Page 38 of The Rancher’s One and Only

He was physical, and what she was feeling in her body was physical. And it made sense to her, just suddenly, why people did strange and impulsive things around this kind of attraction. She’d never felt remotely moved by something like this before. At least, not in comparison to this. She had thought that… She thought she was close. But it wasn’t close. It was hardly the same thing.

He took his hands off her, quickly. And she squeezed her knees together just slightly, trying to ease the pressure between her thighs.

“Do I need to lead the horse toward…?”

“No, they’ll be fine for a minute.”

He jerked his head down the path, and she followed him. Until they were completely enclosed in these strange mountains. It was red all around. Captivating. Breathtaking.

“These are such fascinating formations. Really different from most of the terrain that I’ve been in. Volcanic, but wouldn’t preserve fossils well.”

“All I know is that it’s pretty.”

“It really is.”

She turned to face him, and the perfect, handsome symmetry of his face. His square jaw, the strong column of his throat. The way he wore that cowboy hat did something to her. Profoundly.

“It reminds me a little bit of the outback,” she said. “Australia is pretty amazing. Though, you have to be very cautious of poisonous snakes.”

“You have to be pretty cautious of them out here too.”

“Yes, though the odds of a rattlesnake killing a healthy adult who would have fairly quick access to antivenin is low.”

“Not so with the Australian snakes?”

“No. Very not so with the Australian snakes. With some of them you’re practically dead before you hit the ground, which in fairness is a gift in many ways.”

“Is Australia your favorite place that you’ve been?”

She shook her head. “I really did enjoy Greece. I kind of wish it hadn’t been ruined by… Well. You know.”

“That’s really awful that guy ruined that experience for you.”

“Yeah.” She started to walk, meandering through the alien landscape. “It’s probably why I’m still a virgin.”

She wanted to bite her tongue. Just to punish it, because there was no calling the words back. There was nothing to keep her from having done that major overshare. She hadn’t meant to tell Jax that she was a twenty-eight-year-old virgin. But it had just felt like an extension of the conversation.

When she turned around, he was standing behind her, motionless, looking like he’d been hit in the head with a shovel.

“Sorry,” she said, suddenly blatantly, nakedly aware of what she’d said and how exposing it was. It hadn’t felt that personal in her head. It was just a thing. Like her shirt was blue and she was a virgin, but now that he was looking at her like that it felt… She felt…embarrassed. “That was an inappropriate overshare of information, and I am really apologetic if I made you uncomfortable. I would never want to make you uncomfortable.”

“Ernestine,” he said. “You didn’t make me uncomfortable. There’s no HR.”

“No. I guess we’re not actually working together so to speak but—”

“You are a tiny woman,” he said. “I would never feel threatened by you, unless you actually pulled a knife on me, okay?”

“Well, still. Let’s forget I said it. Because it was a dumb thing to say.”

He paused for a moment and then swallowed. “Was it a true thing to say?”

She felt her face get hot. “Yes,” she said slowly. “It was a true thing to say. But it’s not the me that I go around sharing, because it doesn’t usually come up, and I shouldn’t have mentioned that, because that’s just uncomfortable.”

“You know, that guy has a lot to answer for. It seems like he really hurt you.”

He had. Something had been damaged inside of her after that happened. It had made her so fearful of herself. And she had never known how to explain it to another person before, but it felt a little bit easier now. Like there was a hope that she could make him understand. Just maybe. That she could maybe even verbalize the thing she’d been trying to get straight inside of herself all this time.

“It just made me feel like my body was scary,” she said. “Because if what he said was true, then I was putting out signals for something that I didn’t actually want.”