Jesse Cooper!

I closed my mouth with a snap and tried not to stare too hard as he got to his feet. Oh, my…He wasn’t wearing a shirt, so the muscles beneath his smudged-black skin rippled, flexed, and popped all over the place. I felt my own muscles start to tense.

Ignoring me, he headed over to switch the radio off.

Fuck. When did he get this…adult?

“How can I help you?” He turned back to me as he grabbed his shirt from where he had dumped it over the edge of a chair and quickly pulled it back on. Somehow, the pale fabric of the tee seemed to outline his muscles even more profoundly than before.

I found my eyes drawn to the fullness of his arms in the sleeves. “Um,” I swallowed heavily. “Hi, Jesse.”

He furrowed his brow at me for a moment and for a split-second, it looked like he didn’t remember me.

I wanted to crawl out of there in humiliation. We went to high school together. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised he didn’t know who I was because it suddenly felt like a hell of a long time ago. Even so, I recognized him like I’d seen him yesterday, the memory of him burned into my brain like a brand.

He still looked the same in some ways; the dark, slightly messy hair, that inscrutably strong jaw, those strikingly blue eyes, but now he had a man’s body, full of hard muscles, and his features were sharper and more defined. His jaw was also smattered with a light stubble.

I never in a million years would have imagined that he could get any hotter, but here we were.

“Mia Foxton,” he finally drawled, a grin curling up onto his face, as his eyes slowly worked its way down my body. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

“Uh, I guess not,” I offered in return. Jesus, why did I feel as though the ground had been swept out from underneath me? Like I was about to topple over on the spot? Nothing had ever even happened between us.

Jesse had ridden up on his big, black motorbike to my high school in my final year. No one really knew much about him other than he had an older brother who sometimes came to school to pick him up, but it was clear he was special. He was one of the cool, mysterious kids who instantly become the heartthrob of whatever school they went to. Every girl found herself swooning over him.

And yeah, sure, maybe I did a little swooning too. I would never have admitted it to anyone then, as I was too busy carefully cultivating an above-it-all teenager attitude. Then I caught him looking at me with those smoldering flame-blue eyes few times in the math class we shared and it put ideas into my head that for sure, shouldn’t have been there.

Not that he spent too long hung up on me.

No, he had other fish to fry. Since most of the girls were busy fluttering their teenage eyelashes at him, he took advantage of their offers and ended up sleeping with as many as he could. Well, pretty much all the girls in my graduating year. Actually, he popped the cherries of so many girls he quickly earned the title of Cherry Popper. And that had been enough to keep me away from him.

I didn’t want to be just another conquest he made, a box ticked in his mind. He asked me out once. I turned him down even though every fiber of my being was screaming for me to say yes, please.

Now here he was… working at the old garage that had been on the edge of town for years. Looking even better than he had before, his eyes filled with the same highly sexual gaze of many years ago, reminding me of the past and how much I’d wanted him while I pretended to be aloof and uninterested.

Problem was…I was now having a hard time remembering exactly what had kept me away from him all these years.