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 because 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.”
CHAPTER 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.