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“I…” I trailed off.

“Okay,” Stace said, reaching for her shirt.

“No, wait!” She paused with her shirt in her hand.

“I’m getting some mixed signals here, baby.”

“Stop calling me that,” I growled.

“Okay.”

“Shit,” I said again. “It’s not that… I do want you, Stace. I do. So much that I sometimes can’t even think about anything else. But we want different things. Very different things.”

Stace put the shirt down and then got to her feet.

“Okay, Hunter. We’ll do it your way.”

She stopped when she was a few feet away from me.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that this has been building between us and if the only way I can have you is to keep things casual, then that’s what we’ll do.”

I raised both my eyebrows. “Just like that? After the whole thing about seducing me and getting me to fall for you? You’re just going to drop that and have casual sex? I find that hard to believe.”

Stace nodded slowly. “It’s true. I can compartmentalize, remember? If all you want to do is casual, then we’ll do casual. Friends who have sex when we want to. People do that all the time.”

I absolutely didn’t believe her.

“But what if you develop feelings for me?” I asked. “What then?”

She nodded. “I’ll tell you before it gets to that. And we’ll decide. But it’s a bridge we’ll cross if we come to it. We may not. A lot of my past relationships started out hot and then we grew apart and parted on amicable terms.” Oh. That was interesting. I wanted to know more about these past relationships.

“I’ve never really dated anyone seriously. In addition to my family relationships being disasters, I saw how everyone around me was pretty much falling apart after every breakup and it just confirmed everything I thought.” I shrugged. “I think it can work out, but it’s much more likely that it won’t. And I’m not taking the chance.”

Stace nodded and licked her lips, drawing my attention.

“I can appreciate your hesitancy. And your desire to keep things casual. So let’s do it. Let’s be casual.”

I stared at her, waiting to see her flinch or blink. She didn’t. For someone who was always smiling and showing emotion, she also had a hell of a poker face. At least she did right now.

I kept underestimating her and she kept turning the tables on me.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “You’re not going to get all your feelings tangled up?”

Stace shook her head slowly, not taking her eyes from me.

“I’m sure.” I didn’t believe her, but she sure sounded confident.

This was a bad, bad idea. Possibly the worst idea that I’d ever had.

I should ask her to go home. I should tell her to go right now.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay?” she asked. “Not a ringing endorsement.”

She raised one eyebrow as if in challenge.