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But she couldn’t think of an example. She could remember fights with friends blowing over with some laughter and a whole lot of hand waving and such, but she couldn’t recall any of them apologizing to each other sincerely.
She blinked, shoving that uncomfortable thought to the side. She climbed out of the truck—not her truck—and made her way into the bar before she could think things through too deeply. She needed to just get this over with. Like ripping off a Band-Aid, she reminded herself.
Ripping off an Ace bandage.
She smiled faintly at her own joke as she ventured deeper into the empty dining area, looking around the space. It was clean, but that was about all she could say for it. She wasn’t a huge fan of the Western decor that clashed with the more nautical elements. There was half a fishing boat mounted to the wall with nets and those weird little glass balls that appeared all the time in oceanic themed decor. She had no idea what they were. Or what they were for.
Lately, Ace had certainly been upping the Western angle. The addition of the bull, and a new little bar seating area that had stools made out of barrels. Even though it wasn’t her personal taste, she realized that it was an accurate representation of the town. This was where the fishermen came to drink when they came in off the water, where the ranchers came to relax after they were finished with a hard day’s work.
It was a cross section of the community, right here in one location. And even if she wouldn’t put a fishing boat or bar stools in her bedroom, she could appreciate them here.
The door to the kitchen swung open and Ace walked through it, wiping his hands on a rag. Her eyes were drawn to the shifting of his forearm muscles, and then the rather firm grip he had as he chucked the rag onto the counter. She looked up, hoping to distract herself from her illicit hand-related thoughts. It didn’t really help. Because from there, she ended up with illicit thoughts about his square jawline, partly disguised, but not completely, by his dark stubble. And from there those thoughts went to his lips. She knew from experience that they smiled easily, that they were shaped nicely, and that when he looked at her, they seemed to get a little sterner.
His eyebrows also seemed to turn sterner when they focused in her direction. Strong, dark eyebrows that were attractive in a way that eyebrows had no right to be. For heaven’s sake.
Apparently, even sober, Ace had an effect on her. Strange, because she couldn’t recall him ever affecting her before last night.
She blamed the emotionally compromised landscape inside her. Severely shifted, rerouted and in general destroyed by all the revelations that had crashed through her like a flash flood recently.
“Hi,” she said, slowly approaching the counter.
“What can I do for you?” he asked. He smiled. Effortless. Friendly. As though he had not given her a ride home last night when she’d been drunk. As though they hadn’t said anything offensive to each other while he’d been giving her a ride home when she was drunk.
“I came to... Jack said—well, Kate called. Kate Garrett. And she said that you might have a job for me.”
“I have a server position available,” he said, crossing his arms over his broad chest.
She took another moment to check out his muscles. She hadn’t decided to check him out, so much as she’d been held captive by an involuntary urge. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. About any of this. Maybe it was all a displacement activity to offset how uncomfortable she was. Being here. About to ask for work. About to beg forgiveness.
“I thought... I thought that maybe...”
“Are you about to ask me if I can donate a kidney, or something?”
She blinked. “No. Why would I want your kidney?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know your life. I don’t know your medical history. But you’re acting like you have something serious to ask me when I was pretty sure you just came to find out about the server position. So maybe stop looking at me like you’d rather be anywhere—including the deepest pit of hell—other than here.”
She could feel her temper starting to warm up. This was hard. Coming here, humbling herself. Okay, she hadn’t exactly humbled herself yet. But she was about to. “I just... I need a place to work. Because I had a falling-out with my father, and I’m not living with my parents anymore. But that also means that not only do I need a place to stay, I need a new job, because my job as an office manager type person was at the ranch. The family ranch...” She was the opposite of eloquent right now, and she knew it. What was it about this guy that made her so tongue-tied? It wasn’t the guy. It was just the situation. Bolstered by that, she took a deep breath and pressed on. “Please.”
“I’m sorry about the situation with your dad,” he said, not sounding it at all. But he said sorry so easily. Maybe it would be easy for her, as well. “But I’m not really sure if you’d be a good fit for the bar.”
