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She folded her fingers in and rubbed them against her palm. It wasn’t really a punishment, if she were honest. Touching him felt good. It was just that it led to all sorts of other thoughts that didn’t have a place to go, and that was what made it all feel like torture. That was the problem.
“Right. Well. I’m sorry that you feel that way. I would’ve supported you, though. I do support you. And if I try to provide a...counterweight to your buoyancy, it’s only because everybody needs a ballast, right?”
“I guess,” she said. “I get it. I do. But the thing is, you treat me like I’m a kid. We are like a year and a half apart, Jace. There is no call to treat me like that.”
“Yeah, there is,” he said, his voice suddenly going gruff. “Where should I put the stuff?”
She knew what he was thinking. She knew what he was going to say. She wasn’t going to give him a chance to say it. “Well, I don’t know. We have to find a bedroom. We might as well find the best one.” They started to walk up the stairs. One of them creaked, but it wasn’t so bad.
The carpet on the stairs was somewhat threadbare, and she wondered if it would just be the better part of valor to get rid of all of it and reveal the honey oak beneath.
But there would be a lot of expense involved in refurbishing the place. Still, it would be worth it. And she could afford it. Really, for the first time in her life, she could afford a dream, and it was brilliant and amazing.
She was not a kid.
And she was definitely not Jace’s baby sister. No matter how he acted.
The hallway was long, with numbered doors facing opposite each other. Ten in total. “All right. Let’s see what we have.”
The first room was entirely barren, with lace curtains that barely covered the window, and she decided that unless they had to, that wasn’t going to be the room.
The next room was filled with nightstands and wardrobes and other miscellaneous furniture—a dining table and some chairs, all stacked up and filled from back to front. “Well, I guess it’s good to know there’s some furniture left in here. Some of it is probably salvageable. Or at least, we can use the wood for something. There’s probably some local artisans that could make something great with it.”
“Yeah,” he said.
And she could tell that he was biting his tongue. Damn him.
He was trying—that wasn’t fair.
“Let’s go, so that you don’t pull a muscle,” she said, carrying on down the hall and opening two more doors, before deciding to open another.
And in that room, there was a bed.
A big bed that was likely full of dust and had a rich brocade bedspread on it. There were canopy curtains and matching velvet curtains over the window. It was set as if it was exactly prepared for guests. A nightstand, wardrobe, a small vanity with a bowl and a picture, which she knew would have been used as a washbasin.
“Well, here we go,” she said.
“Look,” he said. “I don’t even believe in this haunting business, and even I know that if one of the rooms is going to have a ghost in it, it’s going to be this one.”
“But you don’t believe in ghosts,” she said. “And I want to see one, so that declaration is hardly a deterrent.” She grabbed a sleeping bag out of his hand and looked around the room. “I hope you don’t have allergies.”
“No. Thankfully. Otherwise living on a ranch would be rough. I can deal with a little bit of dust.”
“You can sleep in the bed if you want,” she said, grinning at him.
“Yeah. I’ll skip it.”
Then suddenly, it was way too easy to imagine the two of them in a bed, and she wondered if she had miscalculated by choosing this room.
It was one thing to think about sleeping on the floor with sleeping bags—which they were still going to do—it was just that the fact that they were in a room with a big bed...
She was starting to feel a little bit sweaty. She was starting to feel a little bit shaky. Jittery. And she just didn’t have the presence of mind to figure out how to not feel that way.
It’s Jace.
This was the problem. It wasn’t like this all the time. It was just like this sometimes, and usually for set periods of time. Like, something would happen, there would be a touch, a little bit of something that felt out of the ordinary that brushed up against her hormones, and then she would have a fantasy about him, and then things would feel awkward, but then they didn’t usually spend the night in the same bedroom.
“Okay,” she said, desperate for a reprieve. “You lay out the sleeping bags and get the space heater going, I’m going to go downstairs and see what I can find in the way of utensils and get some snacks prepared. And, I also brought a bunch of downloaded movies.”
