his connections to bring people with big money into town, sometimes on a permanent basis. An entire culture of horsemanship had been built up because of her father, because of her sister Madison’s dressage training. And in addition to that, her family made donations to the schools, to local charities...
And beneath all of that, what no one else knew was that her father was actually an awful human being.
That’s not true. Jack Monaghan knows. His mother knows.
Her friend Kate knew, since she was engaged to Jack and all.
The secret was like a festering wound that had been tightly bandaged for years. But now the bandage was ripped off, and the wound was reopening, the truth of it slowly bleeding out around them, touching more and more people with each passing day.
She took a deep breath, trying to ease the pressure in her chest, trying to remove the weight that was sitting there.
“What’s your sign?” Somehow, her fuzzy brain had retrieved that as a conversation starter. The moment the words left her mouth she wanted to stuff them back in and swallow them.
To her surprise, Ace laughed. “Caution.”
“What?”
“I’m a caution sign, baby. Now where are we going?”
“I’m staying with my brother Colton. He has a ranch just outside of town. After the Farm and Garden. Not as far out as the Garretts, kind of by Aiden Crawford’s place.”
“Does he have an address?”
She blinked, shaking her head. “Right. 316 Highway 104.”
“All right, I think I can figure that out.”
“I can give you directions. Or you can map it on your phone.”
He snorted. “Do I look like I’m carrying a smartphone?”
No, no he didn’t. “Oh. A caution sign. Like on the road.” Suddenly, the meaning of his comment washed over her. “I get it.”
“Good job.”
She 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
