Page 121 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
Logan rolled off the mattress and had his feet on the floor before his eyes opened. Bad habit, relying on Grace to handle the night feedings.
He crossed the hall and pushed open the nursery door. Miriam stood in the crib, gripping the rail with both fists, face scrunched and streaming with tears.
Grace’s side of the house had gone quiet. Her door, across from the nursery, hung open on an empty room.
“Grace?”
He scooped Miriam up. She latched onto his collar with that desperate clamp-grip and screamed directly into his ear, which hurt like hell but at least meant her lungs worked fine.
“Grace!”
He carried Miriam down the stairs, bouncing her the way Grace had taught him—softer, not harder—and hummed something, his tuneless rumble doing exactlynothingto calm the baby down. The kitchen sat dark and cold. No coffee on the stove, no skillet warming, no Grace at the counter with her hair half-braided and a pencil behind her ear.
A note sat propped against the salt cellar.
He picked it up with his free hand while Miriam yanked his collar hard enough to pop a button, and the words on the page went through him one line at a time like fence nails driven flush.
I have gone to find Ace.
His hand tightened on the paper.
Don’t come after me.
Like hell he wouldn’t.
This is my mess to clean up because Jonah is my brother. The only reason that man has any hold on this family is because of me, whether I knew it or not. I’m taking my fifty dollars because it’s mine, and you said so yourself, and I aim to use it to make him leave.
Fifty dollars. She’d gone to bargain with a gang boss—a man who ran thirty pickpockets and had beaten her brother half to death yesterday—with fifty dollars. Damn it.Wouldn’t she ever learn that her stubborn streak would be the death of her?
I meant every word of that letter. The one I wrote from New York. Nobody told me what to say.
I still mean it.
Pa appeared in the kitchen doorway in his long johns. “What’s all the commotion?”
“Grace is gone.” Logan handed him the note. “She left in the night. Went lookin’ for Ace Pike.”
Pa read the note. His jaw set in that granite way it did when he’d formed an opinion, and the opinion involved somebody being a damn fool.
“Well.” He folded the paper. “She’s braver than she is smart.”
“Pa, I need you to take Miriam.”
“Son, I—”
“I’m ridin’ to town to find Jonah. He’ll know where Ace is holed up.”
“And you trust him to tell you straight?”
Logan’s gut turned sideways on that. Six hours ago, he’d thrown the man off his property, and now he needed him.
“I don’t trust him. But he’s all I’ve got.”
“You even know where to look?”
Logan shrugged. “Ain’t, what… three places with any beds to them in all of Pitkin. Gon’ start there.”
Pa took Miriam. She fussed at the transfer, grabbing for Logan’s collar, and he had to peel her fingers off one at a time. Each little finger that came loose pulled at something under his ribs.
