LITMIR.BIZ

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sniffed. “You don’t have to be mean. I’m drunk, not stupid.” Actually, she was debating that last thing. Right now, she was heavily debating it. Most of her actions over the past twenty-four hours had been pretty freaking stupid. Apparently anger made her kind of dumb.

      “This is a judgment-free zone, little girl,” he said, making her feel smaller, sillier with that very reductive endearment. Was it even an endearment if it was reductive? She wasn’t sure.

      She was only pondering that because of the alcohol. She wasn’t sure she would have noticed his phrasing at all if she’d been sober. A lot of men talked to her like that.

      Baby doll. Pretty little thing.

      She didn’t have trouble with men. Or, more to the point, she could have exactly the kind of trouble she wanted to with most any guy in town. She didn’t, because she was a West, and she’d always been taught the importance of discretion in such matters. That truth had been hammered home when Madison had dealt with her own crazy scandal at seventeen.

      Sierra’d had boyfriends at college, but, while she liked to engage in a little bit of flirtation with the men in town, she wasn’t really one to follow through. In a place like Copper Ridge it was too easy to run into an ex at a stop sign, and she had never wanted to deal with that. Had never wanted to deal with bringing a guy home to her family. Too many expectations.

      Which, given the recent revelations about her father, was a bit of a joke.

      For all his talk about discretion he had apparently spread himself all over town. And he had a child with someone else. A child who was now a man. A man who had been in the bar tonight. A man who had just seen her go ass-over-head off a mechanical bull.

      She’d totally lost the thread of the conversation, and her train of thought. Her head was starting to hurt. She knew that she was going to regret all of this in the morning, intensely. She was regretting it now, even with the comforting blanket of alcohol still somewhat wrapped around her.

      Tomorrow was going to be a very particular kind of hell.

      “I’m not a little girl,” she said, because it was the only thing she could think of to say.

      “Of course not,” he replied, his tone placating.

      She had known who Ace Thompson was for a long time. He was the guy that almost everyone in town had bought their very first beer from the moment they turned twenty-one. She was no exception. But she hadn’t realized what a butt-head he was.

      A hot one. He had dark hair, and a dark beard that was just a shade longer than stubble. It always made her wonder if it was intentional, or if he had just gone a few days without shaving. There was something about that, the careless presentation that still managed to make him look irresistible, that made her think of all the debauchery that occupied his time, and kept him too busy to shave.

      “You don’t have to sound so much like you’re patronizing me,” she said.

      “But I am patronizing you.”

      She bristled. “I guess you’ve never had any crap happen in your life that makes you go out and get drunk and want to...”

      “Ride a mechanical bull? Not specifically. But I’ve tried to drown my sorrows in a bottle of Jack a time or two.”

      “So, that’s all this is.” She sighed, looking out the window at the dark shapes of the pine trees, like a jagged spill of ink against the night sky. “Just one of those things.”

      “He wasn’t good enough for you. It was him, not you. He looked like an ass in that popped collar anyway.”

      She let out a harsh breath that fogged the window and obscured her view. “It isn’t about a guy.”

      “Honey, I don’t really care what it’s about. Guy, girl.” He paused. “I’m actually more interested in the second option.”

      She turned toward him, barely able to make out the shape of his profile in the darkness. “Not a girl, either.”

      “Way to spoil a man’s fantasies. Lucky for you, the only thing I’m really interested in is getting you home without you getting kidnapped and mangled by a drifter, okay? That’s something I can’t have happen on my watch. You can get drunk. You can make a fool of yourself riding a bull. I don’t care. That’s all part of how I get paid. What I don’t need is some silly little rich kid getting herself killed trying to get home from the bar because she hangs out with a bunch of idiots who don’t care about her safety. All right? That’s as far as my good deed goes.”

      His words were harsh, exceptionally so, given her particularly raw state. She felt...bruised. Completely and righteously enraged. “You shouldn’t have troubled yourself. In Copper Ridge the crime rate pretty much consists of kids throwing water balloons at shop windows.”

      “We have a police department for a reason, babe.”

      “Sierra,” she said through gritted teeth. “My name is Sierra West. Not babe. Not kid. Definitely not little girl.”

      “Well, that puts me in my place.”

      “I haven’t even begun to put you in your place.” That was not as hard-core as it sounded in her head. She just sounded kind of pathetic. A little bit whiny. She was both of those things, but she would rather Ace Thompson didn’t know that.

      She was starting to bleed her issues all over the cab of the old truck in front of a man she barely knew.

      Everything seemed to be falling apart.

      She couldn’t say anything else. If she did she would dissolve completely. Into a puddle of big, wimpy girl tears. She was better than this. She knew how to be better than this. She had been trained to keep a brave face on from birth. Where the hell was it now?

      It wasn’t his business what was happening with her family. She should have let him think her little mini-breakdown was about a guy.

      In fact, she would retract her earlier statement. It was technically about a guy anyway. Her father. Jack Monaghan, the half brother she hadn’t known she had...

      “It’s about a guy,” she said, feeling her own subject change like a bad case of whiplash.

      It was so strange to feel tongue-tied and clumsy around a man, around anyone. She didn’t usually. She was going to put it down to her weird mood and the intoxication.

      “I figured. Girls like you don’t have a lot of problems bigger than that. Except maybe a broken nail.”

      Annoyance spiked through her. “Please. If I was the type to worry about a broken nail I would hardly have gotten onto the back of your mechanical bull. I might be spoiled, I’m not going to deny that. But I’m also a barrel racer. I’ve been riding horses since before I could walk. I don’t exactly sit at home with my hair in curlers planning my next shopping spree.”

      He chuckled. A real laugh. “Point taken.”

      “Anyway. I’m just upset because... You know, sometimes people aren’t what they seem to be. And then you just wonder... If you’re a gigantic idiot. If you really shouldn’t be allowed to cross the street by yourself because you can’t tell that someone’s a bad guy after spending... All that time with him... How can you ever be confident you know anyone?” Her throat tightened, emotion flooding her. She had no control right now, and she hated it. She was used to being able to put on a flawless show no matter what was going on inside of her.

      She’d been dumped by her boyfriend junior year—her first boyfriend. First kiss, first everything—right before one of the big games in Autzen Stadium, and she’d managed to parade right in there with her group of girlfriends, a huge smile plastered on her face. She’d even done a little happy dance for the Jumbotron that had made it onto national TV. A big chipper eff-you to the man who’d broken things off with her.

      She didn’t let people see her sweat. She didn’t let them see her cry. They thought her life was easier

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