Page 18 of Finding Her Billionaire Cowboy Mismatch

“Haven’t had it in me to get one.” He turned his cup. “A good dog’s a long goodbye.”

“That’s the saddest thing anybody’s said to me over coffee.”

“You asked.”

It should have put her off, a man that careful with his own heart. It did the opposite. It made her trust him, which was worse, or better, and she hadn’t sorted out which yet.

Somewhere into the second cup, a thought crept up on Elise and sat down uninvited.

She’d spent two years dead certain she wanted a life with no one in it but herself. Tidy and controlled. Safe as a locked drawer. And here she sat across from a man who’d argue about dishwashers for free, and the wanting had gone and rearranged itself while she wasn’t looking.

She’d had it wrong, perhaps. Not about the work, never about the work. But about the rest, the part she’d boarded up and christened a fortress. A fortress with one chair in it might not be the prize she’d sold herself on. She’d defended that fortress as if it were the last dry ground in a flood. From in here, with the coffee going cold and the cowboy going warm, it had the look of a very tidy way to be alone.

She’d armored that piece of herself so long she’d near forgotten there was a person under the plating, a woman who used to want things out loud. Across the little table from Stephen Garrett, the plating itched the way a cast does three weeks past due to come off.

It was a dangerous thought to let in. She let it in anyway.

When the cups stood empty, an hour had slipped off somewhere she couldn’t account for, which never happened to Elise, who accounted for everything.

“This wasn’t terrible,” she said, gathering her bag.

“High praise.” His mouth tipped up. “Same time next week?”

She should have hedged, left herself an exit.

“Saturday,” she said.

Monday, the strangeness found her.

She was passing Kelly’s open door, arms full of the week’s filing, when Kelly’s voice drifted out, low and pleased with itself, aimed at the phone wedged against her shoulder.

“…told you it would take. Project Cowboy’s heating up really well. They had coffee Saturday, and she came back glowing, not that she’d own up to it under torture…”

Elise stopped.

Project Cowboy.

The filing went heavy in her arms. She stood there a breath, the words settling wrong, the way a receipt won’t square with the register no matter how you add it.

She could go in and ask. The old Elise, the one who read every spreadsheet to the last cell, would have planted herself in that doorway and demanded the whole ledger.

Instead she stayed in the hall and talked herself down.

So Kelly had a nickname for a scheme. The woman had a nickname for everything. She’d dubbed Robert’s anniversary trip Operation Sweetheart and last spring’s roof repair the Great Shingle Crisis of Early June. A pet name wasn’t a plot.

And coffee was coffee. People talked about coffee. There was nothing sinister in two friends being tickled that the lonesome workhorse of the office had finally gotten herself a Saturday morning.

Still.

Something about the phrase sat crooked. Heating up, the way a plan does, with a timeline and a hand on the thermostat. A project implied an objective. An objective implied somebody running it.

And she had a fair guess who. Annie’s fence assignment. The barbecue she’d been steered to the way you steer a heifer up a chute. Lined up in a row, the pieces made a picture she didn’t care for.

But lined up was the whole trouble. Elise was good at lining things up. Show her three coincidences and she’d hand you a conspiracy with a flowchart and a budget. That was the bookkeeper in her, forever hunting the error in the ledger, and not every ledger had one.

Besides, suppose it was true. Suppose Kelly and Annie had nudged a fence assignment here and a seating card there. No one had scripted the laugh over fence-post creosote, or the way Stephen had said a dead dog’s name soft as a prayer. Whatever the meddlers set in motion, the part that mattered had happened between two people and two cups, with no audience and no script.

She shut the thought in a drawer and slid it closed.