His eyes looked even brighter, surrounded by the dirt on his face, there in the dark.
She pushed past it. Pushed past the tangle in her chest, in her lungs, and went right at him.
“You heard me. You were... You were unfair, and you were mean to me. You keep treating me like a child. And it isn’t fair. I’m not a child. And I’m not somebody that you can just lecture all the time. You don’t think I know anything,” she said, getting a good rant all built up in her chest. Oh, yes. She was ready to fight. She was ready to scream. Good and loud, too. “I have worked with you on this ranch for years. I know just as much as you do about any of the work we do here. What makes you think I don’t know anything about life? I’ve caught calves and I’ve buried them. I lost my parents. I know what it feels like to lose things.” She felt her tongue about to tip her right over the edge of decency. She’d been pushing it all day, starting with Barbara, and she was going further, worse now, and she did it anyway. “I know what it feels like to grieve. Twice what you did. Don’t you dare treat me like I don’t know my feelings.”
Sparks burned in the blue, and his anger was like a palpable force. Good. She’d wanted it.
“Be careful, Rose,” he said, his voice a growl.
She expected him to go on. To give her the fight she craved.
He didn’t.
He turned back to the anvil.
“Don’t you dismiss me,” she said. “You don’t have the right to dismiss me.”
He didn’t look back at her. She looked around, then she saw an empty soda can on the floor. She picked it up and hurled it at him. It hit him in the shoulder.
“What the fuck, Rose?”
“I said don’t dismiss me,” she said.
“You’re acting like a child. You are quite literally throwing a tantrum here, while you tell me that you should be taken seriously. I think even you can appreciate how ridiculous that is.”
“See? Even that. I’m the closest thing you have to a business partner, Logan. And suddenly you’re acting like I’m a thousand years younger than you.”
“You are. A decade younger than me, Rose. And the only reason you think you know everything is because you don’t. You profoundly don’t. The difference between you and me is that I know all the things I don’t know.”
“That’s a contradiction. You can’t know what you don’t know.”
“You can. And I do.”
“Just... I’ve had it with you,” she said. “I’m right about Elliott and Iris. Barbara Niedermayer needed to be put in her place. She has no right to treat us this way just because she’s resentful that Pansy has a position of power. And you know why she does it. The same reason that you’re a jerk to me. Because I’m a woman. Because I’m young.”
“I am not a jerk to you because you’re young and a woman. I am a jerk to you because somebody has to be. Everybody else is a little bit overindulgent of you and your shenanigans. If I were Iris I would’ve told you where to shove it.”
“Well, hopefully you’ll get an opportunity to after all the stuff with Elliott works out, because then I’ll get to set you up.”
“You are not setting me up, little girl. Not happening.”
“Why not? You don’t seem to be able to set yourself up.”
“Did you ever think maybe I’m making a choice.”
“A choice to be alone?”
“A choice to be a better person than I damn well want to be.”
The air crackled between them, hotter than the forge, louder than the pop of the sparks around them.
She closed the space between them, and with an open palm pressed her hand against his chest and shoved him back. Her skin felt scalded, and she ignored it. “I deserve your respect.”
“You want me to start treating you like an equal? You want me to treat you like a woman?”
She took a step closer to him, something driving her that she couldn’t name. Something dangerous churning in her gut. That she couldn’t define it enraged her, because it fell into line with everything he had just said. That there was something out there, a great mystery that she wasn’t privy to. Something that he knew, that she never would.
“You wouldn’t know how. You still look at me and see a kid who needs her shoes tied. But I’m a woman who can put on her own damn cowgirl boots, and I don’t need you to tell me how it is.”
He took a step toward her, and another, those blue eyes never leaving hers. It was like that moment in the hallway had been a taste of this. The thunder in the distance. And now here it was, all around her. The storm.
She took a step back, then another, until her shoulder blades hit the rough wood wall of the barn. And still he was coming. Six foot plus of large, angry man, who could wield a mallet with no effort, who could pick a calf up off the ground and effortlessly heft a bale of hay.
And it didn’t scare her, having all that strength right there, not even with him full of rage.
No, it was something else that twisted her insides now. Something else that made her stomach tight. And there was a big, panicked blank in her brain as she tried to figure out what it might be.
“You don’t want that,” he said. “Trust me, you don’t.
“And do you know why you need somebody to tell you what’s happening? It’s not because you’re stupid, Rose. It’s because you don’t want to see the damn world around you. And I can understand why. Because yeah,
