Page 99 of Ironwood Ranch Cowboys

Now I’m about to tear a chunk out of it again.

Because he asked, and I can’t say no. Because I don’t know how to let him fall, even if catching him might drag me down with him.

Shit.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Duke

I know something’s off before I even see her.

That’s the problem with caring about somebody. Once it gets under your skin, you start noticing absences as much as presences.

The way a laugh doesn’t show up where it should. The way a room feels wrong when one specific person hasn’t walked in. The way your whole body clocks a missing thing before your brain gets around to naming it.

Annie skipped dinner, and while sometimes she’s late, skipping it isn’t something she does.

I give it fifteen minutes.

Then twenty.

Then I tell myself I’m just going to check the office because Annie’s got a habit of working straight through hunger until late when something’s chewing at her.

She isn’t in the office or in the upstairs hall. Isn’t on the back porch with her camera or at the paddocks where she goes when she wants air and doesn’t want to admit it.

Which is how I end up crossing the yard in the dark with a flashlight in one hand and a bad feeling in my chest.

The night cool bites a little. The kind of Pacific Northwest cold that sneaks down your collar and reminds you the mountains are always closer than they look.

The yard lights cast long amber pools across the gravel, and the barns sit beyond them, dark and watchful. The tack room door is half open. A stripe of dim yellow light cuts across the packed dirt outside, and there she is…

Sitting on an overturned bucket between the saddle racks and the wall of bridles, shoulders curled in, trying to make herself smaller than she is.

Her blue hair’s still twisted up, but not well anymore. A few bright strands have come loose and stuck to her cheeks. Her elbows are braced on her knees, face in her hands.

I go still.

Then I hear it, the broken edge of a breath she’s trying very hard not to let become anything bigger.

Well.

Hell.

I set the flashlight down on a shelf by the door and lean one shoulder against the frame.

“Hey,” I say, soft enough not to startle.

She jerks anyway.

Her head snaps up, her eyes are red, and there’s no real graceful way to describe what that does to me, except to say I feel it low and immediate, all twisted up.

“Duke,” she rasps. “What are you doing here?”

“I was about to ask you the same thing.”

She scrubs both hands over her face hard enough I want to stop her. “I’m fine.”

“Sure you are.”