LITMIR.BIZ

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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.”

       Three

      Anna was reeling slightly by the time she walked up the front porch and into Chase’s house. The entire town was going to think that they were...lovers. She had never had a lover. At least, she would never characterize the guy she’d slept with as a lover. He was an unfortunate incident. But fortunately, her hymen was the only casualty. Her heart had remained intact, and she was otherwise uninjured. Or pleasured.

      Lovers.

      That word sounded...well, like it came from some old movie or something. Which under normal circumstances she was a big fan of. In this circumstance, it just made her feel...like her insides were vibrating. She didn’t like it.

      Chase lived in the old family home on the property. It was a large, log cabin–style house with warm, honey-colored wood and a green metal roof designed to withstand all kinds of weather. Wrought-iron details on the porch and the

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