“What? My excellent mechanical bull riding skills didn’t convince you?”
“That’s about all you have going for you, from where I’m standing.”
“Ace,” she said, trying again. “I was...not myself last night.”
“Uppity, kinda snotty. Seems to me like it was probably you.”
She gritted her teeth, wanting so badly to tear a strip off him with a very sharp word. But that would run counter to her objective. “I was rude.”
“And?”
She looked up, curling her fingers into fists, digging her nails into her skin. “Drunk.”
“Anything else, little girl?”
He was going to make sure this killed her. Now, if it did kill her, she wouldn’t need a job. She would just need a house to haunt. Maybe she would haunt his ass. “I’m sorry,” she said, the words pulled from her as grudgingly as any words ever were.
“Now, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“Borderline impossible,” she said. “Can I have the job?”
“Have you ever waited tables?”
“Of course I’ve never waited tables,” she said, belatedly realizing that that was just the sort of attitude he had an issue with. “Because I’ve never had the opportunity,” she added, trying to make the words perky.
“You don’t want to do this,” he said, resting his hands flat on the bar, flexing his fingers in a way that sent a strange sensation down her spine. “I know you don’t. You know you don’t. Let’s not play games.”
“I’ve looked for work everywhere else in town. I haven’t been able to find it. I’m not an idiot. I have a degree in business from the University of Oregon. I know that I worked for my father, but I did my job well. If you know anything about Nathan West, then you know he didn’t give me anything just because I was related to him.”
A fact that was driven home by the discovery that Jack was one of their siblings. Their father had given him nothing, less than nothing. A onetime payout to disappear. He certainly hadn’t been made a part of the family dynasty. Then there was Gage. Her oldest brother. She didn’t know all of the circumstances surrounding his leaving. She’d been too young to fully grasp the situation at the time. But she knew it wasn’t because her father was a loving, forgiving man. “I’m not useless. I’m competitive. I’ve done pretty well with my barrel racing, and you might not take something like that seriously, but it takes a lot of grit. A lot of work.”
“I know it does,” Ace said, a strange look in his eye. “I don’t run a charity, I run a business. I don’t like to hire people that don’t have experience. But if you really want a job, you’ve got one. On a trial basis. You have three weeks to prove to me you can do this. But if you mess up too many orders, or spit in anyone’s food because they make you mad, or mouth off to any of my customers, you’re done.”
She waited to feel some sense of triumph. Some sense of relief. Instead, she felt nothing more than a grim determination and a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.
Because now it was real. There was no going back. No crawling back to the West ranch with her tail between her legs, begging her father’s forgiveness, even though he’d been the one who was wrong.
“Sure.”
“That’s it?”
“Thank you?”
He chuckled, that same dark sound she’d first heard last night. There was something strange in his happy sounds, his happy expressions. An undertone that didn’t quite match. Of course, she didn’t have time to try to figure out why his expressions didn’t seem to match his deeper emotions. She could barely sort that crap out for herself. “You don’t have to sound so excited.”
“Sorry.” That was easier. “Excitement has been a little bit hard to come by these days.”
“Now that,” he said, “I do relate to.”
“What do you suggest for that?”
He lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know. Fake it ’til you make it? Drink it ’til you think it?”
“Great. I will...use my employee discount to help with that.”
“There’s no employee discount.”
“What?”
“No drinking on the job, either. Working at a bar isn’t actually any fun. Except the part where you’re sober while everyone else is drunk. That is actually pretty funny.”
“Is it?”
“Hilarious. In fact, last night, some little blonde girl got up on that mechanical bull and fell on her face.”
Sierra gritted her teeth. “Ha-ha.”
“You start tomorrow.”
“I do? What if I have plans?”
He shrugged. “Cancel them. Or quit now.”
She blinked. She couldn’t quite work out what was happening between herself and Ace. There was something. Something that wasn’t neutral. On her end, it was that weird moment where she suddenly thought his hands looked capable. Of all kinds of things. Like pushing a strand of hair out of her face or deadlifting a fallen tree. With him...who knew? It wasn’t really a friendly feeling she got from him.
