CHAPTER TWO
ANNA JUST ABOUT laughed herself off her chair. “You’re going to make me a...a...a woman?”
“Why is that funny?”
“What about it isn’t funny?”
“I’m offering to help you.”
“You’re offering to help me be something that I am by birth. I mean, Chase, I get that women are kind of your thing, but that’s pretty arrogant. Even with all things considered.”
“Okay, obviously I’m not going to make you a woman.” Something about the way he said the phrase this time hit her in an entirely different way. Made her think about other applications that phrase occasionally had. Things she needed to never, ever, ever, ever think about in connection with Chase.
If she valued her sanity and their friendship.
She cleared her throat, suddenly aware that it was dry and scratchy. “Obviously.”
“I just meant that you need help getting a date, and I need to go to this party. And you said that you were concerned about your appearance in the community.”
“Right.” He wasn’t wrong. The thing was, she knew that whether or not she could blend in at an event like this didn’t matter at all to how well her business did. Nobody cared if their mechanic knew which shade of lipstick she should wear. But that wasn’t the point.
She—her family collectively—was the town charity case. Living on the edge of the community in a run-down house, raised by a single father who was in over his head, who spent his days at the mill. Her older brothers had been in charge of taking care of her, and they had done so. But, of course, they were also older brothers. Which meant they had tormented her while feeding and clothing her. Anyway, she didn’t exactly blame them.
It wasn’t like the two of them had wanted to raise a sister when they would rather be out raising hell.
Especially a sister who was committed to driving them crazy.
She loved her brothers. But that didn’t mean they always had an easy relationship. It didn’t mean they didn’t hurt her by accident when they teased her about things. She acted invulnerable, so they assumed that she was.
But now, beneath her coveralls and engine grease, she was starting to feel a little bit battered. It was difficult to walk around with a screw you attitude barely covering a raw wound. Because eventually that shield started to wear down. Especially when people were used to being able to lob pretty intense rocks at that shield.
That was her life. It was either pity or a kind of merciless camaraderie that had no softness to it. Her dad, her brothers, all the guy friends she had...
And she couldn’t really blame them. She had never behaved in a way that would demonstrate she needed any softness. In fact, a few months ago, a few weeks ago even, the idea would have been unthinkable to her.
But there was something about this invitation. Something about imagining herself in yet another situation where she was forced to deflect good-natured comments about her appearance, about the fact that she was more like a guy than the roughest cowboys in town. Yeah, there was something about that thought that had made her want to curl into a ball and never unfurl.
Then, even if it was unintentional, her brothers had piled on. It had hurt her feelings. Which meant she had reacted in anger, naturally. So now she had a bet. A bet, and her best friend looking at her with laser focus after having just promised he would make her a woman.
“Why do you care?” He was pressing, and she wanted to hit him now.
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.”
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.”