by Maisey Yates
She noticed that he was looking past her now, and she followed his line of sight. He was looking at that blonde again. “Regrets, Chase?”
He winced, looking back at her. “No.”
“So. I assume that to get a guy to come up and hit on me in a bar, I have to put on a dress that is essentially a red ACE bandage sprinkled with glitter?”
He hesitated. “It’s more than that.”
“What?”
“Well, for a start, there’s not looking at a man like you want to dismember him.”
She rolled her eyes. “I don’t.”
“You aren’t exactly approachable, Anna.”
“That isn’t true.” She liked to play darts, and hang out, and talk about sports. What wasn’t approachable about that?
“I’ve seen men try to talk to you,” Chase continued. “You shut them down pretty quick. For example—” he barreled on before she could interrupt him “—Ace Thompson paid you a compliment back at the bar.”
“Ace Thompson compliments everything with boobs.”
“And a couple of weeks ago there was a guy in here that tried to buy you a drink. You told him you could buy your own.”
“I can,” she said, “and he was a stranger.”
“He was flirting with you.”
She thought back on that night, that guy. Damn. He had been flirting. “Well, he should get better at it. I’m not going to reward mediocrity. If I can’t tell you’re flirting, you aren’t doing a very good job.”
“Part of the problem is you don’t think male attention is being directed at you when it actually is.”
She looked back over at the shimmery blonde. “Why would any male attention be directed at me when that’s over there?”
Chase leaned in, his expression taking on a conspiratorial quality that did...things to her insides. “Here’s the thing about a girl like that. She knows she looks good. She assumes that men are looking at her. She assumes that if a man talks to her, that means he wants her.”
She took a breath, trying to ease the tightness in her chest. “And that’s not...a turnoff?”
“No way.” He smiled, a sort of lazy half smile. “Confidence is sexy.”
He kind of proved that rule. The thought made her bristle.
“All right. So far with our lessons I’ve learned that I should unzip my coveralls and as long as I’m confident it will be okay.”
“You forgot not looking like you want to stab someone.”
“Okay. Confident, nonstabby, showing my boobs.”
Chase choked on his beer. “That’s a good place to start,” he said, setting the bottle down. “Do you want to go play darts? I want to go play darts.”
“I thought we were having female lessons.”
“Rain check,” he said. “How about tomorrow I come by the shop and we get started. I think I’m going to need a lesson plan.”
* * *
Chase hadn’t exactly excelled in school, unless it was at driving his teachers to drink. So why exactly he had decided he needed a lesson plan to teach Anna how to be a woman, he didn’t know.
All he knew was that somewhere around the time they started discussing her boobs last night he had become unable to process thoughts normally. He didn’t like that. He didn’t like it at all. He did not like the fact that he had been forced to consider her breasts more than once in a single hour. He did not like the fact that he was facing down the possibility of thinking about them a few more times over the next few weeks.
But then, that was the game.
Not only was he teaching her how to blend in at a function like this, he was pretending to be her date.
So there was more than one level of hell to deal with. Perfect.
He cleared his throat, walking down the front porch of the farmhouse that he shared with his brother, making his way across the property toward the shop that Anna was renting and using as her business.
It was after five, so she should be knocking off by now. A good time for the two of them to meet.
He looked down at the piece of lined yellow paper in his hand. His lesson plan.
Then he pressed on, his boots crunching on the gravel as he made his way to the rustic wood building. He inhaled deeply, the last gasp of winter riding over the top of the spring air, mixing with the salt from the sea, giving it a crisp bite unique to Copper Ridge.
He relished this. The small moment of clarity before he dived right into the craziness that was his current situation.
Chase McCormack was many things, but he wasn’t a coward. He was hardly going to get skittish over giving his best friend some seduction lessons.
He pushed the door open but didn’t see Anna anywhere.
He looked around the room, and the dismembered tractors whose various parts weren’t in any order that he could possibly define. Though he knew that it must make sense to Anna.
“Hello?”
“Just up here.”
He turned, looked up and saw Anna leaning over what used to be a hayloft, looking down at him, a long dark braid hanging down.
“What exactly are you doing up there?”
“I stashed a tool up here, and now I need it. It’s good storage. Of course, then I end up climbing the walls a little more often than I would like. Literally. Not figuratively.”
“I figured you would be finished for the day by now.”
“No. I have to get this tractor fixed for Connor Garrett. And it’s been a bigger job than I thought.” She disappeared from view for a moment. “But I would like a reputation as someone who makes miracles. So I better make miracles.”
She planted her boot hard on the first rung of the ladder and began to climb down. She was covered from head to toe in motor oil and dust. Probably from crawling around in this space, and beneath tractors.