“I’ll be here. Just name the time.”
“Be here at five. Be ready to work.”
CHAPTER FOUR
SIERRA WEST WAS a problem. A bejeweled, bouncy problem.
She’d shown up to work on time, which had kind of pissed Ace off, because he’d been looking for an excuse to fire her out of the gate, and that had been taken from him. But she’d shown up wearing a pair of shorts that looked painted onto the skin they covered. And they didn’t cover much. Instead, they did a good job of displaying a lot of smooth, tanned leg. He wondered how the hell she had a tan.
This was the Oregon coast. In late February. It wasn’t all that sunny.
Maybe she went to one of those fake-and-bake tanning beds. His ex had been a big fan of those. It was how she kept her warm orange glow all year-round. Either that, or sucking the blood of virgins. He wouldn’t really put anything past her.
He studied Sierra, who was talking to a table full of men who were absolutely thrilled with his new hiring choice.
She didn’t look like the type to go lie in a tanning bed. He wasn’t sure why. She probably went and lay out back in the yard, in that private, gated ranch she and her family lived at. She probably lay out in a hot-pink bikini. She maybe even took the top off to avoid a suntan line.
He gritted his teeth and turned his focus to wiping down the counter. It was clean. But cleaning an already clean counter was better than thinking about Sierra West topless. He really needed to deal with these inconvenient fantasies. Get laid. With someone else.
He looked around the bar, and for some reason, didn’t see any appealing prospects. Not because there weren’t beautiful women here. There were. It was just, for some reason they didn’t really register to his body.
Funny, usually his body wasn’t all that picky. He didn’t do relationships. He did satisfying evenings. Which left his options pretty wide-open. His type was female. Thin, curvy, blonde, brunette, pale, dark... Didn’t much matter to him. Women were a glorious creation. One he preferred in his bed, and nowhere else in his home.
In fact, he had a bedroom up above the bar, so that he never actually had to have women in his home at all.
There was a time when his own behavior would’ve shocked him. Or it would’ve shocked the boy he’d been. But he could barely remember that time.
Now, the most shocking thing was that he wanted one woman specifically.
Yeah, Sierra West was a problem.
She turned away from the table, her walk particularly bouncy in those little cowgirl boots as she made her way back to the kitchen. Everything on her bounced. Her hair. Her ass.
Damn, some other woman needed to start looking good.
She disappeared into the kitchen for a moment, then reappeared a second later. “I think I got everyone for now,” she said.
She was looking at him expectantly, blue-eyed and far too innocent. “Is there anything else I can do?”
“I’m not going to hold your hand, little girl,” he said.
That was unnecessary, and he knew it. But he didn’t particularly care. With most employees, he would be happy to show them what to do next. He would even be happy that they’d asked what they could do. But he wasn’t happy about her asking, because it meant he had to interact with her, and he didn’t want to interact with her.
He supposed it wasn’t her fault that she was far too pretty for her own good. But he was going to hold it against her anyway. Because he was never going to hold her against him, and that was the source of a lot of problems.
The trouble was that he was out of practice with self-denial. He’d spent the past decade indulging himself whenever he wanted to.
When he’d turned away from the teachings of his father, he’d turned away hard. Then life had gone and kicked him in the balls, and made him question every damn thing he’d ever done. Every decision he’d ever made. It had made him question why he’d ever practiced restraint of any kind. Why he’d so firmly believed that self-denial, the greater good, morality and a host of other things would lead him down a smooth path in life.
No. He’d spent a lot of years doing the right thing. Being a good man. The better man.
It hadn’t gotten him anywhere in the end. So when he’d broken free of his marriage, when he’d finally left it all behind, left it all as dust and rubble in his past, he’d set his foot on the road to hell, and figured he’d better make the journey there pretty spectacular.
And he had.
When he’d decided to go for a life of debauchery and sin, he hadn’t gone halfway.
That made it difficult when he actually wanted to employ a little bit of abstinence. He didn’t know how.
