Page 62 of Ironwood Ranch Cowboys

Then Riley snorts. “You are.”

“No, I’m not.”

Margaret, who’s somehow materialized close enough to involve herself without my consent, turns on her stool and says, “Is she the blue-haired one from Ironwood?”

“That’s not relevant,” I say.

“Oh, it absolutely is,” Carl says, pointing at me with the conviction of a man who shouldn’t be allowed to point at anything after his third drink. “Because if it’s the blue-haired one, then yes, you are.”

I stare at all of them in mounting disbelief. “This is an absurd conversation.”

“And yet you’re still in it,” Riley says pleasantly.

Reid folds his hands around his glass and gives me the kind of look that has historically preceded either excellent advice or deeply irritating accuracy.

“Alright. Let’s strip the nonsense out of it. You’ve got a new accountant who’s smart enough to make you uncomfortable, pretty enough that every idiot in town has noticed her, and new enough to Ironwood that she doesn’t understand where the real fault lines are yet. You’ve also got something ugly moving around in your books. If all you’re saying is that you’re concerned, then fine. That’s rational. What isn’t rational is the way you’ve been acting about it.”

“I’m acting appropriately.”

“You’re not,” he says. “You’re wound so tight I can hear the pressure from here.”

I laugh once, low and humorless. “Concern isn’t the same thing as attraction.”

“No,” Riley says, “but in your case it’s very obviously sharing a border.”

“I’m not attracted to her.”

The lie lands badly even to my own ears.

Margaret smiles into her drink. “Oh, sweetheart.”

I rub a hand over my mouth and immediately regret the gesture because it signals a level of exasperation I don’t want read aloud. “What exactly is it you all think you’re observing?”

“That you like her,” Carl says.

“That you’re trying very hard to make ‘like’ sound like a systems issue,” Riley adds.

“That you’re already halfway in trouble,” Reid says.

I look at him. “Trouble.”

“Yes.”

“On what basis?”

He shrugs. “The basis that you don’t spend this much energy trying to define something you’re indifferent to.”

That would be easier to dismiss if he were wrong.

“She works for us,” I say instead, because that, at least, is measurable. “She lives in the house. She’s already become visible faster than is strategically useful, and the combination of Duke’s inability to exercise discretion and Silas’s tendency to react to risk by tightening everything around it has created a situation I don’t trust.”

Reid’s expression shifts at Duke’s name, some of the teasing giving way to actual attention. “So this is about Duke.”

“It’s also about Duke.”

“Also,” he repeats, and that one word makes it obvious he heard exactly what I didn’t intend to admit.

I take another drink, which is how I know I’ve had too much already, because the bourbon has stopped tasting tart and started tasting functional, and that’s generally when people make poor decisions under the illusion they’re making clear ones.