Page 12 of Finding Her Billionaire Cowboy Mismatch

The drive to Bolton ran twenty minutes of empty road, and he gave every one of them to her.

Elise Pollard. Sharp as a fresh blade and twice as fast. Competent in the way that never once asked for the credit. And prettier than he had a lick of business thinking, with that road dust on her and that light held dead steady in her hand.

He shut the thought down before it could put down roots.

The math didn’t work, and Stephen was a man who respected math. Elise had her whole life squared and labeled, an apartment that was hers and a job she ran without a wasted motion and not one loose thread a body could tug.

And him.

Land-rich and cash-poor, and both of them by his own choosing. He could clear every notice in that kitchen drawer tomorrow, sell off a corner of Garrett ground or sign over the minerals the lease men came sniffing after every spring, and not miss the money. He wouldn’t. Earl had left him the land and one instruction to keep it by. Keep it in Garrett hands. Don’t sell, and don’t let anybody buy you cheap. So the taxes got paid the slow way, out of a crew lead’s wages, a lean winter at a time, and the old truck kept its bald tire a while yet.

It wore on him some, and not the way a body would guess. He didn’t grudge the going-without. He’d gone without his whole life and made his peace with it long ago. What sat heavier was the question that crept in on the quiet nights with the drawer open in front of him, whether the old man would truly want him riding the place this close to the edge over a handful of words said off a porch one winter. He let the question stand, the once. Then he set it down. Earl hadn’t dealt in maybes, and a promise to a dead man was the one thing Stephen meant to keep whole. He’d cover what he owed the way he covered everything, on his own two shoulders and his own wage, and he’d do it without parting with a single acre or a barrel’s worth of what his grandfather left in his keeping.

A woman with her life squared the way Elise had hers didn’t need a man hauling that kind of freight. What would he even bring to her table? He’d inherited more than a huge parcel of family land from Earl. He’d also inherited his prideful stubborn streak.

He’d been raised by a man who never took a handout and never aimed to be one, and Stephen had come up cut from the same bolt of cloth. Pride and solitude, the one paid for with the other. It had cost him plenty over the years. It had also never once let him down.

He talked himself out of it the rest of the way home, the way he’d talked himself out of wanting things since he was old enough to do the wanting.

The Bolton gate came up in his headlights, and Stephen had the matter settled. Elise Pollard was a fine woman and a closed door, and he’d built a life out of leaving closed doors closed.

CHAPTER SIX

The fence along the line between Bolton and Hickory Hollow had given out in three places over the winter, and somebody had to ride out and tell two crews how to mend it.

That somebody, it turned out, was Elise.

“You want me to coordinate a fence crew.” She set down her pen and gave Annie Bolton the flat look she saved for people inventing work. “I run an office. Wire isn’t my department.”

“You won’t string a thing. You’ll plan it.” Annie had planted herself in the visitor’s chair as though she owned the lease on it, which, by marriage, she half did. “Robert’s chasing that Abilene buyer all week, and our manager wrenched his shoulder hauling feed and can’t lift his arm past his ear. The job needs a head on it. You’ve got the best one on either place.”

“That’s a Bolton job. Why’s it landing on my desk?”

“Because it’s a both-of-us job, and both of us are short-handed, and you, sugar, are wasted in here fielding Dale’s weepy phone calls.” Annie leaned in, warm and immovable. “Consider it a chance to learn something new. You can read a map and tell a cedar post from a hole in the ground. That’s the whole skill.”

Elise studied her. Annie passed out chores the way other folks passed out compliments, but there was an extra wattage to her this morning, a brightness that didn’t quite match a stretch of downed wire.

“You’re mighty cheerful about a fence repair.”

“I’m cheerful about a sharp woman getting out of a stuffy office and into the sunshine.” Annie patted the corner of the desk. “Take the win, hon. Not everything’s a plot.”

A flicker crossed the edge of Elise’s attention and was gone before she could pin a name to it. A fence was down. Annie was Annie, sunny and meddlesome and slippery as a creek stone. There was nothing in it worth chasing.

Most likely.

Elise reached for her keys, and Annie was already on her feet, halfway to the door with that pleased-as-punch glide of hers.

“Materials list is on the seat of my truck,” Annie called over her shoulder. “Have fun, hon.”

And that was that.

Elise told herself it was a nuisance and not a kindness, and then she did the thing she always did with a nuisance. She made it hers.

Inside the hour she had a clean one-page plan, the kind she’d have wanted handed to her if she’d been the one in the dirt. Three breaks marked on a sketch of the line. Bolton’s crew on the north two, Hickory Hollow’s on the south one, materials split down the middle, a staging spot for the wire where both crews could reach it without fording the creek twice. She printed two copies, since a plan nobody could read was only a daydream, and drove out to the line with the pages on the seat beside her.

She had the radio on and her window down and a flutter under her ribs she chose not to examine. A fence was a fence. She was a professional delivering a work plan. If her pulse had opinions about which crew waited on the far bank, her pulse could keep them to itself.

The work site sat where the two ranches met, a long run of fence threading the creek through a stand of mesquite. Both crews were out already, trucks nosed into the bar ditch, men moving in the unhurried way of folks with a full day ahead and no cause to rush it.