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Colton’s expression turned stormy, his brows locking together. She looked at his eyes, that bright blue color so striking and unique with his dark hair. It struck her then, how similar his features were to Jack’s. It hit her so hard it took her breath away.
“You might want to retract the assertion that my fiancée is only marrying me for my name.”
“I said it was half of why,” Sierra said, not backing down.
“You’re a little butt-head, you know that?”
“Ouch. A butt-head? That cut deep, Colton. Right where it hurts most.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“I’m sure Natalie cares about you.” She wasn’t really. But, she didn’t want to hurt her brother. Even if she did think Natalie was a social-climbing weasel, desperately trying to sink her little claws into Colton so she could use him as a rung on her ascent to the top.
“It’s fine. I’m not an idiot, Sierra. I do understand that if I was a nobody she never would have pursued a relationship with me. Well, she wouldn’t be marrying me anyway. But that’s the way relationships work. It’s not all attraction, or mushy feelings. You pick the person that fits into your life the best. The person that supports your ambitions. I support hers, she supports mine. It’s not a bad thing.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that it would be a bad thing to meet an untimely death at the hands of his wife’s nasty weasel claws, should he ever disappoint her in any way, or should their family scandal grow any vaster.
“You’re not really selling me on the institution, Colton, I have to say.”
“Just wait until your quarter-life crisis is over. You’ll feel differently.”
He turned and walked back into the house, and Sierra made her way over to her truck. She opened the door and got inside, jamming the keys into the ignition, the engine roaring to life. She loved her truck. Cherry red and perfect, with feathers hanging off the rearview mirror and a hookup for her phone so she could play all of her favorite country music.
But it wasn’t really her truck. The thought struck her numb as she put the vehicle in Reverse and began to pull out of the driveway. Her phone wasn’t hers, either. Not really. Neither was the music on it.
That realization stopped the little moment of happy she’d experienced upon getting into the truck. And it weighed her down on the drive back into town, toward Ace’s.
It also reinforced what she was about to do.
Ask for a job. Apologize.
Another thought hit her as she pulled into the parking lot, putting her truck in Park and killing the engine. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever apologized to anyone before in her life. That couldn’t be right. Surely, she’d apologized at some point. To someone. For something.
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 (#ulink_85dae46d-4128-5503-af1a-3b2a427badd5)
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.
