I wasn’t going to acknowledge the way my heart did a little flip at that discovery. Nope. I’m just gonna ignore that.
“This sucks,” I whined, gripping the scraper once more and resuming the tedious work. This wasn’t exactly what I signed up for, and it certainly wasn’t where my talents were.
“Unless you have a few thousand dollars lying around to pay Riley, I suggest less whining and more scraping.”
I scoffed, some sort of guttural sound that rolled in the back of my throat. “Are we going to paint the truck ourselves, too? You saw my frosting unicorn… I can’t say I’m much artsier with a paintbrush.”
Liam stretched to scrape a bit of rust above the door, and as he did so, his t-shirt lifted, revealing a strip of very tanned skin pulled taut over strong ab muscles. With a sigh, his arm fell to his side. “No, I guess not. But if we can at least get rid of most of the rust, maybe the cost can be cut in half.”
His words would have been a relief except for the stressed-out look creasing his face. I hated that look. I hated seeing how worried and sad he looked. “Hey, let’s talk about fun stuff while we work. We can kill two birds with one stone, making this a business meeting as well as a labor session.”
“What’s there to talk about?”
What’s there to talk about? I had a list about a mile long in my head. “Well… to start with, what day do we want to soft open?”
“Uh, shouldn’t we wait until we have an idea of how long this work will take?”
“Absolutely not. We need to give them our dates so that they stick to a schedule.”
“Who is ‘them’?”
“Them. The people. The media. Then, if we need to adjust our soft open, we can!” I stood up from where I was kneeling and winced at the indents on my knees from the pavement. As I stood, the back of the basketball shorts got caught on the heel of my shoe, and since they were already several sizes too large, the elastic band of the shorts slipped right off my hips and fell down to my ankles.
Not thinking straight, I squealed—which only made Liam look down at me.
If I’d just kept my dang mouth shut and pulled them up, maybe he never would have known… never would have seen my little yellow ducky turquoise panties. Why couldn’t I have worn my sexy lacy pink panties today?
Whoa. Whoa. Mayday. Where the hell did that thought come from? Of all the people in Maple Grove to choose from, I did not and should not want Liam Evans seeing me in any sexy panties. I’d promised Elaina as much.
“Don’t look at me!” I cried out.
My cheeks were burning and not only because of the hot, late summer sun beating down on us. But Liam, ever the gentleman, said nothing and jerked his gaze back to the rust in front of his face. But the small smile turning up his lips didn’t escape me.
“I-I swear, I didn’t see anything.”
The tips of his ears looked pink. Does Liam blush with his ears? “Liar,” I mumbled and hiked those shorts so high, I may have given myself a momentary camel toe. “I feel like it’s only fair that I see your undies now, too.”
His brow quirked. “You want to see my boxers?”
“You’re a boxer guy? Huh. I always imagined you as one of those boxer-brief types.”
He shrugged. “Nope. Boxers all the way. Actually, most days, I just go commando.”
I had to ignore the way my stomach somersaulted with that new factoid about Liam Evans. Was he ‘going commando’ now? If his pants slipped down right this second, would I get pure Liam butt flesh in my face? Oh, God, why could I not stop thinking about Liam’s butt flesh? Stop thinking the words butt flesh, Chloe!!
“You’re staring.” He cleared his throat, and I jerked my eyes up from where they’d been plastered onto his crotch to his face, where he was grinning down at me with that smug expression of his.
“Sorry… you just so don’t strike me as the kind of guy to go commando.”
“Can we stop talking about our underwear habits please? I didn’t even see anything. Just a flash of movement and, ummm… color.”
“Fleshy color?” I asked, my voice going shrill.
He shrugged and leaned in closer to the rust as though there was scripture written there he needed to decode. “It was all just sort of a blur.” I noticed the pink blush on his ears spread to the back of his neck and turned even darker. “Anyway… back to the food truck. It seems like extra work choosing a soft open date that we may or may not have to move because the truck isn’t finished being fixed.”
I took a deep breath, pushing aside the embarrassment from the fact that Liam and every homeowner here at his condo unit had just seen my ass. “Maybe. But every day this truck isn’t on the road selling is a day we aren’t earning income. We can’t get out of the red if we aren’t open for business. And having a soft open date that is flexible means I can start putting together our social media presence and press releases and booking interviews—”
His laugh interrupted my train of thought, and he quickly covered his grin with the scraper. “I’m sorry. Who in their right mind is going to want to interview us about this food truck?”
“Local news, blogs, maybe some travel magazines… point is, we won’t know until I start reaching out! And I can’t reach out until we have a soft open—”
“Okay, okay. Jeez, fine. When do you think we should open? In a month?”
“A month?” I shrieked. Oh, good Lord. We had very different ideas. “Riley said she only needed a couple of days to get the truck up and running. I was thinking ten days—”
It was Liam’s turn
