Page 47 of Some Cowgirls are Worth Protecting

Hudson gave her a sharp look, and she huffed. “You know what I mean. This is my home. The problems we’re dealing with are just as important for me to know. You can’t just go out there and find whatever it was without giving me something.” Her eyes darted to the other men, then landed on Wade. “Tell him.”

Wade was more closed off than he’d ever been. He looked away and rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t know, Rachel. Maybe it would be smart to let us deal with whatever is going on.”

“Fat chance!” she snapped. “You’re going to tell me so I can decide if I need to involve the authorities more than they’ve already been involved. If I need to hire a P.I. to do some of the heavy lifting, I’m going to do it.”

Liam was the only one who reacted to that statement. She didn’t know what it meant, if anything. His gaze shifted to Hudson and then back to Wade before ultimately landing on the ground, where he twisted the toe of his boot into the dirt.

“I mean it,” she continued. “I want to know what you found.”

“It wasn’t that big of a deal,” Hudson said.

“If that was the case, then why won’t you tell me?” She folded her arms and glared daggers at him. She wasn’t going to keep getting pushed around. Not by the criminals and not by the man she was quickly falling in love with.

Hudson stared at her hard. “All they did was dam up the creek and redirect it to a clearing where there was a deep enough valley to house the water. Eventually, it would have overflowed and returned back to the creek. It would have been a mess to clean up from a Bureau of Land Management standpoint, but that’s it.”

Her eyes never left his face. She could tell he was hiding something. Whatever it was, he didn’t want her to know about it, and if it was up to him, he probably would take it to his grave. The sinking feeling that she would be pushed out because she wasn’t good enough to hang with the real cowboys was the first thought that popped into her head. Copper Creek was the kind of place where, if a person didn’t fit in, they knew it from the start.

She couldn’t tell what bothered her most. The fact that the man she trusted was clearly keeping things from her or her sense of self-worth crumbling before his eyes.

Rachel clutched her hands into fists and then opened them to stretch out her fingers before doing it again and again. Finally, she released a frustrated huff and hurried inside. She wasn’t alone for even ten minutes before Hudson slipped into her office. She refused to lift her eyes to meet his as he hovered by the door. “Your brothers leave?”

He grunted, moving closer. “I know you think that you…” his voice trailed off.

Keeping her eyes trained on the email she had open on her computer, Rachel waited to hear the excuse he was going to make as to why she couldn’t be part of their boys’ club. But when he didn’t speak, she finally glanced toward him.

Hudson was holding the offer letter for the charity she’d been invited to oversee on the East Coast. The pigment in his skin had reddened, and his eyes had clouded over. “What’s this?” he muttered sharply.

“Nothing,” she snapped, ripping it from his hands. She yanked open a drawer and threw the letter inside before slamming it shut. “You have your secrets, and I have mine.”

“What secrets?” he demanded. “I’m not keeping secrets.”

“Me neither.”

He snorted. “You’re being ridiculous. There was nothing left to tell. We found the dam. We fixed it. End of story.”

She laughed derisively. “You can’t possibly think I’m that stupid. I could tell there was something you were keeping from me back there. And whatever it was, I’m sure I could handle it. Or have you forgotten that this sanctuary belongs to me?”

His jaw tightened. Lightning flashed between them as the tension in the room grew exponentially. Several things left unsaid filled the air, making it hard to breathe. It would have been easy to tell him that she had gotten the letter earlier that morning but had zero interest in looking into it. She could have assured him that she wasn’t going anywhere.

Unfortunately, her past dictated that she keep her heart protected by any means necessary. She couldn’t tell him any of that until she knew she could trust him implicitly. How could she have come so close to making the mistake of giving everything to this man when she didn’t know him well enough to guarantee he wouldn’t hurt her?

Rachel rose, placed her hands on the desk, and kept her voice low. “If there’s nothing else you want to say to me, perhaps it would be best if we go our separate ways for the evening. I’ve got work to do?—”

“What? Like respond to a letter asking you to run a different charity across the country?” Hudson spit out.

She pressed her lips together firmly. “Good night, Hudson.”

23

Hudson

The stench of smoke hung heavy in the air.

Horses whinnied in terror.

Something made a loud crackling sound somewhere in the distance.

Hudson flared and then wrinkled his nose before suddenly realizing that the smoke he’d experienced in his dreams was, in fact, surrounding him in real life. He leaped up off the bale of straw he’d chosen as his temporary bed and his eyes flew wide as he took in the scene before him.

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