She jumped down past the last three rungs, brushing dirt off her thighs and leaving more behind, since her hands were coated, too. “You don’t exactly look like a miracle,” he said, looking her over.
She held up her hand, then displayed her middle finger. “Consider it a miracle that I don’t punch you.”
“Remember what we talked about? Not looking at a guy like you want to stab him? Much less threatening actual bodily harm.”
“Hey, I don’t think you would tell a woman that you actually wanted to hook up with that she didn’t look like a miracle.”
“Most women I want to hook up with aren’t quite this disheveled. Before we start anyway.”
Much to his surprise, color flooded her cheeks.
“Well,” she said, her voice betraying nothing, “I’m not most women, Chase McCormack. I thought you would’ve known that by now.”
Then she sauntered past him, wearing those ridiculous baggy coveralls, head held high like she was queen of the dust bowl.
“Oh, I’m well aware of that,” he said. “That’s part of the problem.”
“And now it’s your problem to fix.”
“That’s right. And I have the lesson plan. As promised.”
She whipped around to face him, one dark brow lifted. “Oh, really?”
“Yes, really.” He held up the lined notepaper.
“That’s very professional.”
“It’s as professional as you’re gonna get. Now, the first order of business is to plant the seed that we’re more than friends.”
She looked as though he had just suggested she eat a handful of bees. “Do we really need to do that?”
“Yeah, we really need to do that. You won’t just have a date for the charity event. You’re going to have a date every so often until then.”
She looked skeptical. “That seems...excessive.”
“You want people to believe this. You don’t want people to think I’m going bec
ause of a bet. You don’t want your brothers to think for one moment that they might be right.”
“Well, they’re going to think it for a few moments at least.”
“True. I mean, they are going to be suspicious. But we can make this look real. It isn’t going to be that hard. We already hang out most weekends.”
“Sure,” she said, “but you go home with other girls at the end of the night.”
Those words struck him down. “Yes, I guess I do.”
“You won’t be able to do that now,” she pointed out.
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because if I were with you and you went home with another woman, I would castrate you with nothing but my car keys and a bottle of whiskey.”
He had no doubt about that. “At least you’d give me some whiskey.”
“Hell no. The whiskey would be for me.”
“But we’re not really together,” he said.
“Sure, Chase, but the entire town knows that if any man were to cheat on me, I would castrate him with my car keys, because I don’t take crap from anyone. So if they’re going to believe that we’re together, you’re going to have to look like you’re being faithful to me.”
“That’s fine.” It wasn’t all that fine. He didn’t do celibacy. Never had. Not from the moment he’d discovered that women were God’s greatest invention.
“No booty calls,” she said, her tone stern.
“Wait a second. I can’t even call a woman to hook up in private?”
“No. You can’t. Because then she would know. I have pride. I mean, right now, standing here in this garage taking lessons from you on how to conform to my own gender’s beauty standards, it’s definitely marginal, but I have it.”
“It isn’t like you really know any of the girls that I...”
“Neither do you,” she said.
“This isn’t about me. It’s about you. Now, I got you some things. But I left them in the house. And you are going to have to...hose off before you put them on.”
She blinked, her expression almost comical. “Did you buy me clothes?”
He’d taken a long lunch and gone down to Main Street, popping into one of the ridiculously expensive shops that—in his mind—were mostly for tourists, and had found her a dress he thought would work.
“Yeah, I bought you clothes. Because we both know you can’t actually wear this out tonight.”
“We’re going out tonight?”
“Hell yeah. I’m taking you somewhere fancy.”
“My fancy threshold is very low. If I have to go eat tiny food on a stick sometime next month, I’m going to need actual sustenance in every other meal until then.”
He chuckled, trying to imagine Anna coping with miniature food. “Beaches. I’m taking you to Beaches.”
She screwed up her face slightly. “We don’t go there.”
“No, we haven’t gone there. We go to Ace’s. We shoot pool, we order fried crap and we split the tab. Because we’re friends. And that’s what friends do. Friends don’t go out to Beaches, not just the two of them. But lovers do.”
She looked at him owlishly. “Right. I suppose they do.”
“And when all this is finished, the entire town of Copper Ridge is going to think that we’re lovers.”
Three
Anna was reeling slightly by the time she walked up the front porch and into Chase’s house. The entire town was going to think that they were...lovers. She had never had a lover. At least, she would never characterize the guy she’d slept with as a lover. He was an unfortunate incident. But fortunately, her hymen was the only casualty. Her heart had remained intact, and she was otherwise uninjured. Or pleasured.
Lovers.
That word sounded...well, like it came from some old movie or something. Which under normal circumstances she was a big fan of. In this circumstance, it just made her feel...like her insides were vibrating. She didn’t like it.
