by Emma Hart
“No. But I want you to have one.”
“Okay. I did it because you did it first.” Another shrug. “Don’t give it if you can’t take it, Chase.”
“I can take it.” His lips quirked to the side. “Can you?”
“Is that a declaration of war?”
“Maybe.” He paused. “Depends how you wanna fight.”
I drew my lower lip between my teeth and ran it between them as if I were picking at a dry bit of skin on it. Chase’s bright eyes dropped to my mouth, flashing with a darkness that looked an awful lot like desire.
“I see,” he mused, dragging his gaze back up so his eyes met mine. “You’re playing dirty.”
“If you think that was dirty,” I said, opening the door and looking him up and down, deliberately making my gaze linger on his groin area. “Then you’re about to get a goddamn shock.”
“I look forward to it.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN – CHASE
And I did. I looked forward to it.
If Rae was messing with me, she wasn’t hating me. Every second she spoke to me was a second closer to her keeping me in her life. I didn’t give a fuck how I was in it, just that I was.
Every moment we spent together solidified the one thing I knew. She was still attracted to me. Whether or not she wanted to admit it or accept it or take that any further, she was attracted to me.
She tried to hide it, but I saw how she reacted to me. I saw the things she tried to hide.
Every time she blushed, she dipped her head to hide it, but she couldn’t hide the pink flush that colored her neck.
Every time she bit back a shiver, she couldn’t hide the way goosebumps erupted on her skin.
She thought she could.
She thought she was clever. She thought she had control over her body, but she was wrong.
I couldn’t control it either. I couldn’t control the way my heart beat a little faster at the mere mention of her name, never mind actually seeing her. The sound of her voice captivated me in a way I couldn’t explain. Even when she was throwing sass like it was her damn job.
In her eyes, it probably was.
I left the broom propped against the wall and looked around the store. It seemed hollow now that everything was out in the open and Rae knew the truth.
And I didn’t really care. I realized that. Looking around the empty space, I didn’t care. It wasn’t like I was good at making ice cream—I didn’t make it. I didn’t have the vision or the passion that Rae did.
Not once had I ever gotten ice cream in my hair because I’d been so in the zone.
I couldn’t remember all the ingredients for a chocolate fudge sundae half the time.
I didn’t want to lose this space, but I couldn’t help but wonder if there was something else I could do with it when Rae reopened. She hated that it was an ice cream store, but there had to be another option.
I liked running my own business. It gave me the freedom to do what I wanted and when.
I just needed to figure something else out.
I used the dustpan to pick up the dirt on the floor and dumped it into the trash. Three knocks sounded at the door, and I looked up to see my sister standing there with Chelsea.
I unlocked the door to let them in. “What are you two doing back here?”
“Need any help?” Marnie asked, hands in her pockets.
I shook my head. “I’m good. Why?”
Chelsea rolled her eyes. “She wanted to know how your conversation with Rae went last night. She also wants to know what was in the minivan-sized box.”
“You weren’t supposed to tell him right away.” Marnie snorted and walked to the fridge and grabbed two bottles of Coke.
I raised my eyebrows at her as she popped the caps off the glass bottles. “Are you paying for those?”
She paused. “Sure. I’ll deep-clean the freezer tomorrow.”
“You’re damn right you will.” I perched on the edge of a table and folded my arms. “I don’t know what was in the box. She didn’t open it when I was there.”
“You were gone a long time.”
Chelsea smiled slyly. “Yeah, you were.”
“I’m the boss here, aren’t I?”
“Yeah,” Marnie said. “But I’m your bratty teenage sister, so I’m allowed to annoy you.”
“I can fire you.”
“But you won’t. That would get in the way of you trying to get Rae back.” She smiled smugly. “So? How did your conversation with her last night go?”
I pushed off the table and walked to the counter to clean it. “That’s none of your business.”
Chelsea sighed. “It went bad.”
Marnie nodded. “Yep.”
I gritted my teeth and rinsed a dishcloth in the sink behind the counter. I didn’t need to wipe the countertop down, but I needed to not talk to two teenage girls about my problems.
Why the fuck was I even entertaining it? Jesus. My life was falling to shit if they were my only potential confidantes.
I needed a life.
“We aren’t discussing this,” I said firmly. “It’s none of your business.” I threw the cloth in the sink. “When you’re older, you’ll understand.”
“When we’re older? You’re only eight years older than me,” Marnie grumbled, flicking her hair.
“Exactly. Which means I knew how to be an irritating brat when you were still screaming for someone to give you attention,” I shot back. “Come back to me when you’ve had a relationship with someone who doesn’t sell pot out of his mom’s garage.”
She sniffed. “We’re not dating.”
“That’s true,” Chelsea piped up. “They’re not.”
“All right,” I said, shrugging. “So, if you’re not dating the local teen pot dealer, what are you doing at his house on a regular basis?”
I knew the answer to that, and she knew I knew it. I raised my eyebrow as she squirmed on the seat.
I won that round.
Marnie sniffed and got up. “Whatever. I’ll go ask Rae instead.”
“If she’s still there. Even if she is, she’s probably in the bathroom cleaning up the tissue.” My lips twitched.
