Or maybe before that when she had told him about her plan in the first place.

Maybe it had all changed sometime before she could even remember. Maybe there had just been the slow, inevitable walk toward something new. Something different. Maybe no matter how badly you wanted to stay in one place, the way things moved around you meant you couldn’t.

She was filled with maybes and she didn’t have a lot of answers. But that was the story of her life.

She was on a quest for something more concrete; if she wasn’t then she wouldn’t have embarked on the whole baby endeavor to begin with.

Ryder was the strongest, most solid man she knew. And so on that score she could see the value in agreeing to what he had asked her to agree to.

But beyond that... Beyond that was the way he’d made her feel, and when had anyone in her life touched her and made her feel that good? They hadn’t. Not ever.

Didn’t she deserve that?

Buried in all those thoughts was a concern about the way he had called her selfish. And if maybe this line of thinking was selfish, as well. But she wasn’t sure she cared. She wasn’t sure she could afford to care, not now.

Because now that the idea was in her head, that it should be him, now that he had touched her the way he had, kissed her...

And none of it was simple, because it was all bound up into many things. Because he was her friend, and because they had never done anything like this before. Because she had never felt anything like that before with anyone, because all of this was linked to the idea of having a baby together, and then because of him, the idea of maybe getting married...

Yeah, it was a little bit complicated and she wanted to reduce it right now.

To sensation.

To the way that he had made her feel, because it was new, and it was amazing, and it was different from anything she had ever felt before.

She opened the door to the caravan and walked outside, the warm summer evening washing over her skin. Her nipples pebbled beneath her thin top. She wasn’t wearing a bra. She often didn’t wear a bra; she didn’t have breasts that were much of anything to write home about, so there wasn’t a point when she wore tank tops. No use fussing around with strapless bras and things like that when she might as well just forgo.

But she happened to know tonight that the white tank top she was wearing was a little bit see-through. As was the skirt that she had put on.

She had put on underwear, but only because she had a pair of very cute white lace panties that she thought he might like.

The idea sent an arrow of pleasure shooting straight through her core.

She didn’t think she’d ever thought about sex and attraction in these terms before. The idea of wearing things for men... Well again, she just assumed that men kind of wanted whatever woman presented herself as available. So she had never gone out of her way to make herself particularly attractive to a particular sort of man.