Page 9 of Finding Her Billionaire Cowboy Mismatch

“None of that,” she told the empty room, and her own voice steadied her the way it always had.

She filled a big pot with water and put it on the stove to boil.

A fistful of salt went in after, then the good bronze-cut pasta she saved for the nights dinner ought to be a kindness instead of a chore. She talked herself through it the way she’d talk a panicking bride down off a rained-out reception. You are fine. You’ve got a full life and garlic that needs chopping. Loneliness was weather. It rolled in, and given time it rolled on out, and the trick was to keep stirring till it did.

She chopped the garlic finely, the way her mother had shown her, the blade rocking with a sound she could have made in her sleep. There was a particular mercy in a chore the hands had memorized. Her mind could wander off anywhere it pleased, and supper still got made.

The garlic hit the hot oil and the kitchen turned fragrant, and her shoulders relaxed.

She ate at her dining room table, using her mother’s plain white plates, in the warm lamplight of a home that was nobody’s doing but her own. She was proud of what she’d made for herself. But when she was in her curated home, she was alone. The part she didn’t want to admit was right in front of her.

And if a quiet cowboy wandered through her mind somewhere between the pasta and the dishes, she chalked it up to a long hectic week. But she couldn’t wash his image away like she washed the dinner dishes.

CHAPTER FIVE

The supply run came down to Stephen the way most things did at Bolton Farms. Sideways, and through Annie.

He was coiling lead ropes outside the tack room when her voice carried out the office window, bright and certain.

“…and Stephen ought to be the one to go. He’s levelheaded. He won’t let the Hickory Hollow folks talk us into the dear stuff.”

Chad’s answer came low, dry as a cob. “Quit running my crew, woman. I’ll send who I send.”

“I’m only saying.”

“You’re only always saying.”

Stephen hung the ropes on their pegs and made nothing of it. Annie had a notion about every soul inside the fence and half the ones outside it. A man could go gray chasing the why of what she said.

By week’s end Chad sent who he sent. He sent Stephen.

The joint order was a twice-a-year chore, two ranches splitting a flatbed of the same goods to spare the freight, one body from each outfit to sort whose was whose. Stephen pulled into the feed store lot early and put the trailer against the dock in one clean cut.

The Hickory Hollow rep stood already inside, bent over a clipboard, laying down the law to a stock boy who looked grateful for the counter between them.

He placed the voice before he placed the face.

Elise Pollard. The prickly one from the barbecue, the one who’d carved up his layout and kept her chin high the whole time she did it.

Of course it was her.

He squared his shoulders and let his grandfather have a word in his ear. Earl Garrett had a saying for every fix a man could land in, and the one for this came up quick. Make the most of where you’re set down, son. The Lord seldom asks your druthers.

This was going to be a job of work, making a good day out of an afternoon chained to that clipboard. But he’d give it an honest go. He owed Earl that much.

“Garrett.” She’d clocked him without lifting her eyes from the page. “Bolton’s half is the left column. Keep your stock off my pallets and we’ll be done by supper.”

“Afternoon to you too.”

“It’s nearly evening.”

“Is it.” He set his gloves on the counter. “Where do you want to start.”

She wanted every sack counted and checked against the invoice before a one of them left the dock. He wanted to load by weight and by drop, heavy on the bottom, Bolton’s gear on the tailgate end for the shorter haul. Two right ways to do one job, and neither of them built to bend.

“You load before we verify the count,” she said, “and when the tally comes up short, you’ll be unstacking the whole rig on the shoulder of the highway.”

“I load light to heavy and we count as it goes. Nothing leaves this dock I haven’t laid hands on.”