Page 99 of The Cowboy Who Worked Late

“All right,” he grumped at her.

“I’m not really sure what you want me to do, Henry,” she said. “You seem to have an idea of how this is going to go, and I’m not doing it right. So why don’t you just tell me how you want it to go, and I’ll do my best to do it.”

“We both know that’s not true,” he said.

“What? That I’m not going to do my best to meet your needs?” She scoffed, her own irritation shooting through the roof. “Is that really what you think?” She couldn’t sit and have this conversation, and Angel burst to her feet and started pacing in the kitchen. “Because if that’s what you think, I think we should?—”

“I don’t think that,” he cut her off, his voice low and dangerous but nowhere near loud. “All right? I’m sorry; I don’t think that.”

Angel calmed down, but she still spun and walked back toward the sink and then took another lap toward the fridge. “What do you think?” she asked, her voice remarkably calm and smooth.

“I think I’m frustrated with this whole situation,” he said.

“Which situation?” she asked. “The one where you’re sitting in a hospital in Three Rivers, or the one where I was forced to hand out the handbook so that we could move forward here on the ranch, but you weren’t here?”

“Both,” he clipped out.

“Yeah, I am too,” she said. After a couple of moments where they both sat with themselves, the fire inside Angel started to burn out.

“Henry, baby, I’m real sorry about your grandma.” Angel realized the quiet could be incredibly charged with emotions, and this was one of those times. When she’d sat with her momma in the hospital, the quiet had not been this sad or this emotionally charged. Everything about Henry amplified the world around Angel. “I’ve sat with my mom in the hospital before,” she said. “It’s never easy.”

“No,” Henry said, and this time his voice didn’t sound like his at all.

“Is that where you are right now?” Angel asked.

“Yep.”

“Who’s coming in tonight?” An idea started to form in her head, and Angel wasn’t sure she could pull it off because it was a long drive to Three Rivers, and Henry had a lot of family surrounding him.

“Tonight is Sammy and Mike,” he said. His cousins.

“All right,” Angel said. “Well, maybe I can meet you for dinner.”

“You don’t need to do that,” he said. “It’s a long drive.”

“Yeah, and we would have a few hours together.”

He scoffed and said, “Angel, do you know what time it is?”

At least he’d started kidding again, and Angel giggled. “I miss you, Henry.”

“I miss you too, sweetheart.”

“I’m real sorry about the handbooks,” she said. “None of it is playing out the way I imagined.”

“Life rarely does,” he said. “And maybe it’s just God telling me it doesn’t matter. We can tell them when we tell them.”

“That’s right,” Angel said. “We’ll tell them when we tell them.”

“I want to see you,” he whispered. “But maybe let’s plan on dinner tomorrow. My momma and my aunt have been cooking all afternoon, and she’s going to have a feast at the housetonight. And then Paul said he’d go with me to look at a couple places in Stinnett.”

Alarms went off in Angel’s head all over again, and she resumed her pacing. “A couple places in Stinnett?” she asked, an icy undertone in her voice.

Henry obviously heard it too because he said, “Yeah,” in a higher-pitched voice. “Remember, I’ve talked to you about finding somewhere else to live?”

“The way you phrase that as a question tells me you know that no, I did not remember that,” she said. “And number two, no, we’ve not talked about that.”

“We have,” he said. “Remember when I mentioned that I thought it would be better if we didn’t live at Lone Star? I need a break from that place, and so do you. And the more I’ve thought about it, the more I think that’s true.”

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