Page 17 of Finding Her Billionaire Cowboy Mismatch

She made the mistake of mentioning it to Kelly.

She hadn’t meant to. It slipped out over the vendor reports, a throwaway line about being busy Saturday morning, and Kelly pounced on the word coffee the way a barn cat takes a june bug.

“Coffee,” Kelly said, lighting up. “With who?”

“A person.”

“A tall, quiet, fence-mending sort of person?”

“Goodbye, Kelly.”

“I’m only happy for you,” Kelly called after her, in a sing-song that promised the opposite of letting it go.

But Kelly had gone pink with delight, near to bouncing in her chair, as pleased as Elise had ever clocked her over a thing that wasn’t her own business. The woman lived for other people’s news. Elise filed the reaction under Kelly being Kelly and got on with her day. A coffee was hardly headline material.

The shop sat on the square between the hardware store and the bank, six tables and a chalkboard menu somebody redid in a different hand each week. Elise had driven past it a thousand times and gone inside all of twice. Saturday mornings she generally spent with a spreadsheet and a pot of her own coffee, which was free and asked her no questions. She’d changed her shirt three times before leaving the apartment, then been cross at herself for changing it the once.

Stephen was there ahead of her, hat off, two waters already on the table, filling his chair the way he filled everything, as if he’d grown there. He’d cleaned up. Pressed shirt, clean-shaved, hair still showing the teeth of the comb. The effort of it reached her in a way a tailored suit never could have on another man.

“You found it,” he said.

“I run logistics for a living. Finding a coffee shop is within my powers.”

“Wasn’t sure you’d show.”

“Neither was I, frankly. You caught me before my better judgment woke up.”

The coffee came. She took hers black. He doctored his with enough cream to founder a calf, and she had opinions.

“That’s not coffee, that’s a milkshake that lost its nerve.”

“It’s coffee with manners.”

“Coffee that quit on itself, and dragged a grown man down with it.”

“Says the woman drinking fence-post creosote.”

She laughed at her own line. He near about did too, which from him counted double.

“You make your bed,” he said, as if it were an accusation.

“Every morning. A made bed is a promise to your future self.”

“Waste of good minutes, tidying a thing you’ll only crawl into again by dark.”

“It’s discipline.”

“A quarrel with a blanket, that.”

She had no answer for that, which annoyed her near as much as it pleased her.

They argued about the radio, him loyal to AM weather and cattle reports. “Conway Twitty is not driving music,” she informed him. “He surely is. You’re driving it wrong.” Then they moved on to the proper way to load a dishwasher, which neither of them owned, purely for the sport of it.

None of it mattered, and that was the marvel of the thing. Every argument was a door propped open, an invitation to keep talking, and Stephen kept walking through.

At some point the bickering settled, and they sat in the lull of it easy, two cups and no agenda. He asked about her people. She told him about her mother’s Sunday calls and the four-hour drive she kept not making. He told her about a blue heeler named Pete who’d worked cattle till he was fourteen and lay buried under the live oak by the house. The way he said the dog’s name carried more of the man than an hour of questions could have.

“You don’t have another?”