Her expression suggested that she rather doubted there was anything he'd like more than being her distraction -- even if she didn't mean it in a salacious way. Spike could have proven a most disastrous domestic distraction simply due to her own well-established blind spots. How simple it would have been to think she was doing good for him by giving him a little cottage on the castle grounds or by making use of a live, cooperative vampire to help in the girls' training. Doubtless they would've grown close again and...

No -- don't entertain impossible thoughts. But she was getting older, now. And her mind wandered now occasionally towards the settling-down parts of life, even if she wasn't ready to admit it.

"...We both know it was better that way. This way." She altered the tense for his sake. After all, 'that way' was over three years into her past now.