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  Part Time Cowboy

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  Bad News Cowboy

  Can these cowboys find the love they didn’t know they needed?

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  —USA TODAY

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  One Night Charmer

  by Maisey Yates

  THE DOOR TO the bar’s kitchen swung open and Ace walked through it, wiping his hands on a rag. Sierra’s 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 jaw line, partly disguised, but not completely, by his dark stubble. And from there they went to his lips. She knew from experience that those lips 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 a little 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 Thompson had an effect on her. Strange, because she couldn’t recall him ever affecting her before last night.

  It must be all the emotionally compromised landscape inside of her. Severely shifted, rerouted and in general destroyed by all of the revelations about her father, her siblings, herself that had crashed through her like a flash flood recently.

  “Hi,” she said, slowly approaching the counter.

  “What can I do for you?” Ace asked. He smiled. Effortless. Friendly. As though he had not given her a ride home from this very establishment last night when she’d been drunk. As though she had not said anything offensive to him 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 to 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 serving position. So maybe stop looking at me like you’d rather be anywhere else than here—including the deepest pit of hell.”

  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 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 in at all. But he said sorry so easily. Maybe it would be easy. “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?”

  “From what I could see, that’s about all you have going for you.”

  “Ace,” she said, trying again. “I was...not myself last night.”

  “Uppity, kinda snotty. Seems like it was probably you to me.”

  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. Granted, 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 more grudgingly than any words ever were.

  “Now, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  “Borderline impossible,” she said. “So 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. He had made some assumptions about her because she was from a wealthy family, and the last thing she needed was to confirm any of those assumptions. “Because I’ve never had the opportunity,” she added, trying to make her tone 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 she had an illegitimate half-sibling. Their father had given him nothing, less than nothing. A one-time 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 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 the work. 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.”

  Sierra 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 estate 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 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 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’s drunk. That is actually pretty funny.”

  “Is it?”

  “Hilarious. In fact, last night, some little blond girl got up on my new 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 had nothing to do with the fact that he was now her boss. On her end, it was that weird thing where she suddenly thought his hands looked capable. Of all kinds of things. Like pushing a strand of hair out of her face or dead-lifting a fallen tree. On his end...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.”

  “With bells on,” she told him. “And once the three-week trial is up, you’ll be begging me to stay.”

  He crossed his arms over his broad chest. “Don’t wear bells. And I doubt it...”

  Copyright © 2016 by Maisey Yates

  ISBN-13: 9781460391297

  A Copper Ridge Christmas

  Copyright © 2015 by Maisey Yates

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