Take Me, Cowboy(4)

Which kind of summed up why she was in this position in the first place.

She swallowed hard. “Maybe I just want to surprise people. Isn’t that enough?”

“You came from nothing. You started your own business with no support from your father. You’re a female mechanic. I would say that you’re surprising as hell.”

“Well, I want to add another dimension to that. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said. “Multidimensional Anna. That seems like a good idea to me.”

“Where do we start?”

“With you not falling off your chair laughing at me because I’ve offered to make you a woman.”

A giggle rose in her throat again. Hysteria. She was verging on hysteria. Because this was uncomfortable and sincere. She hated both of those things. “I’m sorry. I can’t. You can’t say that to me and expect me not to choke.”

He looked at her again, his dark eyes intense. “Is it a problem, Anna? The idea that I might make you a woman.”

He purposefully made his voice deeper. Purposefully added a kind of provocative inflection to the words. She knew he was kidding. Still, it made her chest tighten. Made her heart flutter a little bit.

Wow. How annoying. She hadn’t had a relapse of Chase Underpants Feelings this bad in a long time.

Apparently she still hadn’t recovered from her earlier bit of mistaken identity. She really needed to recover. And he needed to stop being...Chase. If at all possible.

“Is it a problem for you?” she asked.

“What?”

“The idea that I might make you a soprano?”

He chuckled. “You probably want to hold off on threats of castration when you’re at a fancy party.”

“We aren’t at one right now.”

She was her own worst enemy. Everything that she had just been silently complaining about, she was doing right now. Throwing out barbs the moment she got uncomfortable, because it kept people from seeing what was actually happening inside of her.

Yes, but you really need to keep Chase from seeing that you fluttered internally over something he said.

Yes. Good point.

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.”