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“It was my turn,” Ranger’s voice broke into the quiet of the house. For someone so big, he could sometimes move almost silently. It was odd and off-putting the way he could sneak up on me.
I grimaced down at the green bean I had snapped in half, shrugging, tossing it into the pot. “What was your turn?”
“Cooking dinner,” he clarified, putting another pitcher of goat milk into the fridge. Gadget may have been small, but he had the appetite of a goat ten times his size.
“I didn’t have anything else going on,” I told him, turning to find him leaning against the fridge, arms folding over his chest.
“What are you making?”
“A stir fry,” I told him, trying not to shift around under his gaze. He had a tendency to watch. Not in a creepy way. Or a critical way. He almost seemed curious. To see another person, to know what it looked like when they went about mundane daily tasks. It didn’t bother me necessarily, but it made me incredibly aware of each of my movements.
And, if I were being completely honest, I almost liked the attention. His attention. This man who didn’t like most people, who for some reason found me interesting, worth his time.
“Want coffee?” he asked, moving to make it before I could even answer. He was half-standing behind me, having to reach around me to put the pot of water on the stove. In doing so, his entire front brushed my whole back, pressing close enough for a long moment for me to feel the warmth that always seemed to radiate off of him.
Everything in me seemed to freeze. My heart, my breathing, my thoughts.
His body shifted again, the button of his jeans grazing across my lower back, a sensation that made a shiver course through me.
And not one of those inside shivers, either.
Nope.
This was a full-body shiver.
And with how close Ranger was, there was no way he hadn’t felt it.
His body seemed to tense too, then suddenly jerk away, stalking off and out of the kitchen.
He didn’t come back to make the coffee.
All through cooking dinner, my stomach was twisted, a knot of unease in my core, worried I had screwed things up, made him second-guess me staying here.
Not that it was my fault
I couldn’t control it if my body had responded to him a little.
It certainly hadn’t been intentional. I wasn’t interested in that. The idea of intimacy made my skin feel itchy, uncomfortable.
But there was no controlling a knee-jerk kind of response.
Not that I could blame my body for doing it either. If ever there was a man who could muster something innate, primal in a woman, it was Ranger. This giant, bearded, muscled specimen of a man who also happened to be strong, smart, capable, who made a life off the land, who could be both a hard and a soft place at the same time.
It would almost be ridiculous if my body didn’t respond to him.
Even though my brain wasn’t involved.
Of course.
That would be ridiculous, after all.
“Is it done?” Ranger’s voice barked, making me jump from where I was dishing rice onto two plates.
“I, ah, yeah. I wasn’t sure if you were eating.”
“I’m always hungry,” he told me, taking his plate so I could load it up with the vegetables.
“This was the last of the rice,” I told him a few minutes later during a long silence that had me shifting uncomfortably in my seat. We never talked nonstop during dinner, but usually, Ranger would ask a question, would make a comment, would start some form of conversation.
“Okay. Finn should be here tomorrow, I think. He will load us back up for a while.”
Again, another awkward silence.
“What about you?” I blurted out when I couldn’t take the silence a moment longer.
“What about me?” he asked, brows knitted.
“You asked me about my life before. What about your life before?”
“Life before what?”
“This,” I said, waving an arm around.
“No… I mean before I decided to live here, or before that, when I was in the service, or before that when I was just a kid…”
“Um, well, all of it,” I decided. He wasn’t exactly an easy person to know. And he was so tight-lipped about anything outside of the Pine Barrens. Of course, I was going to take him up on an offer to know more if it was hanging there for me to grab.
“Alright. I grew up in North Carolina. My dad had been in the Army. My mom was a homemaker. Though when times got tight, she would take odd jobs around town that she could bring me with her. Babysitting. Or elder care. Even some occasional house cleaning gigs. It was a normal life, I guess. A little slow. I spent a lot of time just being a boy – getting dirty, getting into trouble. When my old man would come on leave, he gave my mom a week of undivided attention, and then I got one. And we would go camping deep in the woods, live off the land. That was how I learned a lot of what I know now.”
