Take Me, Cowboy(2)
They walked back over to the table, and gradually, her heart rate returned to normal. She was relieved that the initial weirdness she had felt upon his arrival was receding.
“Hi, Sam,” Chase said, taking his seat beside his brother. Sam grunted in response. “We were just talking about the hazards of you turning into a hermit.”
“Am I not a convincing hermit already?” he asked. “Do I need to make my disdain for mankind a little less subtle?”
“That might help,” Chase said.
“I might just go play a game of darts instead. I’ll catch up with you in a minute.” Sam took a long drink of his beer and stood, leaving the bottle on the table as he made his way over to the dartboard across the bar.
Silence settled between Chase and herself. Why was this suddenly weird? Why was Anna suddenly conscious of the way his throat moved when he swallowed a sip of beer, of the shift in his forearms as he set the bottle back down on the table? Of just how masculine a sound he made when he cleared his throat?
She was suddenly even conscious of the way he breathed.
She leaned back in her chair, lifting her beer to her lips and surveying the scene around them.
It was Friday night, so most of the town of Copper Ridge, Oregon, was hanging out, drowning the last vestiges of the workweek in booze. It was not the end of the workweek for Anna. Farmers and ranchers didn’t take time off, so neither did she. She had to be on hand to make repairs when necessary, especially right now, since she was just getting her own garage off the ground.
She’d just recently quit her job at Jake’s in order to open her own shop specializing in heavy equipment, which really was how she found herself in the position she was in right now. Invited to the charity gala thing and embroiled in a bet on whether or not she could get a date.
“So why exactly do you want to kill your brothers today?” Chase asked, startling her out of her thoughts.
“Various reasons.” She didn’t know why, but something stopped her from wanting to tell him exactly what was going on. Maybe because it was humiliating. Yes, it was definitely humiliating.
“Sure. But that’s every day. Why specifically do you want to kill them today?”
She took a deep breath, keeping her eyes fixed on the fishing boat that was mounted to the wall opposite her, and very determinedly not looking at Chase. “Because. They bet that I couldn’t get a date to this thing I’m invited to and I bet them that I could.” She thought about the woman he’d been talking to a moment ago. A woman so different from herself they might as well be different species. “And right about now I’m afraid they’re right.”
* * *
Chase was doing his best to process his best friend’s statement. It was difficult, though. Daniel and Mark had solid asshole tendencies when it came to Anna—that much he knew—but this was pretty low even for them.
He studied Anna’s profile, her dark hair pulled back into a braid, her gray T-shirt that was streaked with oil. He watched as she raised her bottle of beer to her lips. She had oil on her hands, too. Beneath her fingernails. Anna wasn’t the kind of girl who attracted a lot of male attention. But he kind of figured that was her choice.
She wasn’t conventionally beautiful. Mostly because of the motor oil. But that didn’t mean that getting a date should be impossible for her.
“Why don’t you think you can get a date?”
She snorted, looking over at him, one dark brow raised. “Um.” She waved a hand up and down, indicating her body. “Because of all of this.”
He took a moment to look at all of that. Really look. Like he was a man and she was a woman. Which they were, but not in a conventional sense. Not to each other. He’d looked at her almost every day for the past fifteen years, so it was difficult to imagine seeing her for the first time. But just then, he tried.
She had a nice nose. And her lips were full, nicely shaped, her top lip a little fuller than her bottom lip, which was unique and sort of...not sexy, because it was Anna. But interesting.
“A little elbow grease and that cleans right off,” he said. “Anyway, men are pretty simple.”
She frowned. “What does that mean?”
“Exactly what it sounds like. You don’t have to do much to get male attention if you want it. Give a guy what he’s after...”
“Okay, that’s just insulting. You’re saying that I can get a guy because men just want to get laid? So it doesn’t matter if I’m a wrench-toting troll?”
“You are not a wrench-toting troll. You’re a wrench-toting woman who could easily bludgeon me to death, and I am aware of that. Which means I need to choose my next words a little more carefully.”
