Page 170 of Ironwood Ranch Cowboys

I hate it.

Annie eats while scrolling through files, muttering occasionally under her breath in accountant dialect.

“Suspicious little bitch,” she murmurs at one line item.

I grin. “Talking to the spreadsheet again?”

“It started it.”

“Fair.”

She keeps working while she eats, because of course she does. Cody’s rubbing off on her in deeply upsetting ways.

The office is tranquil except for keyboard clicks, paper shifting, and the occasional distant sound of ranch activity drifting through the windows.

For a little while, it almost feels normal.

Suspiciously normal.

Then Annie goes still beside me.

I know that look now.

It’s the same expression she gets right before she finds something that makes everybody else’s lives significantly harder.

I sigh. “What did you discover now, tiny menace?”

She doesn’t answer right away. That’s never good.

Her eyes narrow at the screen. One hand comes up automatically, thumb tapping once against the side of her camera body.

Thinking rhythm.

“What,” I repeat more carefully, “did you find?”

Annie zooms in on a section of the spreadsheet, then opens another file beside it. “Okay,” she says slowly. “That’s… weird.”

My stomach drops a little. “Weird how?”

“At first I thought these were just buried operational reimbursements.” She clicks again. “But they’re not coded consistently with ranch logistics.”

I lean closer automatically.

She smells of iced coffee, vanilla musk, and sleep deprivation.

Dangerous detail to notice this early in the morning.

“These,” she says, pointing at the screen, “look like standard consulting bleed at first glance. Same structure. Same splitting behavior under approval thresholds.”

“Okay.”

“But the associated classifications are wrong.”

I frown. “Wrong how?”

“They’re event coded.”

That word lands badly.