She picked up her fork and started eating, and Becca started telling her about a client she'd seen that week.
It was ordinary, their normal weekend, but beneath the ordinary something extraordinary was bubbling away. Ellie knew that they had genuinely discovered something amazing, something transformative for their marriage. What came next, she didn’t know.
What she did know, though, was that she couldn't wait to find out.
Chapter 19
Kelly's message arrived on a Monday morning while Ellie was in a stand-up meeting that had, entirely predictably, ceased to involve standing twenty minutes ago and was now seven engineers slumped around a conference table debating whether to refactor a codebase that everyone hated but nobody wanted to be responsible for rewriting.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket and she snuck a look under the table:
So I have a proposition for y'all and before you say anything just hear me out. How do you feel about a weekend on the ranch? Colt's around Friday night and Saturday morning but then he's got a thing with his boys in San Antonio and I could use the company. It's beautiful out here right now, wildflowers everywhere, we've got a watering hole that's warm enough to swim in, and I promise the guest room is nicer than anyhotel you've stayed in. Come Friday after work, leave Sunday whenever. K x
Ellie stared at the message, rereading it twice, while around her the refactoring debate continued unabated. She could feel the smile forming before she could stop it… unfortunate, because a smile had no place in this discussion about legacy code.
She forwarded the message to Becca with a single added line:Thoughts? I’m keen if you are x
Becca's reply came within a minute, which hopefully meant she was between clients. Either that or she’d become deeply unprofessional, which Ellie strongly doubted:
Yes. Obviously yes. Tell her yes immediately before she changes her mind. x
Then a follow-up:Also I've never been on a ranch. Do I need cowboy boots? x
And another:What does one wear to be seduced on a ranch? Asking for a friend. x
Ellie laughed before she could stop herself, turning it into a sort of strangled cough as the engineers sat near her looked concerned. “Ticklish throat,” she managed to croak, before excusing herself to get some water.
Once she was out of the room she typed back:
I'll tell her yes. You don't need boots. Wear whatever you want, doubt you’ll be wearing it long x
She watched the three dots appear and disappear several times before finally:
You can't say things like that when I have a client in four minutes. I won’t be able to concentrate xx
Ellie pocketed her phone, grinning. This was going to be fun.
***
They left Austin on Friday late afternoon, Becca driving the rental SUV they'd picked up because their own car would have struggled on the unpaved roads Kelly had warned them about. The city fell away quickly… suburbs giving way to strip malls, then open road, the landscape changing from urban sprawl to wide open vistas as they headed west into the hill country.
It was early April and the wildflowers were out, just as Kelly had promised. Blues carpeted the verges in dense, impossible drifts mixed with bright oranges and yellows. Ellie had lived in Texas for over a year now but she'd never seen the hill country in spring, and the sheer beauty of it was staggering.
"It's stunning," Becca said, slowing down as they rounded a bend and a whole multicoloured hillside came into view, the colour so saturated it looked like surely it had been photoshopped. "I had no idea."
"Kelly said the wildflowers are the best they've been in years."
"Kelly would say that. She's trying to sell us on the ranch lifestyle."
"Is it working?"
Becca glanced at her and smiled. "Ask me again Sunday."
Ellie’s heart beat just a little faster, the jealousy-arousal loop kicking in early.
They drove for another hour, the roads getting gradually narrower and quieter, the towns getting smaller. This was rural Texas now and the places reflected it, a gas station with a convenience store, a feed store, a church, a bar. The essentials, repeated at regular intervals. The GPS took them off the highway onto a county road, then onto an unmarked road that was more gravel than asphalt, and then through a gate that had Kelly's name on a mailbox alongside a faded no-trespassing sign with a bullet hole in it.
"Charming," Ellie said.
