Page 67 of Ironwood Ranch Cowboys

One step. Then another.

“You don’t fit cleanly anywhere,” I say, hearing my own voice lower and hating how much of it is truth. “You walk into a room and everyone underestimates you until they can’t. You learn systems too quickly. You notice things you shouldn’t have enough context to notice. You make this place less predictable just by being in it, and I do not like unpredictability.”

Her pulse moves once in her throat. I see it because I’m too close now not to.

“And yet,” she says softly, “you’re here.”

The room narrows.

“This is a bad idea,” she says.

“Yes.”

“You shouldn’t be in here.”

“I know.”

“Then why are you?”

Because I came upstairs intending to restore order and have instead found the opposite of it. Because alcohol lowers the barriers.

Because I’ve been circling this for days under increasingly dishonest labels and am exhausted by the effort it takes not to name it.

“I shouldn’t want this,” I say, more to myself than to her.

Her breath catches.

And then, because thought has finally lost the race it was pretending to win, I kiss her.

It’s impulse, plain and undisciplined, and the moment it happens I know two things with absolute certainty: first, that I should stop; second, that stopping is now the hardest task available to me.

She freezes for the first half second, surprised, and then her hand lifts to my shirt, grabbing hold of the moment just long enough to test whether it’s real.

Her mouth parts beneath mine, warm and alive with the same frustration that has been flashing between us since the day she walked into my office and corrected my number without blinking.

I should step back.

Instead I kiss her again, deeper this time, because whatever restraint I had left has gone from compromised to irrelevant.

The argument’s still there inside it, the friction, the refusal to smooth either of us into something more convenient.

What are we doing?

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Annie

How did this happen?

That’s the first coherent thought I have, and even that feels delayed, like it has to fight its way through everything else before it can surface.

Because this… this isn’t something that just… happens.

Not to me.

Not like this.

Not twice.