Page 26 of Finding Her Billionaire Cowboy Mismatch

He turned a palm up, as though the whole of it weighed nothing. “It’s not the thing you’re building it into. Dirt and a stack of paper in a kitchen drawer. There’s not a rig within forty miles of the place. No money coming out, not the way you mean. Numbers on a deed, nothing more.”

She’d carried the maybe for three days, and the yes should have closed the matter. It only pulled the floor out from under her boots.

“That’s not the part that bothers me.” Her voice ran steadier than her hands had any right to make it. “You had a hundred openings. Out on the pond bank. The night you spread those house plans on the table and swore you’d frame every room yourself, wage by wage, as though a dollar was the dearest thing you owned.” She made her chin stay level. “Why keep it from me?”

His jaw set hard. He dragged a hand down the back of his neck and looked off toward the pond and the empty chair, anywhere that wasn’t her face.

“People change once it gets out,” he said. “I’ve been through it more than once. The minute word gets out about a potential windfall, a person quits talking to the man and turns to the land instead. They go careful with you. Or they go warm all at once, warm as a fresh baked pie. Either way you’ve stopped being a fellow to them. You’re a sum they’re adding up in their head.” He set a hand on the chopping block. “I learned to keep my own counsel and let folks take me for a hired hand who sews up the holes his gloves to keep from spending money on a new pair. It’s a quieter way to live.”

“I changed your tire in the rain and argued you off your own fool system,” she said. “I sat in your grandad’s chair and never said one word about fixing his porch. Where in any of that did I come at you with a calculator?”

Part of her wanted to grant him the wound. People did go strange around money and the men who had it. Kelly’s eyes went bright over a good quarter, Robert’s went flat over a bad one. He wasn’t wrong that money moved folks. About her, though, he was dead wrong.

There it was, the whole shape of it. He’d taken her to the one piece of ground that meant the most to him and braced himself for her to turn into everybody else.

Her insecurities rose to the top. Again.

“You’d cast me as the type who’d run the numbers on you,” she said. The calm in her own voice startled her. “After I told you about Brandon, and you told me about Earl. You settled it before you ever gave me the chance to be who I really am.”

He took the names the way a man takes cold rain, head down, shoulders set. It cost him, and she read it in the way he held himself. Whatever it was, it stayed locked behind his teeth.

He opened his mouth, but nothing came that could help him out here. He shut it again and stood there, broad and quiet.

This was the kind of uncomfortable silence that proved the shift away from balance and trust.

She’d stood in this exact quiet before, and that night she’d made herself a promise. Never be that vulnerable again. And here she was, three years on, having gone and done the one thing she swore off.

She waited for him to cross the gravel and lay that rough hand over hers, to let her know that things between them were good. The old Elise would have forced him to make a declaration. She’d have drawn the terms of their peace treaty and done the hard work so he would never have to. Her fingers itched to do it now, to mend their broken relationship so neither of them had to stand in the wreck of it.

She kept her hands at her sides. She’d made her adult life be about doing all the work and accepting the full responsibility. She was taking care of herself by not taking charge.

So she did it in an orderly fashion. She kept the part of herself she knew she was good at. She told him she ought to get going, that Robert had the Abilene man ringing that afternoon, that she’d catch him later. The words came out smooth and awful.

He nodded once. Of course he did. She’d handed him a clean way out and he was gentleman enough, or coward enough, to take it without a fight.

She got into her car. He went to his truck, to the door he had to wrench on when it stuck in its frame. Two engines turned over in the same gravel yard. At the county road she swung left, toward town and the payroll waiting and her clean apartment with its clean white dishes. His truck pulled out behind her and went right, off toward a place she had no name for.

In the mirror the home place shrank small, the porch and the oak and the chair under it, the whole picture she’d let herself draw a future onto. She’d asked her question and gotten her answer, both of them, the one he said out loud and the one his silence gave underneath. His words she could live with. The silence was the trouble.

She didn’t cry. She’d gotten good at that, too, somewhere in the years between the storage unit and now. The road went to water once, and she blinked it clear and held the wheel and took the long way home, the way that gave her more road to do it on.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Stephen worked the post-hole digger till his shoulders burned, and the burn settled nothing.

He’d been right. Tell yourself something often enough and it sets up as firm as a corner post. Keeping the land ownership to himself had been the only sane play. People wanted something once they got wind of it. They always had.

He’d made one naïve mistake, though. The land records were available as public record. It had been short-sighted to think that nobody would find out. And all it took was some gossip and a records search for Elise to find out he’d been keeping a big secret from her. No matter his motive, this had broken her trust in him.

By his own long-held rules he ought to have rested easier. His defenses were up again, and he was protecting himself the way he was comfortable doing. A man couldn’t be made a fool of if he didn’t allow it.

The day she found out, did it turn me into a number to her?

He hated the question. It dishonored her, and it dishonored the woman who’d changed a tire in the rain and never once angled for a thing he had. She’d come at him hot about hiding the truth, not the holdings.

The question stayed anyhow. A suspicion needed no proof, only a man willing to keep searching.

Annie rode out to the fence line near dinnertime, Wes and Maddox trailing her truck on horseback and breaking off toward the south gap. She climbed down and picked her way across the cut grass to where he stood with the coil of wire.