“What?” Marnie frowned.
“Never mind. Go away. I have work to do.” I waved my hand at them, and they disappeared quickly. Thank God. I didn’t have the time to amuse my sister’s nosiness today.
I didn’t actually have work to do, and I did have the time, but it felt better to tell myself that I didn’t.
Instead of going home, I created work. I deep-cleaned the entire front of the store, and by the time I was done, my fingers were wrinkled, and my stomach was rumbling.
A glance at the clock told me why. It was almost six p.m. I’d be annoyed if the place wasn’t sparkling and smelling like lemon—or whatever the shit was in that cleaning stuff Marnie had bought last week.
I grabbed my stuff and locked up, pausing outside Best Served Cold. I didn’t think seeing Rae twice in one day after last night would be a good idea, especially since I’d had to leave before I’d kissed her again.
I didn’t think that would work in my favor.
A loud thump came from inside, quickly followed by a smash, and I instinctively reached for the door. It was unlocked, swinging open with one hard push. “Rae?”
She walked out from the kitchen, rubbing the side of her head. “What?”
“What the hell was that noise?”
She winced, hand still on her head. “I was reaching up for a glass on the shelf, but I didn’t stack them right. I nudged the plastic tub full of tubs I’ll never use. That fell on my head and on its way down, took two sundae glasses with them. There’s glass all over the floor.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose and stepped inside. “How the hell does anyone think you’re able to run a business without supervision for your safety?”
“Starting to wonder that myself,” she muttered. “I just wanted to make a sundae.”
“At six p.m
.? Aren’t you hungry?”
She glanced up at me, muttering again. This time I couldn’t hear her, and she darted into the kitchen before I could ask what she’d said.
I shut the door behind me and followed her through to the back. It was fucking carnage. Two sundae glasses had not only just broken on the floor—they’d shattered, and the bright lights glinted off the tiny pieces that coated the floor.
Ingredients were everywhere, and there was a smear of neon green across the floor near where Rae was standing. She herself had purple and pink patches on her arms, and what the hell was in her hair?
“What in the ever-loving fuck have you been doing back here?” I blinked at her.
“Trying to take over the world, clearly,” she snarked. “Are you going to help me clean up or are you here to watch while I do it all?”
“I’d prefer to watch,” I admitted. “But in order to save myself from the murder in your eyes right now, why don’t you pass me that broom and I’ll get started?”
She passed me the broom with a wry smile on her face.
“Are you aware you look like you had a fight with a box of coloring pens?”
Rae sighed and looked at her arms. “I can’t focus today. Hence why I’m still here, eating ice cream for dinner and hoping I won’t be done with work until midnight.”
I paused mid-sweep. Right. Her mom had shown up this morning. “Avoiding your mom?”
“Like the plague.” She shrugged a shoulder. “I’m a selfish bitch, I know, but it’s been two years, we’ve barely spoken, and I just don’t think I can cope with it right now.”
“Everything happens in threes.”
“Great. I can’t wait to see what else gets thrown at me this week.” She huffed out a big breath and opened the dishwasher. “It’s not hellish enough.”
I emptied the dustpan in the trash and continued sweeping. “It can still get better. I mean, from your perspective, it can’t get much worse, can it?”
“You’re not making me feel better.”
“Hey, you could be me. You could have told your ex you still love them and had them not say it back.”
She froze and side-eyed me. “I hope you’re going somewhere with that, Chase.”
“Not really. I was just pointing it out.” I smirked. “It could be worse.”
She threw a towel at me.
“The last time you did that, you ended up with a bathroom full of wet tissue paper. And, the last time you took a towel to me, I ended up whipping your ass with it.”
“Whatever. I won both fights, and you know it.”
“Did you?”
“Well, one of us had to leave, and it wasn’t me who walked away from the fight.” She shrugged and finished loading the dishwasher.
I emptied the last of the glass from the dustpan into the trash. “Try it again, and I won’t be walking away from anything, whether you like it or not.” I propped the brush against the wall and surveyed the rest of the mess she’d made in the kitchen. “Do you want a hand cleaning the rest of this up?”
Rae stood up and smiled sheepishly. “Only if you don’t clean up too fast. And I can pay you.”
“You don’t need to—”
“In ice cream,” she said quickly. “I, um, I made some chocolate fudge brownie ice cream earlier.”
My favorite.
She swallowed, fiddling with the hem of her shirt. “Um. I made it for you anyway. To say thank you for helping me with the steamer. And taking my parcel. And sorry for being a huge raging bitch?”
I ran my tongue over my teeth and grinned at her. “Are you apologizing for that last one, or are you still deciding?”
“Um.” She rubbed her hand over her mouth to hide her smile and met my eyes. “Apologizing. Awkwardly.”
“An apology with ice cream is my favorite kind. Especially that flavor.” I reached out and tugged on her hair. “Come on. I’ll help you clean up. Then we’ll go and find real food for dinner.”
“Are you asking me on a date?”
“Do you want to go home?”
“No.” She paused. “But it’s not a date.”
I held up my hands. “Not a date. Just two hungry people avoiding real life.”
