Page 25 of Finding Her Billionaire Cowboy Mismatch

“It was nice to see you, Stephen.”

Nice to see you.

That was the thing a person said to a man they’d run into outside the grocery store. Or to the fellow who’d put a new transmission in their truck. Not to the one who’d held your hand on a pond bank and shown you the only patch of Earth that ever meant a thing to him.

He’d driven her out to Earl’s land and let her sit in Earl’s mended chair under the live oak. And she stood on Annie’s steps with a folder against her hip and handed him the same light words, that it had been nice.

The question came up in him whole.

Are we through, Elise?

Four words. He could set them in the open air and have his answer, clean, the way a man would rather have it out that a post was rotten than keep leaning on it.

His mouth stayed shut.

He’d never been a man who asked. Asking put the answer in another person’s hand to do with as they pleased, and the quiet had always sat easier on him than that kind of risk. Earl never pried at a thing, and Earl had come out fine. A door left shut couldn’t be slammed in your face.

So he touched his hat brim and stepped back to give her room to go.

“Tell Annie I said hey,” he got out.

She nodded and went inside. The office door clapped shut behind her, and the sound of it carried clear across the yard to where he stood.

Stephen looked at that closed door a long moment.

The rope went around his arm, loop over loop, the motion older than thought. His grandfather had taught him that a man kept his hands moving when his head got loud. Earl had put his wife in the ground, and a few years on his son and the boy’s wife both, and never let the place slide over it. What would mend, you mended, and the rest you left to weather.

But Earl had taught him the other thing too, even if the old man never said it plain. A fence, a body could mend in silence. People were a different animal. And Stephen had no other language for the trouble, only the quiet, and the quiet was the very thing carrying her off.

Then he took up the rope and coiled it down to the end, and kept his eyes off the office.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Three days, Elise had carried the question, turning it over at her desk and again in the dark before sleep. She’d run it so many ways the edges had worn smooth. None of the ways made the drive out any easier.

The money was the least of it. She’d told herself so until it held. A man’s bank balance belonged to him, same as his faith or his politics. What sat heavy in her, what had kept her up three nights running, was the keeping itself. He’d let her draw his future on graph paper and never once let her stand inside the true size of his life.

Her car bumped over the cattle guard and the Garrett home place opened past the gate. The deep-porched house sat quiet under its live oak, Earl’s mended chair beneath the branches by the pond. A few weeks back the sight had warmed her clear through. Now she read it the way she read a ledger that wouldn’t balance, every line accounted for and the total still wrong.

Stephen was at the woodpile, splitting rounds the way he split them every evening, a man who could buy a hundred cords without blinking, swinging his own maul the way he’d worn the same boots eleven years. He buried the blade in the block when her tires hit the gravel.

She’d half hoped to find him gone to the far pastures, so she could turn the car around and call it fate. He was right there. She cut the engine and made her fingers let go of the wheel one at a time.

Then he crossed to meet her at the edge of the gravel. No smile. His eyes went over her face, a man set on reading whether she’d come to stay or come to go.

“Didn’t expect you,” he said.

“I figured.” Her keys bit into her palm. “I’ve got to ask you something, and I need it straight.”

His chin dipped, wary. “All right.”

“The Garrett land. The minerals under it.” She held his eyes and made herself hold them. “Is it true?”

A hush moved over him, the way the pond goes flat before the wind finds it. “Where’d that come from?”

“Does that matter? Is it true?”

He looked at the dirt between them, then at her. “It’s true. The section runs bigger than I let on. It’s very rich land.”