When she turned to face me, I got up and held out my hand. I glanced down and saw my hand was shaking.
Oh, man. Get it together, Mathews. It wasn’t good that a girl had me so nervous that I was shaking.
She slowly let her smile move across her face. “Garre
tt, it was a pleasure meeting you. I’ll see you tonight?”
I smiled back and tried my best to make her melt.
Nothing.
Her face never budged. She stared me in the eyes, and I had to quickly turn away before looking back at her.
“Yeah, I’ll be there. The pleasure was all mine, Emma.”
Her eyes lit up when I said her name, but other than that, she had no response. I watched as Wayne walked out with the girls, and he began talking to Emma. I knew what the jerk was thinking—new girl, new chance to score. There was no way in hell I would let that happen.
“You got your eye on the new girl?” Billy asked as he pushed my shoulder, causing me to stumble into the stool.
I turned to face him and shrugged my shoulders. When Billy let out a laugh, the people sitting farther down the counter looked at him.
He leaned closer to me and said, “Did you see how stacked she was?”
I instantly felt my face get hot. I grabbed on to him and pulled him closer to me. “Don’t ever talk about her like that again.”
His smile faded, and I gave him a good push away. I threw money down on the counter and thanked Mr. Horster.
Billy followed me out. “I’m going to take that as a very clear response that you’ve got your eye on Emma Birk.”
I smiled as I jumped into Billy’s truck.
Neither one of us said a word as Billy drove me back home. His family owned the ranch next to ours, and we had been best friends for as long as I could remember. I thought this was the first time we hadn’t spoken a word to each other on this daily drive. I got a funny feeling in my gut that maybe Billy liked Emma also. The last thing I wanted to do was ruin our friendship over a girl. No girl was worth that.
“You want me to take you all the way down?” Billy asked as he pulled up to my family’s gate.
I looked up at the big M on the gate and smiled. Someday, this will all be mine.
“Nah, I need to clear my head, so I think I’ll just run home,” I said as I got out of his truck.
He nodded his head and glanced around before looking back at me. “I like her, too, Garrett,” he said.
My stomach dropped. “All right. How do you think we need to handle this, Bill?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. I saw the look on your face when you first saw her, Garrett. In an instant, I knew you were attracted to her. I gotta ask…is it just a sex thing? Or is it something more?”
Just the idea that he was asking if I was interested in Emma for only sex pissed me off. “What is it for you?”
He looked down and then back up at me. “Honestly?”
I nodded my head and got ready for his answer.
“At first, it was just the idea of getting her alone, but the more I talked to her, the more I liked her. She’s different than the other girls around here.”
I looked down and kicked the dirt. We really need rain to get out of this drought. My heart was aching now, more than it ever had before. I’d already been worried about my family’s ranch because of this drought, and now, I was worried that my best friend and I were about to go head-to-head over a girl.
I simply said, “Yeah.”
I looked at Billy, and we both smiled at each other.