These days, he only knew how to do three things really well.
He knew how to make drinks, he knew how to drink drinks and he knew how to screw. He did all those things as often as he could, and whenever he felt like it.
He hadn’t anticipated the effect trying to resist a woman he was attracted to might have on him. He’d figured it wouldn’t have an effect at all. But then, he didn’t typically try to resist women he was attracted to. Because he wasn’t usually attracted to spoiled little rich girls who also happened to work for him.
“You need to keep an eye on everyone, and make sure they don’t need anything else,” he said finally.
“Right.”
But she looked surprised by the directive. “You’ve been to restaurants before, right? I know you have. You come here.”
“Yes.”
“What does a server do? They make sure you have french fries, all the drinks that you need, and they do a little tap dance if you require it. So make sure no one needs french fries. Or a tap dance.”
“No one here has ever done a tap dance for me.”
“Have you ever asked them to?”
“Why would I ask someone to tap dance for me?”
“I don’t know. Hopefully, for your sake, no one wants you to tap dance tonight.”
She rolled her eyes and tossed her hair, the blond curls bouncing again, the glittery shadow on her lids twinkling beneath the light. She was a human glitter bomb. Which, in his opinion, had no place outside of a strip club. Or the rodeo arena.
She definitely looked like a rodeo queen. That thought did a little bit to quench the heat that had settled in the pit of his stomach. He’d made the mistake of getting involved with a rodeo queen once before. He knew how that ended.
“So then should I just hover around the tables like a fly, waiting for french fry shortages or demands of dancing?”
“You could fold bar towels.”
“There,” she said, planting her hand on her hip and cocking it out to the side. He might have noticed the dramatic curve of her waist down to that very sassy hip, only because he was human. “Now, Ace, was that so difficult?”
“You seem to be having a hard time remembering that I’m your boss, little girl.”
“Do you call all your employees little girl?”
“Only when they act like one.”
“I’m going to go fold bar towels.” She turned on her heel and started to saunter back into the kitchen, then paused and turned back around. “Where are the bar towels?”
He smiled, as slow and lazy as possible, because he knew it would make her mad. “Under the bar.”
Her cheeks flushed slightly, a sweet little rosy color that made her look a lot more innocent than he was certain she was. She tossed that golden mane again and sauntered to the bar, bending down and pulling out the stack of unfolded white towels.
Those little shorts of hers rode up high, revealing the sweet curve of her ass. Were his scruples so easily discarded? He only had maybe two of them. You would think he could cling to them a little bit tighter.
She placed them on the back counter, and began to fold them clumsily.
He let out a heavy sigh. “That isn’t how you do it.”
He crossed the space between them, coming to stand beside her, taking one of the towels off the top and spreading it on the empty bar in front of him. He held the edges tight, before folding one half toward the green line that ran down the center. “This. You do it like this.”
“There’s a specific system for folding towels?”
“Of course there’s a system. If there aren’t systems, the whole damn world falls apart.”
“Because of a breakdown in bar towel folding?”
He snorted, folding the other side of the towel in tightly and smoothing the fabric flat with his hands before folding it in half again. “Like this,” he said, setting it off to the side. “Keep it compact. Keep it clean.”
“You do keep the place awfully clean. I’ve noticed.” She copied his movements, dainty hands sliding over the terry cloth. He tried not to imagine them sliding over his skin.
Restraint was a damned nightmare.
This, he remembered from his high school years. The more he had to think about not doing something, the more he obsessed about it. Abstinence in deed led to anything but in thought.
You thought so much about not doing something that it took over your life anyway.
But it had been pressed upon him from an early age that he had to be an example. His father was pastor of the largest church in Copper Ridge, after all. It wasn’t all bad. He’d believed in his father’s lessons. Back then, he’d believed that virtue was its own reward. He’d felt a kind of confidence, a direction that accompanied that belief. He had known who he was.
Then it had all bitten him spectacularly in the ass, and he’d turned away, hard and sharp. Now, he was firmly out of practice.
