I might have done the same.
Hell, I was. I was redoing this store to shove him out of business, and here he was, helping me. This was my revenge for his revenge, and he was actively taking part in it without knowing why it was happening.
I should have handled things better. I hadn’t been sixteen. I’d been twenty-three.
And, even after I’d hurt him, he’d still tried to be nice to me.
And I’d been nothing but a raging bitch to him.
“You’re not over him…. You never got over him.”
Sophie’s words were an echo inside my mind, but I brushed them away. No, I was over him. I knew that. Two years was long enough to get over someone. The thoughts I was having were just because he was back in my life.
It was normal.
It was normal for a situation like this to bring back old memories and the whisper of a feeling. Sometimes the present pulled the past forward, but that didn’t mean the past had to be a part of the future.
When I was able to walk properly again, I wouldn’t need Chase to help me. He could go back to The Frozen Spoon and get on with his life while I got on with mine and stopped remembering how good things used to be between us.
No matter how hard the memories came, I’d never be able to forgive him for taking my ideas and opening my store. Even if I did have responsibility for not doing these renovations sooner and letting him steal my customers, it still never should have happened.
I rolled my shoulders and moved the roller through the paint in the tray. The urge to peek over at Chase overcame me, and I gave into it.
He was on the counter on his knees, and sometime in the last thirty minutes, he’d removed his t-shirt. His tanned back rippled with lean muscle as he used the roller to get the top of the wall where the shelves usually went.
Back and forth his arm went, his shoulder muscles flexing with each movement he made. A lump formed in my throat as I watched him, and I let my gaze wander down his spine to the spot right above his ass where he had two deep dimples that I just wanted to poke my fingers in.
He was handsome as hell. And why the hell were backs so hot? What right did Chase’s back have to be so smooth and tanned and perfectly muscled in all the right places? And if the dimples at the base of his spine blinked at me one more time I was going to explode.
This wasn’t fair.
“What are you doing?”
I jerked my attention up to his face. He looked over his shoulder at me, his blue-green eyes shining with mirth, an emotion reflected in the stupid half-smile on his face that I wanted to slap off.
“Making sure you’re doing it right,” I lied. “Just checking.”
“Right. I do the same thing when I ogle your ass. Even when you limp.”
“You make it very hard to be nice to you.”
“You’re the one checking me out like you’ve never seen me naked before. You’re almost drooling over there.”
I touched my fingers to the side of my mouth instinctively.
His half-smile became a grin.
Crap. I’d fallen for it.
“You’re impossible,” I snapped.
He jumped off the counter and put the small roller in his tray. He leaned against the main counter again and reached for his bottle of water. With a shrug, he said, “As I said, Rae, it’s just too easy. Plus, you shouldn’t stare at me if you don’t want me to call you on it.”
“I wasn’t staring at you.” I put my roller down and got up carefully. The sheets we’d put down were soft under my bare feet as I carefully made my way to get my bottle from the counter, too. “I was watching what you were doing.”
“Unless my cock was holding the paintbrush, I doubt that.”
“It’s not that talented.”
“You are the authority on its talents.”
I grabbed my bottle and, resisting the urge to turn away, looked him in the eye. “You’re assuming I remember.”
Something flashed through his eyes. “You assume I believe you.”
“Believe what you want.” I uncapped my water and didn’t let up on eye contact, even though my heart had just skipped a beat. “It has been a while. I don’t remember what I ate last week, never mind what talents your cock has.”
He stared at me for the longest moment. The unrelenting intensity of his gaze as his blue-green eyes stayed fixed on mine sent yet another shiver down my spine, and my heart was now not skipping a beat—it was going double-time.
I wanted to swallow hard. Turn around. Pretend I was serious. Not give him a chance to see right through me.
“Nice try,” he murmured, only inches from me.