Page 101 of The Cowboy Who Worked Late

“Baby, just say it. We’ll work it out.”

She liked his confidence in her, and in them. She’d been feeling real serious and heavy things for Henry, and it sure was nice that he’d been obviously experiencing those things too.

“It’s about the equine therapy,” she said. “Because I know you’ve been doing some of that with Trevor.”

“Youknow?” he asked. “How do youknow?”

“He told me,” she shot back.

“Okay, first, it’s not real equine therapy,” Henry said. “I’m not a licensed trainer or anything. Second, equine therapy requires a human therapist aspect, none of which Trevor is doing. And third?—”

Angel burst out laughing at his prickly defense. “All right, all right,” she said. “But you’re definitely having Trevor work with Palermo as much as you’re trying to rehabilitate Palermo. Just admit it.”

“I’m not going tonotadmit it,” Henry said.

Angel giggled and shook her head. She got to her feet and pulled a bottle of water out of the fridge. “All right, cowboy. I have to get back to work.”

“You’re not mad about the equine therapy?”

“Oh, so you admit it’s equine therapy.” Henry clammed right up again, and Angel laughed. “I’m not mad about it,” she said. “Trevor gushes about it, thinks it’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened to him. He’s out there every evening working with Palermo. So, I guess you’re replaceable.”

“Oh, don’t say that, sweetheart,” he said. “That’s my worst nightmare.”

And he meant it. Henry wanted to be important, and he didn’t want to be replaceable. And so, as Angel left her house, she said, “Henry, you’re irreplaceable to me, and all of us at Lone Star are dying without you.”

He chuckled this time and said, “You don’t have to be a liar on my behalf.”

“I’m not lying, baby,” she said as she crossed the deck. “We all miss you. But I think I miss you the most.”

“You better,” he growled. And then he said, “I’ll talk to you later. Bye, my angel.”

She hung up, and as Angel went back to the blue barn to start going through next week’s orders at the feed store, her mind kept wandering down the road to Stinnett and then to Three Rivers.

She and Henry sometimes went together like vinegar and oil. Sometimes like night and day, and other times like rainbows and unicorns and sunshine. As she thought about the conversation they’d just had, they’d moved through three pretty serious disagreements.

He would get mad and blow off steam for literally a few seconds and then come right back down. She did that too, something that usually didn’t happen quite so fast. When she gother ire up, it would stay there for hours, and she’d have to vent to multiple people to get herself to calm down. But with Henry, that didn’t happen.

Angel didn’t know what it meant. And she decided she could do the same thing that Henry had obviously been doing—looking into the future to see what she saw. Was it the two of them together? And if so, where and when? Angel had more than that to consider. She had Lone Star, and she’d always been dedicated to this ranch. So, if she left and lived somewhere else, how would that impact those around her?

She went over to Trevor’s every morning and then her parents’ house, and while she had reduced a lot of the load on her shoulders, she would not put that burden on someone who wasn’t blood.

She glanced over to Trevor’s house as she walked by and thought,You kind of already have.Trevor had two full-time helpers when he was working on the ranch to make sure he could get in and out of the saddle, to make sure that if he fell off the horse, someone was there to help him immediately, to help him get around. Everybody helped Trevor, and Angel wondered how much of the help she provided was necessary and how much she just simply liked doing.

“And you could still do it,” she whispered to herself. She pushed into the blue barn, grateful for air conditioning, and hurried down the hall to her office.

Momma was doing really good right now. Though she’d never be off oxygen and she still rarely left the house, it didn’t mean she was bedridden. She hadn’t been hospitalized in a couple of years. And besides, Stinnett was only thirty minutes away.

Angel caught sight of a box of the employee handbooks as she entered her office. As she let her mind flow into the future, she did see her and Henry together. She wasn’t quite sure where,and that unsettled her. And then the two of them disappeared completely, like a whiff of smoke, there and then blown away by a brisk breeze.

She ran her fingertips along the coil of the book. “Maybe when we tell everyone that we’ve been together for months,” she said. “There’ll be more fallout than I’m imagining.”

She tried to think of the individual reactions from the men she’d worked with for years, but nothing would come forward. Angel’s future was wide open, white, and completely blank.

No matter what she did for the rest of the afternoon, she couldn’t make anything solidify on it. She didn’t know what that meant. As she liked to plan and had always been able to plan, now she felt like she was marching out into the great wide open, completely vulnerable with armies all around her, weapons pointed in her direction.

She really needed Henry to come home and help her, but she didn’t want to add to his burdens by texting himINACH. So she did her best to cheer herself and stay busy, and she prayed that God would make up the rest until Henry returned.

Chapter Thirty-Four

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