She frowned. “What are you avoiding?”
“Marnie. What else would I be avoiding?”
“There’s a story there.” She threw me a damp dishcloth. “There you go. Get cleaning and tell me why you’re avoiding your sister.”
***
“She won’t stop,” Rae said, propping her chin up on her hand. “You know she won’t. She’s like those little dogs that bark through gates at you when you walk past.”
“The little yappy ones?” I raised my eyebrows. “Are you comparing my sister to a chihuahua?”
“You’re the one who lived with her. You know exactly what I mean.” She pulled her glass of Coke over toward her and sipped through the straw. “She’s going to keep bugging you until you give her what she wants.”
“I’m not telling her anything.” I held my hands up. “That conversation was between you and I. It’s one thing for you to talk to Sophie, but I’m not talking to my baby sister.”
She hid a tiny laugh behind her hand. “I haven’t actually spoken to Sophie yet. I did speak to Grandma, though.”
“You did?” I quirked a brow. “What did she say?”
“Something pretty interesting. Apparently, you still worked wood with my grandpa for a while. A little more frequently than you told me.”
Shit. We’d never deliberately kept that a secret from her, but we’d never exactly mentioned it, either. I hadn’t known how she’d take it that I was still close to her grandfather, and as far as I knew, he’d never found an appropriate time to bring it up.
I nodded slowly and eyed her, unsure of her response. Would she be mad at that? “We were in the middle of a project, and he asked me if I’d help him finish it. I’ve given him a hand a few times since then.”
“What did you work on together?”
I didn’t answer.
Rae’s lips curved to one side. “What? You thought I’d be mad?”
“You’ve got a bit of a track record with that.”
She laughed, dipping her head. “Hey, I know that. It doesn’t make sense to be mad at you for that. I didn’t expect my family to ignore you just because I was.”
Well, fuck me dead. I didn’t expect that.
“We were working on the bench your grandma wanted to go near the rose bushes.” I paused. “We weren’t quite done, and it was a side project to a set of side tables someone had commissioned from him, so he asked me if I’d still come by a few times a week to help him.”
“How did I never see you at the house?”
“I never went inside. I used the side door to the garage. Not to be rude, but because we all know how much your grandma hates sawdust on the carpets.” I sipped my Coke.
Rae laughed, resting both arms on the table and meeting my eyes. “That’s true. I wouldn’t even have had a chance to question it if I’d seen you. She would have murdered you on the spot.”
I smirked because it was true.
Our dinner was brought to us then, and that gave us a moment's silence before we could carry on the conversation.
“What have you been working on together?” Rae sprinkled parmesan over her pasta.
I tried to hide my surprise at her interest. I wanted to talk to her like this—to have some kind of normal relationship with her.
But that didn’t mean it wasn’t weird.
“Mostly garden stuff. He got a lot of requests for things like bird boxes and wildlife houses last summer. I helped him do a few, but his favorite was a bug hotel.”
“A bug hotel? What the hell is that?”
“Exactly what it says it is. It’s a place for bugs to live and thrive.”
She wrinkled her face up. “That sounds like my worst nightmare.”
Laughing, I shook my head and speared a shrimp on the end of my
fork. “No, no. Good bugs.”
“Okay, but what is it? How do you make one?”
I swallowed the shrimp. “It’s mostly a few wooden pallets stuck together and filled with things that bugs can nest in. Bricks, plant pots, old pipes, insulation, concrete slabs.”
“And you just put it all together? What about plants?”
“Yeah, but we don’t put those in. We just construct the house and get it there. We typically add the bricks and heavy stuff when we deliver it.”
“Wow. I never knew they existed.” She stabbed some pasta with her fork. “I didn’t know he made all that stuff.”
“Rae, you haven’t been in the garage for over three years.”
“It’s dusty and dirty, that’s why.” She smiled slightly. “Plus, Grandpa gets all assy if you get in his way.”
I laughed. “I know. I do it often. He’s… lovably assy.”
“You can’t be lovable and assy.”
“Of course you can. You’re that all the time.”
She flicked a small piece of mushroom off the side of her plate. It landed on the table next to mine.
“Oh, boy,” I said. “That sure told me.”
She kicked me under the table instead. “Asshole.”
“A lovable one?”
“Don’t push it.” She narrowed her eyes, but they were bright with amusement. “I can ignore you again anytime I want.”
I pointed my finger at her. “Fifty bucks says you can’t.”
“You’re seriously betting on my ability to ignore you? I did it successfully for two whole years.” She responded by pointing her fork at me. “I can do it again.”
I rolled my eyes and twisted my fork in my spaghetti. “Yeah, but now you’ve been exposed to my devastating charms again. It’s not going to be that easy.”
“Your devastating charms? Which ones might those be?”
“I’d have to take off my shirt to show you all of them.”
“Let me guess. They come in a pack of six and disappear into your pants.” Her lips tugged to one side. “And, if you tensed just right while lying down, you’d be able to sip liquor from between each little muscle.”
“How did you know? Oh, right—you did that once.”
Her cheeks flushed bright red. “It was my birthday, and I was drunk!”