“I— I uh…”
God, he was absolutely stunning! How could I not have remembered him? It wasn’t like David brought a lot of people around. When the whole team came over, he must’ve got lost in the shuffle.
“I think they are,” I shrugged, guessing. “Honestly I really couldn’t tell you.”
“If this is yours you should be driving it,” he said, turning his attention back to the car.
“Oh it’s definitely mine,” I assured him. “If that asshole left me with all the bills, then this comes with it.”
“This thing is a classic!” Tate went on. “It’s amazing! It’s—”
“Probably expensive as all hell to fix up?” I interrupted him. When he didn’t immediately answer, I raised an eyebrow. “No?”
He’d been bent at the waist, trying to look at the paint’s hopefully unblemished surface from the level of the hood. I on the other hand, was staring at his perfectly-round ass. It was covered in jeans that were just tight enough to hypnotize me. In all the best ways, of course.
“Working a few hours a night I could put this back together in a week,” he said. “Give or take a day or two.”
He turned back to me, expectantly. It took me a moment to realize what he was driving at.
“I— just don’t have the money,” I said simply. “Sorry.”
Tate paused, rubbing the side of his face with the back of one hand. His expression changed. The whole way he looked at me changed in fact, as he eyed me up and down.
“Who said anything about money?”
I was suddenly very aware of him. Not as a friend of David’s, or someone who stopped in for pizza one night four or five years back with the rest of the basketball team.
No, I was suddenly aware of him as a man.
“Well…”
The word caught in my throat. For no reason in particular, my heart was beating twice as fast as before.
“What exactly would you want?”
The words left my mouth before my brain could double-check them. What was I saying? What was I asking?
“I don’t know,” he said, folding his arms over his jumpsuit. They were ridiculously strong arms. A man’s arms. “What’s on the table?”
Befo
re I could process anything else, he took a step in my direction. My mind screamed at me to take a step back. To flee, or stop him, or say something. Say anything at all.
Instead I only stood there, biting my lip.
“You know when we were in school we didn’t know your name,” he said. “But we didn’t call you Mrs. Nelson either.”
“You didn’t?”
He shook his head, and a flop of thick dark hair fell over one emerald eye. He brushed it back with the practice of having done it a thousand times.
“No,” he said, his voice going lower. “A bunch of us referred to you by the same little nickname. You were never Mrs. Nelson to us. You were always David’s super-hot mom.”
My stomach lurched. I swallowed dryly, as he took another step forward.
“Stepmom,” I corrected him.
“Whatever.”