Page 22 of Finding Her Billionaire Cowboy Mismatch

He walked her out to the truck after. The plans stayed on the table, weighted at one corner with the salt cellar so the dream would not roll itself shut overnight.

At the cab he held the door and did not hurry her up into it.

“Drive safe,” he said.

“I always do.”

“Reckon you do.” And there it was, plain as the graph paper between them. He counted on her. It did not spook him, and it did not turn her into a thing he would set on a shelf once the work was through.

He kissed her once, unhurried, and shut the door with care.

She drove the county road home with the window down and the radio off, and the dark kept easy company the whole way.

She made her bed the next morning before the coffee finished brewing, the way she always had, a promise to her future self. The made bed looked less lonely than it had a month ago.

Kelly stood at the office coffee pot with a face on.

Elise had that face cataloged. It was the one Kelly wore over Operation Sweetheart, and over the Great Shingle Crisis of June, the look of a woman whose plan had come in under budget and ahead of schedule.

“Morning,” Kelly sang out.

“Mornin’.”

“You look rested.”

“I am.”

Kelly poured two cups and slid one down the counter, far too pleased with the state of the world, humming under her breath at whatever she would not say out loud.

Elise picked up the cup. Black, the way she took it, since Kelly had it memorized by now.

She was happy. The questions about Annie and Kelly’s matchmaking scheme would keep. It could keep till never, for all the good it would do her. She’d decided it was going to be what it was going to be and she was okay with that.

She topped off Kelly’s cup before she left the pot, and let the older woman go on being pleased with herself.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The feed store had two men by the seed corn and a radio nobody was listening to.

Elise had a list in her hand and a deposit to make at the bank after, and she would have been in and out in ten minutes if one of the men had not said the name.

“Garrett land.”

She stopped at the end of the aisle, a sack of layer pellets braced against her hip.

“Old Earl’s section?” the second man said. “That whole stretch out past Terry Hill?”

“More than the section. The minerals under it. My brother-in-law leases his land out that way. Says the Garrett ground sits on the fattest play in the county and not one rig on it. Just sitting there.” He accented his point with a low whistle. “That inheritance is sitting on an untapped fortune.”

The other man said a thing about oil prices going where oil prices went. Elise was no longer in the aisle on account of layer pellets.

The radio kept on about a tractor auction in the next county. A boy stacked salt blocks by the door. The world ran its ordinary errand while the floor of hers tilted a few degrees and stayed there.

Dale rang her up at the counter and got misty over a truckload of alfalfa that had come in green and perfect, and she made the right sounds in the right places while the name past Terry Hill turned itself over in her. She signed the slip in her own neat hand. She carried the sacks to the truck and set them in the bed and did not remember doing either.

Garrett. Past Terry Hill. The minerals under it.

There are at least a hundred Garretts in Texas.