Chase lived in the old family home on the property. It was a large, log cabin–style house with warm, honey-colored wood and a green metal roof designed to withstand all kinds of weather. Wrought-iron details on the porch and the door were a testament to his and Sam’s craftsmanship. There were people who would pay millions for a home like this. But Sam and Chase had made it this beautiful on their own.
Chase always kept the home admirably clean considering he was a bachelor. She imagined that the other house on the property, the smaller one inhabited by Sam, wasn’t quite as well kept. But she also imagined that Sam didn’t have the same amount of guests over that Chase did. And by guests, she meant female companions. Which he would be cut off from for the next few weeks.
Some small, mean part of her took a little bit of joy in that.
Because you don’t like the idea of other women touching him. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been going on, or how many women there are, you still don’t like it.
She sniffed, cutting off that line of thinking. She was just a crabby bitch who was enjoying the idea of him being celibate and suffering a bit. That was all.
“Okay, where are my...girlie things?”
“You aren’t even going to look at them until you scrub that grease off.”
“And how am I supposed to do that? Are you going to hose me off?”
He clenched his jaw. “No. You can use my shower.”
She took a deep breath, trying to dispel the slight fluttering in her stomach. She had never used Chase’s shower before. She assumed countless women before her had. When he brought them up here, took their clothes off for them. And probably joined them.
She wasn’t going to think about that.
“Okay.”
She knew where his shower was, of course. Because she had been inside his bedroom casually, countless times. It had never mattered before. Before, she had never been about to get naked.
She banished that thought as she walked up the stairs and down the hall to his room. His room was...well, it was very well-appointed, but then again, obviously designed to house guests of the female variety. The bed was large and full of plush pillows. A soft-looking green throw was folded up at the foot of it. An overstuffed chair was in the corner, another blanket draped over the back.
She doubted the explosion of comfort and cozy was for Chase’s benefit.
She tamped that thought down, continuing on through the bathroom door, then locking it for good measure. Not that he would walk in. And he was the only person in the house.
Still, she felt insecure without the lock flipped. She took a deep breath, stripped off her coveralls, then the clothes she had on beneath them, and started the shower. Speaking of things that were designed to be shared...
It was enclosed in glass, and she had a feeling that with the door open it was right in the line of sight from the bed. Inside was red tile, and a bench seat that... She wasn’t even going to think what that could be used for.
She turned and looked in the mirror. She was grubby. More than grubby. She had grease all over her face, all up under her fingernails.
Thankfully, Chase had some orange-and-pumice cleaner right there on his sink. So she was able to start scrubbing at her hands while the water warmed up.
Steam filled the air and she stepped inside the shower, letting the hot spray cascade over her skin.
It was a massaging showerhead. A nice one. She did not have a nice massaging showerhead in her little rental house down in town. Next on her list of Ways She Was Changing Her Life would be to get her own house. With one of these.
She rolled her shoulders beneath the spray and sighed. The water droplets almost felt like fingers moving over her tight muscles. And, suddenly, it was all too easy to imagine a man standing behind her, working at her muscles with his strong hands.
She
closed her eyes, letting her head fall back, her mouth going slack. She didn’t even have the strength to fight the fantasy, God help her. She’d been edgy and aroused for the past twenty-four hours, no denying it. So this little moment to let herself fantasize...she just needed it.
Then she realized exactly whose hands she was picturing.
Chase’s. Tall and strong behind her, his hands moving over her skin, down lower to the slight dip in her spine, just above the curve of her behind...
She grabbed hold of the sponge hanging behind her and began to drag it ferociously over her skin, only belatedly realizing that this was probably what he used to wash himself.
“He uses it to wash his balls,” she said into the space. Hoping that that would disgust her. It really should disgust her.
It did not disgust her.
She put the scrubber back, taking a little shower gel and squeezing it into the palm of her hand. Okay, so she would smell like a playboy for a day. It wasn’t the end of the world. She started to rub the slick soap over her flesh, ignoring the images of Chase that were trying to intrude.
She was being a crazy person. She had showered at friends’ houses before, and never imagined that they were in the shower stall with her.
But ever since last night in the bar, her equilibrium had been off where Chase was concerned. Her control was being sorely tested. She was decidedly unstoked about it.
She shut the water off and got out of the shower, grabbing a towel off the rack and drying her skin with more ferocity than was strictly necessary. Almost as though she was trying to punish her wicked, wicked skin for imagining what it might be like to be touched by her best friend.
But that would be crazy.
Except she felt a little crazy.
She looked around the room. And realized that her stupid friend, who had not wanted her to touch the nice clothing he had bought her, had left her without anything to wear. She couldn’t put her sweaty, grease-covered clothes back on. That would negate the entire shower.
She let out an exasperated breath, not entirely certain what she should do.
“Chase?” she called.
She didn’t hear anything.
