Mr Right There All Along. Jackie Braun

improvement? If that last loser you dated had said so, would you have believed him?”

      Whoa, whoa! Her mouth went slack.

      Loser? That was cold. Okay, so she’d called Greg a loser, too, not to mention a couple dozen other choice names in the weeks following their breakup. But Simon hadn’t seen the need to malign Greg’s character then, other than to say the guy wasn’t good enough for her. She’d been well into a pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream at the time. Simon had taken away her spoon, made her dress in something other than sweats and had taken her out to a fancy restaurant for dinner.

      “This is how you deserve to be treated,” he’d said at the end of the evening.

      It dawned on Chloe then. Simon had never maligned the character of any of the guys she’d dated. Never … until just now.

      He was joking. He had to be.

      She waited for humor to leak into his expression, for the corners of his mouth to quirk in a well-remembered smile. But a full minute ticked past and Simon remained stoic, his countenance as unyielding as that of a tombstone.

      “What do you want me to say?” she asked at last.

      “I want you to say that you believe me when I tell you that you look fine just as you are.”

      “I do believe you,” she assured him.

      Well, sort of. Mostly. But he was her friend, her pal, her bud and BFF. People with those titles were known to lie. Which was why on days when Chloe was feeling particularly insecure about her body, she peppered Simon with questions such as, “Do these pants make my butt look big?”

      No woman in her right mind asked that question of someone they thought might actually tell them the truth. Besides, the man regularly dated lingerie models.

      He squinted sideways at her. “You do?”

      She nodded to add emphasis. “Of course, I do.” All the while, she was thinking, he had to be lying.

      The rigid set of his shoulders relaxed fractionally. Simon really did have nice shoulders and the cotton pullover he was wearing did them justice. It was just snug enough to show off some of the definition that his regular workouts had created.

      “Mmm.”

      His brows tugged together. “Chloe?”

      Good God! What was she thinking? Bad, bad Chloe.

      “Hmm. I said, hmm. You know, it’s a kind of humming sound that can be taken for, um, well, an affirmation.” Or the prelude to an orgasm. Though she was barely managing to tread water, she decided to dive in again. “As in, I believe you when you say that I look fine.”