Page 26 of Rough Ride

“Do you have to yell?” I replied.

She flashed a perfect white smile. “I’m not yelling. This is my normal indoor voice. Why?” She cocked her head to the side. “Does your head hurt?”

I gritted my teeth. “I think you know the answer.”

Wood scraped against the floor as she pulled out the chair and sat across from me. “I owe you an apology. I didn’t play fair last night.”

My brain was already barely functioning, but sitting across from Sophie made it even more difficult to think. “I don’t understand how you can drink that much and still look like a supermodel the next day.”

She blinked in surprise, like the compliment caught her off guard. “I just got back from the gym. I look like a drowned rat.”

“Not to me,” I muttered, lowering my head to the table again. “Can you do me a favor?”

“What’s that?”

“Go buy a gun, come back here, and shoot me in the head.”

Her laughter made my headache worse, but it was still like music to my ears. “As I was saying, I didn’t play fair last night. Iwas using a special liquor bottle. There’s a second compartment inside, behind the label. When I pushed on the nozzle, it dispensed a non-alcoholic liquid.”

I sighed. “Yeah, that makes more sense.”

“Three of the shots I took were real,” she confessed. “But, yeah. Sorry.”

“Serves me right for harassing a beautiful woman on the job,” I said.

Sophie was silent, so I raised my head off the table. She was looking at me thoughtfully.

“If you’re not going to get a gun and shoot me,” I said slowly, “then can you leave me here to die slowly? Not really in the mood for chit-chat, Sky Eyes.”

She reached across and patted me on the shoulder. “Rest up, cowboy. I’ll be rooting for you tonight.”

As she got up and left, I couldn’t even muster the energy to turn my head and watch her go. That’s how bad I was—I knew her ass probably lookedincrediblein those compression shorts, yet I was too defeated to look.

But her comment about rooting for me tonight? That made my hangover a little more bearable.

12

Sophie

I felt irrationally giddy the rest of the day.

Supermodel. Beautiful.

I replayed Johnny’s compliments in my head on repeat like it was my new favorite song on Spotify.

As a bartender, I was used to being complimented. I’d heard every noun or adjective that could possibly describe a woman, and even some that probably nobody had ever heard before. When I went to work, I wore an emotional suit of armor, allowing the compliments to slide off me like medieval arrows.

I wasn’t wearing that armor this morning, though. After seeing Sawyer at the gym, I’d let my armor down for the walk home. I didnotlook my best, sweaty from the treadmill and with splotchy red marks on my skin from the frigid air that bombarded me for the two blocks I had to walk to my car.

But then I saw a sad cowboy in the window of a coffee shop. I went inside partly because I wanted to tease Johnny about last night… and partly because I wanted to make sure he was okay. And although he wastechnicallyalive, he was in rough shape.I could see how difficult it was for him to put two thoughts together.

Which is how I knew his compliments were genuine.

He wasn’t a guy at the bar feeding me a line. This wasn’t Tinder, where his comment was perfectly crafted and polished to perfection. He was groaning from the hangover I had caused.

And he said I looked like a supermodel.

I felt a little bad about getting him drunk. Yeah, he kind of deserved it for hitting on me so persistently, but I still didn’t like seeing a guy in pain. I would apologize more earnestly the next time I saw him, when he wasn’t hungover.

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