She looked over at Chase, who had been completely silent upon her entry into the room, and remained so. She glared at him. He wasn’t saying anything. He was only staring. “Well?”
“It’s nice,” he said.
His voice sounded rough, and kind of thin.
“You’re a liar.”
“I’m not a liar. Put the shoes on.”
“Do you even know what size I wear?”
“You’re a size ten, which I know because you complain about how your big feet make it impossible for you to find anything in your size. And you’re better off buying men’s work boots. So yes, I know.”
His words made her feel suddenly exposed. Well, his words in combination with the dress, she imagined. They knew each other a little bit too well. That was the problem. How could you impress a guy when you had spent a healthy amount of time bitching to him about your big feet?
“Fine. I will put on the shoes.” He held them up, and her jaw dropped. “I thought you were taking me out to dinner.”
“I am.”
“Do I have to pay for it by working the pole at the Naughty Mermaid?”
“These are nice shoes.”
“If you’re a five-foot-two-inch Barbie like that chick you were talking to last night. I’m like...an Amazon in comparison.”
“You’re not an Amazon.”
“I will be in those.”
“Maybe that would bother some men. But you want a man who knows how to handle a woman. Any guy with half a brain is going to lose his mind checking out your legs. He’s not going to care if you’re a little taller than he is.”
She tried her best to ignore the compliment about her legs. And tried even harder to keep from blushing.
“I care,” she muttered, snatching the shoes from his hand and pondering whether or not there was any truth to her words as she did.
She didn’t really date. So it was hard to say. But now that she was thinking about it, yeah. She was self-conscious about the fact that with pretty low heels she was eye level with half the men in town.
She finished putting the shoes on and straightened. It was like standing on a glittery pair of stilts. “Are you satisfied?” she asked.
“I guess you could say that.” He was regarding her closely, his jaw tense, a muscle in his cheek ticking.
She noticed that he was still a couple of inches taller than her. Even with the shoes. “I guess you still meet the height requirement to be my dinner date.”
“I didn’t have any doubt.”
“I don’t know how to walk in these,” she said.
“All right. Practice.”
“Are you out of your mind? I have to practice walking?”
“You said yourself, you don’t know how to walk in heels. So, go on. Walk the length of the room.”
She felt completely awash in humiliation. She doubted there was another woman on the planet that Chase had ever had to instruct on walking.
“This is ridiculous.”
“It’s not,” he said.
“All of women’s fashion is ridiculous,” she maintained. “Do you have to learn how to walk when you put on dress shoes? No, you do not. And yet, a full-scale lesson is required for me to go out if I want to wear something that’s considered feminine.”
“Yeah, it’s sexist. And a real pain in the ass, I’m sure. It’s also hot. Now walk.”
She scowled at him, then took her first step, wobbling a bit. “I don’t understand why women do this.”
She took another step, then another, wobbling a little less each time. But the shoes did force her hips to sway, much more than they normally would. “Do you have any pointers?” she asked.
“I date women in heels, Anna. I’ve never walked in them.”
“What happened to helping me be a woman?”
“You’ll get the hang of it. It’s like...I don’t know, water-skiing maybe?”
“How is this like water-skiing?”
“You have to learn how to do it and there’s a good likelihood you’ll fall on your face?”
“Well, I take it all back,” she said, deadpan. “These shoes aren’t silly at all.” She took another step, then another. “I feel like a newborn baby deer.”
“You look a little like one, too.”
She snorted. “You really need to up your game, Chase. If you use these lines on all the women you take out, you’re bound to start striking out sooner or later.”
“I haven’t struck out yet.”
“Well, you’re still young and pretty. Just wait. Just wait until time starts to claim your muscular forearms and chiseled jawline.”
“I figure by then maybe I’ll have gotten the ranch back to its former glory. At that point women will sleep with me for my money.”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s nice to have goals.”
In her opinion, Chase should have better goals for himself. But then, who was she to talk? Her current goal was to show her brothers that they were idiots and she could too get a date. Hardly a lofty ambition.
“Yes, it is. And right now my goal is for us not to miss our reservation.”
“You made a...reservation?”
“I did.”
“It’s not like it’s Valentine’s Day or something. The restaurant isn’t going to be full.”
“Of course it won’t be. But I figured if I made a reservation for the two of us, we could start a rumor, too.”
“A rumor?”
“Yeah, because Ellie Matthews works at Beaches, and I believe she has been known to service your brother Mark.”
Anna winced at the terminology. “True.”
“I thought the news of our dining experience might make it back to him. Like I said, the more we can make this look organic, the better.”
“No one ever need know that our relationship is in fact grown in a lab. And in no way GMO free,” she said.
“Exactly.”
“I don’t have any makeup on.” She frowned. “I don’t have any makeup. At all.”
“Right,” he said. “I didn’t really think of that.”
She reached out and smacked him on the shoulder. “You’re supposed to be my coach. You’re failing me.”
He laughed, dodging her next blow. “You don’t need makeup.”
She let out an exasperated sigh. “You’re just saying that.”
“In fairness, you did threaten to castrate me with your car keys earlier.”
“I did.”
“And you hit me just now,” he pointed out.
“It didn’t hurt, you baby.”
He took a deep breath, and suddenly his expression turned sharp. “Believe me when I tell you you don’t need makeup.” He reached out, gripping her chin with his thumb and forefinger. His touch was like a branding iron, hot, altering. “As long as you believe it, everyone else will, too. You have to believe in yourself, Anna.”
He released his hold on her, straightening. “Now,” he said, his tone getting a little bit rougher, “let’s go to dinner.”
* * *
CHASE FELT LIKE he had been tipped sideways and left walking on the walls from the moment that Anna had emerged from the bathroom at his house wearing that dress. Once she had put on those shoes, the feeling had only gotten worse.
But who knew that underneath those coveralls his best friend looked like that?
She had been eyeing herself critically, and his brain had barely been working at all. Because he didn’t see anything to criticize. All he saw was the kind of figure that would make a man willingly submit to car key castration.
She was long and lean, toned from all the physical labor she did. Her breasts were small, but he imagined they would fit in a man’s hand nicely. And her hips...well, using the same measurement used for her breasts, they would be about perfect for holding on to while a man...
Holy hell. He was losing his mind.
She was Anna. Anna Brown, his best friend in the entire world. The one woman he had never even considered going there with. He didn’t want a relationship with the women he slept with. When your only criteria for being with a woman was orgasm, there were a lot of options available to you. For a little bit of satisfaction he could basically seek out any woman in the room.
Sex was easy. Connections were hard.
And so Anna had been placed firmly off-limits from day one. He’d had a vague awareness of her for most of his life. That was how growing up in a small town worked. You went to the same school from the beginning. But they had separate classes, plus at the time he’d been pretty convinced girls had cooties.
But that had changed their first year of high school. He’d ended up in metal shop with the prickly teen and had liked her right away. There weren’t very many girls who cursed as much as the boys and had a more comprehensive understanding of the inner workings of engines than the teachers at the school. But Anna did.
She hadn’t fit in with any of the girls, and so Chase and Sam had been quick to bring her into their group. Over the years, people had rotated in and out, moved, gone their separate ways. But Chase and Anna had remained close.
In part because he had kept his dick out of the equation.
As they walked up the path toward Beaches, he considered putting his hand on her lower back. Really, he should. Except it was potentially problematic at the moment. Was he this shallow? Stick her in a tight-fitting dress and suddenly he couldn’t control himself? It was a sobering realization, but not really all that surprising.