Page 2 of Finding Her Billionaire Cowboy Mismatch

She’d organized that too. Found the boxes. Taped them herself.

Folks at church had called it a shame. Elise had called the storage unit and locked in a good monthly rate. A person handled what was in front of her, and what was in front of her was a one-bedroom that wanted emptying.

The lesson stuck. Love all you want, she’d told herself in that bare apartment with the tape gun in her hand. Just never let yourself need.

So she poured it into Hickory Hollow instead. Robert and Kelly had taken her in as one of their own, and family didn’t pack up and leave the moment the spreadsheet was finished. They handed you another one.

And she took it gladly, every time. Kelly’s charity luncheons, the vendor disputes nobody else had the patience to untangle. A whole ranch’s worth of small needs, and not one of them the kind that could leave her standing in an empty room with a roll of tape.

The door opened without a knock.

Kelly Shipley breezed in with a travel mug and the particular brightness of a woman who wanted something and hadn’t settled on how to ask for it.

She set the mug down on the one clear corner of Elise’s desk, the corner Elise kept clear on purpose and Kelly claimed every single visit anyway.

“You are a marvel,” Kelly said. “I called the feed store this morning, and Dale practically wept your name.”

“Dale weeps easy.” Elise held her eyes on the screen. “It’s the alfalfa. He gets emotional.”

Kelly laughed and settled into the chair across the desk, in no hurry to be anywhere. That was its own warning sign. A Shipley with time to kill was a Shipley with a plan.

“You work yourself half to death,” Kelly said, swirling whatever was in the mug. “I keep telling Robert he ought to hand you a raise and a week at the lake.”

“Robert hands me a raise, I’ll have to go find a whole new personality to match it.”

Kelly grinned. “Heaven forbid.”

Then came the pause. Elise had worked beside this family long enough to chart their weather, and a Shipley pause meant one of them was winding up to a question.

“So.” Kelly turned her mug a quarter turn. “The joint barbecue. With Bolton Farms. You’re coming this year, aren’t you?”

Elise’s fingers stopped on the keys.

The barbecue meant a whole afternoon with nothing to run. No phones to mind, no clipboard to hide behind. Only Elise, holding a paper plate, with people free to look right at her.

The barbecue. Every summer the two ranches threw in together, a great sprawling affair with too much brisket and not enough shade, and every summer Elise found a reason the office couldn’t spare her.

“Somebody has to mind the phones,” she said.

“The phones can go to voicemail for one Saturday. It won’t kill the ranch.”

“That’s how empires fall, Kelly.”

Elise glanced up, the next deflection already loaded. But Kelly had moved on, mug lifted, her attention drifting to the bulletin board behind Elise’s head as though the subject had never come up at all.

“Did the caterer ever confirm the count? Annie’s convinced we lowballed the headcount last year and ran short on rolls. You remember the roll incident.”

The roll incident had nearly ended a marriage. Elise let the subject turn. Chasing it would take more out of her than it was worth, and Kelly with an agenda was a force best left to spend itself.

“I’ll confirm the count Monday,” Elise said. “And pad it. We are not reliving the rolls.”

“That’s why we keep you.” Kelly scooped the mug back up, rose, and lingered a moment longer than the conversation called for, weighing whether to add one more thing. Then she patted the doorframe and breezed out the way she’d come, victorious over a war Elise had never agreed to fight.

The door swung shut, and the office went quiet again.

Elise sat with the odd shape of the conversation. That barbecue question, dropped and abandoned so fast. Kelly tracked grudges across decades and headcounts across years. A question she let go that easy was a question she meant to come around to.

That woman never abandons anything.