Page 32 of Finding Her Billionaire Cowboy Mismatch

Stephen took the bearing knowing a man thought straighter with his hands full. For a while the two of them worked the old baler, in the good quiet of men who’d said what needed to be said. Earl would have taken to Chad, he reckoned. Two men who’d sooner hand you a hard truth and work than a shoulder to cry on. It was the only brand of comfort Stephen had ever trusted, and Chad had given it without being asked twice.

The next move was slowly forming in his mind, but it would need to be refined and he was all in for that.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The numbers on Elise’s screen had stopped meaning anything an hour ago. She’d run the same payroll line three times and gotten three answers, and not one of them was the problem. The trouble sat where it had sat for two weeks now, a dull stone she carried everywhere and could not set down.

She’d had the hardest time keeping her mind off of Stephen and that was hard to admit. She thought she’d be able to compartmentalize a little better, but time had made it worse instead of better.

She looked up to clear her head, and Kelly stood in the doorway of the office, gone quiet in a way she didn’t wear often. How long she’d been there, Elise couldn’t have said.

Kelly crossed the room and perched on the corner of the desk the way she did when she meant to stay a while. “You’ve been somewhere else all morning, hon. You okay?”

Elise opened her mouth to give the easy answer, the one that kept the line moving. It wouldn’t come. She shook her head instead.

“No,” she said. “I’m not. Not the way folks mean when they ask.”

Kelly didn’t fill the quiet with anything. She just waited, which was its own kindness, and after a moment the truth came up out of Elise on its own. “I’m in love with him. There, I’ve said it out loud.” The words trembled on the way out and then steadied. “I’m in love with Stephen Garrett, and I walked away from him in a dark field, and I’d do it again tomorrow.”

“I don’t regret standing up for myself. A woman who lets a man think the worst of her and stays is a woman who’ll be thinking small of herself by Christmas. I did the right thing.” Her voice cracked on the last of it. “But mercy, Kelly, I miss him something fierce.”

Kelly reached over and squeezed her wrist, hard, the grip of a friend who’d carry a thing for you if she could. “Honey,” she said, and then her gaze went past Elise’s shoulder to the open doorway, and whatever she’d meant to say changed in her mouth. A startled gladness came over her face. “Well. Would you look at that.”

Elise was confused at the sudden turn in the conversation.

“You’ve got a visitor.” Kelly slid off the desk and was gone out the side door before Elise could ask her not to be. She didn’t look behind her, but Elise caught the grin on her as she went.

Elise turned in her chair. Stephen stood in the doorway with his hat in one hand and a manila folder in the other. No flowers, no big armful of roses to say with petals what he hadn’t the spine to say with his mouth. Just the folder, and that quiet way he had of holding himself, and his eyes on her as though she were the one fixed thing in a moving world.

She couldn’t believe her eyes. Just seeing him in her doorway made the time apart feel longer than it had a few minutes ago.

“Elise,” he said. “I drove a long way to… to tell you something. I know words aren’t my strong point but I’d be obliged if you’d let me get it out before you throw me out.”

She should have said no. The smart thing, the safe thing, was to point him at the door he’d come in by. Instead she folded her hands on the desk to keep them still and said, “Say it, then.”

He stepped in and set the folder on the desk between them, and he didn’t sit. A man with a thing to prove stays on his feet. “Open it,” he said.

She did. Inside was no letter, no plea. A legal document, a few pages thick, the top sheet dense with an oil company’s name and a description of the acreage, his plain scrawling signature at the bottom. It took her a moment to make sense of what she held. A lease. He’d signed a lease on a piece of the Garrett land, and what was under it, to the very kind of company he’d been avoiding.

She looked up at him, half a protest already forming. “Stephen.”

“Let me,” he said, gentle, and turned his hat once in his hands. “I’m not showing you this to impress you with what I’ve got. I know now that money’s the last thing you’ve been after.”

“Okay. Thanks, I guess.”

He faltered but continued. “If a fat bank account had been the road to your heart, you’d have found it long before you ever met me.”

“Maybe.”

“I’m showing you because I’m done hiding behind that land.” His voice was low and even and it didn’t waver. “I’ve let people take me for a man with nothing, because nobody comes for what you don’t have.”

“I get that,” she said, starting to understand a little more about what was going on. She was willing to give him time to tell her the changes he’d made. She owed that to them both.

“I signed the lease because you showed me what it takes to quit being afraid.” He set his hat down on the desk, the way a man lays down a shield.

“I didn’t mean to push you into anything.” She frowned, worried that she’d tried to take control of something she had no business getting involved in.

“No. You never pushed me an inch. The night we, um… broke up…” His voice cracked slightly, but his gaze didn’t waver. “You chose your dignity over an easy peace with me. I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.”