He was in love with her. Ryder was in love with her. And he hadn’t asked her to say it back. In fact, he had told her she didn’t have to.

Which made it worse. Because she knew that he wanted something from her he wouldn’t even ask for. Or demand.

She’d asked for it once.

She blinked. Trying to calm her heart rate.

Ryder was long gone, up and out of bed and working, and she was in the house alone. But it didn’t do anything to help.

She shuffled downstairs, and she found her bowl of fruit sitting on the table. That bowl of fruit that he made for her every morning.

Just one of the many ways that he had shown her that he loved her before ever saying it.

She didn’t know why it was terrible, only that it was. She didn’t know why it frightened her like this, only that it did.

It didn’t have to. It didn’t. She could be with him, and it didn’t have to be love.

She could still protect herself.

She couldn’t eat the fruit, because suddenly her stomach felt off. She went back to her caravan and just sat for a while. Because she thought maybe being there would make her feel... She didn’t know. Safe? Back in the role that she was used to?

When she had been his friend who lived next door, and not his wife, who lived in his house and was pregnant.

Okay. She couldn’t go back. After a couple of hours in the camper, she made that conclusion.

She couldn’t just hide away in here and pretend that nothing was happening. That was impossible, and even she wasn’t delusional enough to think it was possible.

None of it mattered. She decided that about the time she had all of her jewelry-making supplies laid out on the kitchen table. It didn’t matter what anything was called. They didn’t need to get into stuff like that. If he wanted to say that, he could. But in her experience, all those words didn’t need to matter quite so much. And they could just continue on as they had been. Bonded together in a really significant way that didn’t need words and labels and all of that.

Everything really could be fine. He’d said that it could be. So it could be.

And she wanted... Well, she wanted to find a way to take this little hiccup they’d experienced and turn it into something more.

Because she had been reluctant to make love since he’d said that. And he hadn’t pushed it.

He hadn’t pushed her at all. Which wasn’t like him. He was just letting her sit back and stew. Normally, he was a lot more... Well, exactly the way he had been with the midwife. Encouraging her to make meetings, and then sitting there, asking all the questions, forcing the conversation.

But he hadn’t been like that, not since he had told her that he loved her.