Page 107 of Ironwood Ranch Cowboys

Annie

The second Silas speaks, every good thing from tonight dies a fast, ugly death. “Where the hell have you two been?”

The office is too bright after the dark outside.

It still smells like paper and printer ink and leather from the tack room down the hall, but now there’s a bite under it too.

Anger, maybe, if anger had a scent. Control stretched so tight it’s gone metallic.

Silas’s shoulders are rigid beneath a dark thermal, his jaw cut hard enough to look painful, his eyes fixed on me with a kind of furious intensity that makes my whole body go on alert.

Not because I’m scared of him exactly. Because I know, with a horrible immediate certainty, that this isn’t really about where I’ve been.

This is about the fact that I went off-grid after being threatened.

Duke shifts half a step beside me, subtle but unmistakable, and if I wasn’t already furious, that would do it all by itself.

Because I don’t need buffering.

“We went into town,” I say flatly. “Why?”

Silas’s eyes flick to Duke, then back to me.

“Why?” he repeats, like the question itself is offensive. “Nobody knew where you were.”

I blink at him. “I’m sorry, did I miss the part where I’m on house arrest?”

His mouth hardens.

Duke, apparently sensing exactly how close this is to becoming an actual disaster, says, “She didn’t disappear, Silas. She went out.”

“With you.”

There’s enough in those two words to build a whole fire out of. Is he… jealous? Or just purely worried about me?

Duke’s expression changes, not much, but enough that I feel it. The easy warmth from the café is gone, tucked away behind a forced steadiness.

“Yes,” he says.

Silas lets out one breath through his nose. “At night. After everything that’s happened.”

I laugh, but there’s no humor in it. “Wow. I didn’t realize Ironwood had a curfew.”

“I was worried about you. I thought something might have happened.”

Silas comes around the desk, every step intentional, every inch of him saying he’s holding on by the last frayed thread of restraint and resents having to do it.

The worst part?

I know some of this is fear.

I can feel it under the surface, ugly and hot and badly translated into control, but that doesn’t make me want to forgive it. It makes me want to shove it right back where it came from.

“You disappeared for two hours after getting threats, Annie,” he says.

“But I went with Duke. I wasn’t exactly wandering the woods barefoot.”

Duke turns his head. “Silas.”