Those full lips thinned into a dangerous line, her green eyes glittering dangerously. “Why don’t you do that, Chase.”
He cleared his throat. “I’m just saying, if you want a date, you can get one.”
“By unzipping my coveralls down to my belly button?”
He tipped his beer bottle back, taking a larger swallow than he intended to, coughing as it went down wrong. He did not need to picture the visual she had just handed to him. But he was a man, so he did.
It was damned unsettling. His best friend, bare beneath a pair of coveralls unfastened so that a very generous wedge of skin was revealed all the way down...
And he was done with that. He didn’t think of Anna that way. Not at all. They’d been friends since they were freshmen in high school and he’d navigated teenage boy hormones without lingering too long on thoughts of her breasts.
He was thirty years old, and he could have sex whenever he damn well pleased. Breasts were no longer mysterious to him. He wasn’t going to go pondering the mysteries of her breasts now.
“It couldn’t hurt, Anna,” he said, his words containing a little more bite than he would like them to. But he was unsettled.
“Okay, I’ll keep that in mind. But barring that, do you have any other suggestions? Because I think I’m going to be expected to wear something fancy, and I don’t own anything fancy. And it’s obvious that Mark and Daniel think I suck at being a girl.”
“That’s not true. And anyway, why do you care what they—or anyone else—think?”
“Because. I’ve got this new business...”
“And anyone who brings their heavy equipment to you for a tune-up won’t care whether or not you can walk in high heels.”
“But I don’t want to show up at these things looking...” She sighed. “Chase, the bottom line is I’ve spent a long time not fitting in. And people here are nice to me. I mean, now that I’m not in school. People in school sucked. But I get that I don’t fit. And I’m tired of it. Honestly, I wouldn’t care about my brothers if there wasn’t so much...truth to the teasing.”
“They do suck. They’re awful. So why does it matter what they think?”
“Because,” she said. “It just does. I’m that poor Anna Brown with no mom to teach her the right way to do things and I’m just...tired of it. I don’t want to be poor Anna Brown. I want to be Anna Brown, heavy equipment mechanic who can wear coveralls and walk in heels.”
“Not at the same time, I wouldn’t think.”
She shot him a deadly glare. “I don’t fail,” she said, her eyes glinting in the dim bar light. “I won’t fail at this.”
“You’re not in remote danger of failing. Now, what’s the mystery event that has you thinking about high heels?” he asked.
Copper Ridge wasn’t exactly a societal epicenter. Nestled between the evergreen mountains and a steel-gray sea on the Oregon Coast, there were probably more deer than people in the small town. There were only so many events in existence. And there was a good chance she was making a mountain out of a small-town molehill, and none of it would be that big of a deal.
“That charity thing that the West family has every year,” she mumbled. “Gala Under the Stars or whatever.”
The West family’s annual fund-raising event for schools. It was a weekend event, with the town’s top earners coming to a small black-tie get-together on the West property.
The McCormacks had been founding members of the community of Copper Ridge back in the 1800s. Their forge had been used by everyone in town and in the neighboring communities. But as the economy had changed, so had the success of the business.
They’d been hanging on by their fingernails when Chase’s parents had been killed in an accident when he was in high school. They’d still gotten an invitation to the gala. But Chase had thrown it on top of the never-ending pile of mail and bills that he couldn’t bring himself to look through and forgotten about it.
Until some woman—probably an assistant to the West family—had called him one year when he hadn’t bothered to RSVP. He had been...well, he’d been less than polite.
Dealing with a damned crisis here, so sorry I can’t go to your party.
Unsurprisingly, he hadn’t gotten any invitations after that. And he hadn’t really thought much about it since.
Until now.
He and Sam had managed to keep the operation and properties afloat, but he wanted more. He needed it.
The ranch had animals, but that wasn’t the source of their income. The forge was the heart of the ranch, where they did premium custom metal-and leatherwork. On top of that, there were outbuildings on the property they rented out—including the shop they leased to Anna. They had built things back up since their parents had died, but it still wasn’t enough, not to Chase.