“Damn,” Chance Drummond said. “I saw the name McCarthy and had myself a flashback. Didn’t you turn out just fine.”
“Chance,” she said, her grin widening like it always did when she saw him, her heart giving a subtle extra beat. “You haven’t changed a bit. Still telling it like it is to a woman.”
His dark eyebrows wiggled some. “Why beat around the bush? Hang on.” He moved away from the bar and walked through the door. Yep, her eyes went right to his ass. He was a bigger man than he had been as a boy in high school. “Here you go.”
She reached for the bag he’d set on the counter. “Working here or is this your place?”
“What gave it away?” he asked. “The name?”
She held her fingers up in a pinch. “Just a little.” She figured Rhea was his wife or some other woman in his life. Not that she ever figured he’d be the type to settle down.
“Come back anytime,” he said. “I know your office isn’t that far from here.”
“What makes you think I work there?”
“Because you’d do nothing else,” he said. “Am I wrong?”
“Nope.”
“I bet you’re sitting in a nice, air-conditioned office telling people what to do.”
She held back a frown. She wanted to dispute that, but she’d just lost a bet trying to do that with her mother.
“Looks can be deceiving,” she said. “You have a good day.”
“Oh, I will now,” he said, winking at her, then turned back to a customer.
Her heart still raced the same way it had when she was a teenager and he used to talk to her, as if no time had passed at all.
2
PROVE HIMSELF
“Look at you getting your flirt on.”
Chance turned to see his grandmother behind the bar next to him, her typical smirk when she caught him doing something she wanted to bust on him about.
“It’s hardly that, Grandma.”
“It’s most certainly that. Not your normal type either.”
“That’s right,” he said. He took the order that was brought over and began filling the drinks. “Someone way out of my league.”
“In your mind. I saw the way she was looking at you.”
His grandmother was almost snickering while she said that.
It didn’t matter how Jocelyn McCarthy looked at him. He knew attraction when he saw it. But that was all it’d be for her. All it’d ever been even in high school.
He’d never be good enough for the likes of her and her family.
“It’d be all about sex, Grandma.”
His grandmother laughed and rolled her eyes. Who could talk to their grandparent like that and not get in trouble for it?
Their dynamic hadn’t been the typical family norm.
No polite dinners with place settings perfectly arranged. No bedtime stories or happy photo shoots.