She matched his movements precisely, producing a very nicely folded towel. Which kind of irritated him. Not that he thought it was going to take her a whole lot of time to learn how to do such a simple task. But he wanted to cling to his irritation, and to his completely unfair thought that this job would be beyond her somehow. He wanted to hold on to his prejudice.
He had earned that prejudice.
“There,” she said, smoothing it down flat and placing it in a stack with the other towel. “I think I’ve got it. You don’t have to supervise me.”
“Good. Because I don’t have time.”
“You’re very busy,” she said, something in her tone irking him. He was certain it was designed to do that.
“I am. I have an entire bar to run. A lot depends on my presence.”
She lifted a pretty, bare shoulder. He swore that it had glitter on it, too. “It is your place. Your name is on the sign.”
“I’m also working out logistics for opening a new brewery.” He didn’t know why he’d told her that.
Actually, he did know why. There was clearly something in him—a part of him that wouldn’t die—that still wanted people like her—people who were born into a certain level of privilege—to understand that he was important, too.
“In Copper Ridge?” she asked, her tone genuinely interested.
“Yeah. In the old flour mill building, down by the beach.”
“That sounds nice. Is it going to be fancy?”
“My kind of fancy.”
“What’s your kind of fancy?”
“You put french fries on a plate instead of in a basket.”
She laughed. Unsurprisingly, her laugh sparkled, too. “Maybe because it’s by the ocean you can get a mechanical dolphin for people to ride.”
“A mechanical dolphin?”
“Yeah. To keep with the theme.”
“No one rides dolphins.”
“They would if they could.”
She placed another towel on the growing stack and smiled at him. All he could think was that he would like to eat her up. Which was inappropriate in every way, all things considered.
“Why don’t you go check on a table,” he said, his words coming out more harshly than he intended.
She shrunk back slightly, looking like a wounded puppy. He didn’t feel bad about it. He didn’t. “Okay. I will finish folding when I get back.”
“If you see something that needs doing, do it. That’s all I ask.”
He did not watch her go out into the dining room. He turned away, heading back toward his office, away from the bar, away from the kitchen. He had stuff to get done and he was not going to allow Sierra West to distract him any longer.
* * *
HER FEET HURT LIKE a son of a bitch. Tonight had been, without a doubt, one of the longest nights on record. And it wasn’t over yet.
She worked hard at the family ranch. But mainly, she managed the office. When she went out and practiced barrel racing, she was on her horse. It definitely worked her muscles, but it also fed her soul.
Right now, she was pretty sure her soul was leaking out the bottom of her feet, which she had certainly worn a hole through walking around the dining area of the bar.
Being a waitress—it turned out—was exactly as little fun as it had always appeared to be.
She supposed some people might enjoy it. They might enjoy interacting with tables full of people and making runs between the kitchen, the bar and the dining area. She, it turned out, did not.
Also, she had discovered that men were slightly different with her when she was serving them drinks, versus when she was drinking near them. Sure, they still flirted with her. But there was a different tone. It was stickier. It left a film over her skin, and she didn’t like it.
“You’re a precious, precious blossom, Sierra,” she muttered to herself as she bent to clear glasses off one of the tables that had just been vacated, before straightening and looking back over at the bar.
Chad, Leslie and Elyssa, the friends she’d been here with just the other night, were half draped over it. They didn’t usually hang out right at the bar, but Leslie had just broken up with her boyfriend and it looked like she was thinking of testing her odds with Ace.
She was grinning and giggling and working the duck face like she was trying to take a selfie, not talk to a guy.
Ace, for his part, didn’t seem disinterested. He was smiling. Smiling in a way he certainly hadn’t smiled at Sierra. That just wasn’t fair. Leslie was not less of a spoiled brat than she was. He should be mean to her, too.
But he wasn’t being mean. He was being...charming. When he handed her drink over the counter his lips curved up into a half smile that made Sierra’s stomach flip from all the way across the room. His dark eyes were glittering with intent. Wicked intent, even. Sierra could imagine that any woman on the receiving end of Ace’s attention would feel like the only woman in the room. Maybe even in the world.