The Ex Factor - Erin McCarthy Page 0,2

every acting skill she’d acquired on stage and reached over and touched his knee. Chance shot her a look that was damn near panicked.

Interesting. So he wasn’t as immune to her as he claimed to be. That shouldn’t matter, yet it did. She felt a flutter of something that wasn’t her stomach digesting that morning’s thoroughly unnecessary waffles.

“Chance, you know I’ll sing any song you write. You’re a brilliant songwriter.” He was. But it still made her want to gag to stroke his already enormous ego. It was part of why their relationship had been so contentious. She wasn’t into threesomes and his ego was a needy ass bitch who took center stage repeatedly. “And we have musical chemistry. Let’s just bang it out, no fuss, no muss.”

A sliver of amusement crossed Chance’s face. “Bang it out?”

Jolene gave him a smile, the smile that had twenty-year-old male fans breaking out into a spontaneous sweat. “Yes. Bang it out. We were always good at that.”

Chance cleared his throat and shifted a little on his chair.

Oh, yeah. That one had gotten him.

“Jolene, you know as well as I do this is not a good idea.”

“We had all sorts of ideas together, good and bad. What’s a few more?” She squeezed his knee and finally let go.

She almost choked on the words.

Chance had insisted it was no big deal when he had been photographed getting his hug on with a strange blonde. The headlines had read RIVERS NO LONGER HAS HIS HART? It had been a big deal. A very big ass big deal that the whole world thought he’d cheated on her about a hot minute into their relationship. It was embarrassing as hell and it destroyed the whole persona of them being a romantic team.

She’d called him an insensitive rat bastard.

He’d accused her of caring more about her image than him.

And it had only gone south from there.

It was hard to imagine they could produce anything other than bad feelings right now, but she was determined to try.

If it killed her, well, at least she’d die on top instead of in the Hall of Has Beens.

She gave him another smile for good measure.

Chance didn’t trust that smile on Jolene’s face or that steely-eyed glare Ginny was giving him. He had never truly liked Ginny because Ginny was always right and after proving it, she took her cut of his earnings smugly to the bank.

The problem with Jolene was altogether different. He had liked her too much, from the first minute he had met her. Against his better judgment. In ways he shouldn’t. Ways that started with the sweetness of her singing voice, continued on through her sassy attitude, and ended with the smoking hot sexy way she had torn him up in bed.

She couldn’t be looking at him like that. He had no power against that look.

That was the look that had landed him in all sorts of trouble, starting with thinking he was cut out to handle the spotlight of being a performer and ending with a stolen Grammy and his ill-conceived relationship with Dixie, the gold-digger.

“Maybe we’re just out of ideas,” he told her now, drawling out his voice long and slow so she wouldn’t see how rattled he was. A locked door. Pressure from their label. The first time he’d laid eyes on Jolene in person since that last big blowout by her pool in April. Yep. He was a little unnerved.

She looked good. Juicy. Like she’d stopped starving herself for a change and had been letting herself have a little bit of fun. Without him. That was annoying. All those times he’d cooked and she’d refused to eat anything but a nibble. But he had to admit he couldn’t stop sliding his eyes over to check her out. Those jeans were snug in all the right places and damn if the woman wasn’t treating him to a little side boob. He wanted to lick that sliver of flesh peeking out at him.

He shifted again in his chair. Damn hard wooden thing that he swore Ginny had purchased just to make her clients uncomfortable. Though it wasn’t the chair’s fault he had an erection, which was the real reason for his discomfort.

“I think we could probably come up with one or two,” Jolene said. She kept her blue eyes locked with his. “Ginny, what do you suggest we do here?”

“What do I suggest?” Ginny pushed her reading glasses up onto the mop of silver hair that reminded Chance