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“That’s in the works, but for the time being, she needs a roommate friend. Someone who’s around her enough to crack open her shell.”
I grimaced, still unsure, and Leah gave me yet another dramatic eye roll.
“Fine! Be a jerk, but just be a lesser jerk, okay? Stop being so hard on her around the ranch.”
“I’m hard on everyone around the ranch,” I muttered, a touch annoyed by what Leah was getting at. I treated everyone the same around these parts, and I didn’t like how she made it seem as if I came down harder on Hazel than any of the other ranch hands.
Leah sighed, growing tired of my responses the same way I was growing tired of hers. “Whatever, Ian. You treat Hazel worse than the others. I’ve seen the way you boss her around when she’s probably one of the hardest workers at this place. I mean, hell, she puts in more work than my bozo brother.”
“Hey, leave me out of this!” James shot out as he packed up his things. “But she’s not wrong. Hazel is a damn good worker, and you do sometimes come down hard on her.”
Well, there was nothing as grand as being tag teamed by the Scout siblings. The shitty thing about it was that they were two of the nicest people around. So if they had issues with the way I was treating Hazel, they were probably spot on about it. True, my judgments based on Charlie might’ve affected the way I’d treated Hazel at the ranch, and having Leah and James point that fact out to me made me feel like a big ass. I’d do my best to keep it in mind to take it a little easier on Hazel.
Which meant I had to remind myself repeatedly that she wasn’t the same type of person that Charlie was simply because she’d been raised by the devil himself.
“You should take it easy today. It’s too hot out to be working that hard,” I warned Hazel the following day as she was shoveling hay into the back of a pickup truck. The temperature was nearing one hundred degrees, and she was dressed in her usual all-black outfit, with her long sleeves. It was too damn hot for that type of wardrobe, especially when Hazel was working directly in the sun. She even had a hoodie on, with the hood up like a madwoman.
“It’s fine. I got this,” she muttered, her voice low as she shoveled the hay. She hadn’t said much over the past few hours, which was odd. Normally, she’d have a rude, sarcastic comment to make toward me, but there was none to be heard.
She hadn’t even mocked me the previous night about me burning dinner. Come to think of it, I hadn’t even seen her at the house. Her bedroom door was closed, and even though I heard her moving around, she didn’t step foot outside. When I woke in the morning, she was already off to work on the ranch.
“Don’t tell me you’re still pissy about me not wanting to open up to you about my feelings and crap that other morning?”
“Contrary to popular belief, not everything is about you, Ian Parker,” she snapped.
I should’ve left it—and her bad attitude—at that. Still, watching that sun beat down on her was making me dizzy. Shit, I was seconds away from passing out for her.
“Come on, darling. Don’t be stupid. Heatstroke is a real thing.” I called her “darling” to try to get under her skin, and she didn’t react whatsoever. Damn. What was with that girl?
She pulled on the edges of her hood and cleared her throat before going back to work. “It’s fine. I’m good.”
“At least head to the pigpens. I’ll even help you in there. Or take a water break. It’s too—”
“I said I’m fine!” she finally snapped.
The moment she turned toward me, my chest tightened. Her eyes were bloodshot red, as if she’d been crying for the past forever hours, and she was wearing pounds and pounds of makeup. Sure, she wore makeup on the regular, but she currently looked like she was auditioning forRuPaul’s Drag Race.
I didn’t even know why, but seeing that level of sadness in her eyes broke my cold fucking heart. “What’s wrong?” I hammered.
She shook her head as tears proceeded to dance down her cheeks. “Nothing. I’m fine.”
“You’re lying.”
“Drop it, Ian.”
“Can’t, darling.”
She parted her lips to maybe sass me, which would’ve made me feel a little bit better about her current state. If she had enough in her to sass me, then she wasn’t too far away from her regular annoying self.
But instead of her speaking, her eyes crossed, and she dropped the pitchfork in her grip. As it fell to the ground, I watched her body waver back and forth.
Fuck.
She was going to pass out.
Her eyes began to roll back in her head, and I rushed over to her, catching her just in time before she crashed. She passed out in my arms, her body going limp against me. I lifted her up and hurried off in the direction of the house and kept repeating the same words over and over.
“I got you, darling,” I muttered. “I got you.”
