Free To Wed a Rancher by Myrna Mackenzie Page B

his mouth was only inches above hers. His blue eyes were doing that wonderful smoldering thing that made her tingle.
    He reached down as if to place his palms on her biceps, then dropped his arms to his sides. “Don’t make me like you too much, Rachel. I don’t want to do something we’ll both regret.”
    Her heart was beating like some wild, out-of-control drum. She could barely breathe. “I don’t want to do anything I’ll regret, either,” she whispered.
    He groaned. He reached out and touched her hair, smoothing back a strand that had crept out of the ponytail she’d been wearing while she worked. Just thatone barely-there caress sent shock waves through her entire body and nearly sent her over the edge. She bit back a moan, closed her eyes. She placed one hand on his chest, and she had no clue whether she was trying to push herself away from him or whether she simply had to feel his heart pounding beneath her palm.
    But he must have assumed the first. “Open your eyes, Rachel,” he whispered, taking a big step away. Cool air slipped over her now empty palm. “I’m not going to touch you. I know you have serious trust issues. You know I have issues, too. One of them being the fact that I’m going to be gone in less than three weeks, and nothing is going to stop me from going. This project has to be done—this house will be sold even if I have to drop the price to nothing. And once I leave Moraine I’m never coming back.”
    â€œMe, either,” she whispered. Even though she suspected that he was running away from an old life and she was trying to run to a new one. Either way, they were just together now on a very temporary pass.
    She took a step back herself. “We should eat,” she said.
    So they sat. They ate.
    â€œIt’s good,” Shane told her.
    It wasn’t, but it wasn’t horrible. And anyway, she mused, after she had returned to Ruby’s, after the initial taste she hadn’t registered a single bite she’d taken. Because she’d realized how close she’d come today to crossing a line that couldn’t be crossed.
    Despite years of avoiding the kind of relationship that had made her life a misery, she had wanted Shane to touch her. She had craved the taste of his lips so intensely that it was a miracle she hadn’t shoved him down and had her kissing way with him.
    Only Shane’s resolve had saved her. Because if he hadn’t backed off…well, she had the worst feeling that he could have told her anything, asked for anything, and despite the fact that she didn’t actually trust him—and she knew for sure that he could and would hurt her—she might have given him much more than she could recover from.
    Instead, he’d backed away. He hadn’t kissed her. She should be drowning in buckets of relief right now. She should be thanking the stars that she had been saved from her own stupid desires.
    If only she could stop wondering what it would have been like if they had a redo and this time their lips actually touched.
    Â 
    In the middle of the night, two days later, Rachel had an epiphany. “Decorating,” she told Shane when she got out of the car and approached him the next morning. “You need decorating. Clean up, fix up, renovate up, decorate up. The ranchers will come for the ranch, I assume, but they have to live in the house. There’s no life in the house. We have to change that.”
    Shane had been drinking coffee, leaning against the porch support, his ankles crossed as he slouched in that casual cowboy pose and surveyed the horizons of the ranch. The sun had risen but it was still a pink and gold ball reaching fingers of rose up to the sky. He turned to Rachel now as if she’d just suggested that he buy an elephant and put it on the porch.
    â€œSlow down, Rachel. Back up. Why do we need to blow up the house?”
    She gave him the evil eye.