Page 51 of Break My Heart
‘Sawyer, you in there?’ a guy yells.
Sawyer pulls away from me and yells back, ‘What do you need?’
‘I got a problem with the cash register. I can’t get the credit cards to run.’
Sawyer looks back at me. ‘Sorry, I gotta go deal with this.’
‘Go ahead.’ I move off him.
He gets up. ‘Don’t go anywhere.’
I smile. ‘I won’t.’
He leans down and kisses me. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
While he’s gone, my brain starts functioning again and I realize we shouldn’t be doing this. I don’t have time for a boyfriend, and even if I did, it couldn’t be Sawyer.
Why did he have to turn out this way? When I moved to this town, I knew he lived here and I knew I’d run into him, but I was hoping he’d be a jerk. I was hoping he’d be unattractive or have a girlfriend or be married with kids. But no, he had to be hot and single and an overall nice guy. It’s nearly impossible to find a guy like him, and when I do, he’s my competitor, a guy who’s off limits.
‘Gina,’ he says, coming back in the apartment. ‘You got any experience with credit card readers?’
‘Yeah. Why?’
‘I can’t get it to run cards and I’ve got people waiting to pay. Any chance you could check it out?’
‘Sure.’ I meet him at the door and follow him downstairs to behind the bar. I see the message on the card reader and smile. ‘This happened to me last week. It’s an easy fix. Do you have a card I can run?’ Sawyer hands me a credit card. I swipe it, hit a few buttons, and the error message disappears. ‘It should work now.’
Wade tries running a customer’s card through. ‘It works.’ He looks at me. ‘Thanks for fixing it. Gina, right? You own the brewery across town.’
‘Yeah. Ihave the same cash register.’
‘You good now?’ Sawyer says to Wade.
‘Yeah, thanks, man. I’ll take it from here.’
‘Let’s go,’ Sawyer says to me.
When we’re back in the apartment, we return to the couch.
‘Thanks for helping me out,’ Sawyer says. ‘I would’ve had to close if I couldn’t figure out how to make that work.’
‘I can write down how to fix it so you’ll know for next time.’
‘If you would, that’d be great. And in exchange I’ll give you more of my mom’s pastries, or free apples, or more of my handyman skills.’
‘I’ll take the handyman skills.’
‘Deal.’ He smiles, then kisses me, and all the feelings I had before come rushing back. The tingles, the heat, the urge to rip off his clothes. But this time, my brain wakes up and tells me to stop.
I pull back. ‘Sawyer, I can’t.’
He looks at me. ‘Can’t what?’
‘Keep doing this. We need to stop.’
His eyes pause on mine and I almost tell my brain to shut-up so I can go back to feeling like I did just seconds ago.
Sawyer sits back on the couch. ‘So what do you think? That had to be better than when I was seven.’
