around back and she could hear his footsteps as he followed her.

She felt unbearably self-conscious of the fact that he might be watching her.

She banished that. It was Jace. They were friends. Maybe it was the strangeness of spending the night with him, but it wasn’t like they had never done that before. Of course they had.

It had just been a long time, because they were grown-ass people, and they didn’t tend to have sleepovers anymore. Or camping trips.

But they had. This was hardly singular.

“How did the rest of the night go last night?” he asked.

“Just fine. Like always. I know it’s a shock to you, Jace, but my world turns just fine when you aren’t there.”

He looked at her. And it was far too clear a look.

For some reason, her stomach went tight, and she had the vague impression that maybe he could see into what had happened last night after she had gone home. No. She refused to think that. She refused to even entertain that thought. Because, if at three in the morning she had finally stumbled home and gotten into the shower, and if, when she had started to run her hands over her body as the water had cascaded over her curves, she had had a few moments where she had let herself imagine that they were Jace’s hands skimming over her skin, and then maybe she had some trouble falling asleep, and she had taken those erotic thoughts to her bed with her and let them carry her off to a natural conclusion...

She really did try not to think of him that way. Yeah, it was one thing to think that he was hot; it was quite another to have actual, full-blown sexual fantasies about him, which just felt intrusive and wrong, and she always felt quite guilty after.

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