Page 21 of Finding Her Billionaire Cowboy Mismatch

His mouth twitched the entire time. She let him have it. A man could grin behind his glasses all he pleased, so long as the grin stayed put.

The rest of it settled into a shape she had not let herself want in a long while.

Dinners most nights. The Wagon Wheel, where Marlene gave up pretending she wasn’t refilling their cups to listen in, and where she started parking them at the corner booth without being asked. His table the other nights, where he cooked plain and good and apologized for the plain part until Elise told him to hush and ate two helpings to make her point.

Walks after, the slow kind, out past the barn while the light went easy over the pasture and the day let go of its grip. He did not crowd the quiet with talk. That suited her better than any speech a man had ever made her.

One evening he stopped at the gate to the home pasture and held it open for her without a word. She went through ahead of him and did not race on to organize the rest of the walk. She let him set the pace. That alone told her how far down the guard had come, the one she had spent years building board by board.

Phone calls that ran long. Longer than she would have admitted to anyone holding a clipboard of her own. He was no talker, and the quiet on his end of the line turned out to be the company, not the words.

Some nights he read her a page out of Earl’s old operations journal, the cattle and the price of feed set down in a dead man’s hand, and she held the phone and let a stranger’s grandfather talk her toward sleep.

She would sit at her own kitchen table, the plain white dishes drying in the rack, the phone warm at her ear, and a whole stretch would pass where neither of them said a thing.

Two people and a quiet line.

The best part of her day, and she had stopped pretending otherwise.

One night at his place, after the plates were cleared and the coffee poured, he unrolled paper across the table and smoothed it flat with the side of his hand.

Not blueprints. Graph paper, soft at the folds, a pencil line drawn and redrawn until the good version stood out from the ghosts of the bad ones beneath it.

“Been working on this a while,” he said.

She leaned in. The house she sat in had a second house drawn over the top of it, the same bones with more room hung on them.

“You’re adding on.”

“Out the back, here.” His pencil tapped the kitchen wall at her shoulder. “Push the wall out, give it a real pantry. A mud porch off the side, so a man doesn’t track the whole county across Grandma’s good floor.” A line ran up the margin of the page. “And a second story. Bedrooms up top. The stair would come off the front room, here.”

She leaned closer. He had drawn the railings. A man penciled railings onto a house he had not built yet only when he meant to grow old inside it.

Bedrooms, she noted. Not a bedroom. Rooms enough for a houseful. She kept that to herself and let it warm her where it sat.

“And out here.” He turned the page over. The yard had squares penciled into it, neat as a quilt top. “Garden. A big one. The way they always kept it.” His voice changed on the word they. “Grandma put up beans and tomatoes every summer till the year she couldn’t. Earl kept it going after, badly, on account of he hated to let her things go. I let it run to grass once he passed.” He looked at the paper instead of at her. “I want it the way it was.”

His pencil rested on the front of the drawing. “From the new porch you’d look out on the live oak. Pete’s resting under it.” He said no more about the dog. He did not have to. Earl’s chair sat down by the pond where it had always sat, and the porch he was drawing would look after the rest.

Elise wanted the pencil.

Her hand half rose for it before she set it down in her lap and held it there.

Two years of a man’s life she had drawn up once, every line of it, the bills and the color-coded road ahead, until the one at the center of all that planning had no more use for the plan, or for her. She had taped the boxes herself. She had paid the deposit on the storage unit and driven the key home in her pocket.

Not yours to draw up. His.

So she asked instead. “When?”

“Slow.” He almost smiled. “Paycheck by paycheck. I’ll frame it myself when the season eases off. Earl put up half the outbuildings on this place with his own two hands, and I helped him raise the last of them. The house can wait on mine.”

“It’s a good plan,” she said, and meant the patience as much as the drawing. “The mud porch especially. You’d save Grandma’s floor and your own back in one stroke.”

“You think so.”

“I run a ranch office. I can spot a good system when a man draws me a clean one.”

That earned her the rest of the smile, the one he kept behind his teeth most days and spent on almost no one.