“What do you need my help with?”
“A project at my new place. It’s pretty delicate work. I don’t trust myself to do it.”
“What’s the project?”
“The house has a stone-and-iron fireplace. It’s what sold me on the place. But the fireplace screen is coming apart. It’s nice, original to the house. Would you maybe be willing to come up and take a look at it tonight?”
“Has to be tonight?”
“You busy?”
“Would you be jealous if I was?” she asked.
“You have a hickey on the side of your neck that you’re trying to hide under your collar. Not that I noticed.”
“Except you noticed.”
“Yeah,” he said with a sigh. “I noticed. Who’s the lucky guy? Or girl?”
“Nobody you know. Old friend from high school who moved back to town a month ago. We reconnected. And then disconnected.”
“Didn’t work out?”
“Do you care?”
“Yes,” he said. He said it very simply. Just “yes” as if what he wanted to say was “obviously I care.”
She shook her head, not at Ian but at her own stupidity for thinking she could have had something meaningful with this jerk she’d dated for a week.
“He was cute, he was smart, he was a good kisser, and he thought my art was awesome. But after a couple week he said he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t date a professional welder when he worked as a teller at a bank. His friends would never let him hear the end of it, he said. He just couldn’t date a woman, no matter how hot—his words, not mine—who came off as more of a man than he did. I said that was fine. I didn’t want to date a guy who was less of a man than I was, either. He called me a couple nice words after that and then he was gone. Good riddance to him and his poor little ego.”
“You have to stop dating beneath you.”
“I slept with you.”
“Exactly my point.”
She laughed. “You’re cute,” she said. “I wish you weren’t.”
“It’s a curse.” He grinned at her. “You know, you could have told that guy you weren’t going to be a professional welder anymore.”
“I could have, yeah. But it doesn’t matter. I can’t sleep with a guy I don’t respect. A man who can’t respect a woman doing a supposedly ‘man’s job’ isn’t going to respect a woman who does ‘women’s work,’ either. I’m glad it ended before it got serious.”
“You feel that way about us, too? Glad it ended before it got serious?”
“It was already serious before you kissed me, Ian.”
“I didn’t know. I had no idea you... It never occurred to me you had feelings for me,” he said. “Except attraction. That I’d noticed.”
“You look as good in your suits as out of them and that’s saying something.”
“Let me take you out tonight,” he said. “Dinner. Then you can come back to the house and help me with the fireplace. We’ll hang out. It’ll be fun. It’ll be normal. We can end things on a good note instead of feeling shitty about what happened.”
“Or didn’t happen.”
“Or didn’t happen, yeah.”
“Do you even like me?” she asked. “As a person, I mean. I insult you, I welded truck nuts to your car, I scare the newbies and I make eighteen dollars an hour while you make eighteen dollars a minute.”
“Dad makes eighteen dollars a minute. I make low six figures. I’m on salary, you know. I don’t own the company. I just run it. If I screw up, I get in trouble or get fired just like anyone else who works for my father.”
“Except the rest of us aren’t senator’s sons who are going to inherit the family business someday no matter how badly we screw up.”
“Dad’s only a state senator.”
“And your ski chalet is only a fixer-upper.”
They were silent a long moment. She knew he was waiting for her to bend a little, to say yes to dinner, to say yes to ending on a good note instead of on this...whatever this was...this awkward painful note.
“I’m going to miss you,” he said. “You keep me honest.”
“I insult you. Often.”
“Somebody has to, right?” he asked. “Everybody else sucks up to me.”
“That’s the damn truth,” she said.
“Please? Hang out with me tonight. Take a look at this thing in my house and see if you can fix it. Then we can go to the brewery. My treat. A thank-you for your help. We can pretend to be friends for one evening, right? Then maybe eventually we won’t have to pretend?”
“Why do you want to be my friend?”
“You carry a blowtorch in your backpack and I had to pay five hundred bucks to get those fucking truck nuts off my bumper,” he said, meeting her eyes finally. It was his eyes that had gotten to her first—a blue so bright you could see the color from the other side of the room, the other side of the world. “Of course I want to be your friend. It’s safer than being your enemy.”
She smiled, because she had to after an admission like that.
“Please, Flash. One apology dinner. I’m even buying.”
Ian was strong and smart and it meant a lot to her that he wasn’t ashamed to humble himself a little. A real man. He wasn’t afraid of her even if he joked he was. Which is why she shouldn’t be doing this, having this conversation with him, thinking these thoughts. She cared too much about him already. He’d crushed her before and he could crush her again. She absolutely should not spend any time alone with him ever again, not if she didn’t want to get hurt like before, and God knows, she didn’t want to get hurt like before. She was still hurt.
“I’ll go get my torch,” she said. “But you better make good on the brewery or your fireplace screen won’t be the only thing I solder to the floor.”
“You’re sexy when you’re threatening permanent damage to my genitals,” he said.
She patted his shoulder.
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
IAN WATCHED FLASH walk back into the office to retrieve her equipment. Dammit, what the hell was he thinking? He was thinking he wasn’t over Flash, that’s what he was thinking. And he needed to be over her. He really needed to be over her.
And under her.
And all around her.
And inside her. He needed that more than anything else.
“Pathetic, Asher. Just pathetic,” he muttered to himself as he fished around in his coat pocket to find his keys. Begging for crumbs from this woman when he wanted to feast on her. But he’d fucked it up with her so badly he knew she’d probably never lower her guard around him again. Not enough to give him anything but hope. Certainly not her love, which is what he wanted. Nothing else would do. And yet he knew it was over, all the way over. He’d had some hope when she welded metal testicles to his bumper. Only a woman with very strong feelings for him would pull a prank like that. But after that, nothing. Even the silent treatment would have been better than what he’d gotten from her. She’d treated him like she treated everyone else—with a mix