Page 14 of Finding Her Billionaire Cowboy Mismatch

This was the part where she should shut this down. Crushes were how it always started. A flutter and a flush, and then the slow handing-over of the keys, and you woke up one morning in an empty apartment with a roll of packing tape.

She had the shape of this memorized. She’d walked it before, eyes wide open, dead certain that time was the different one. The fluttering never allowed a warning to sound.

She was so deep in the wreck of her own good sense that she nearly missed the moment he caught her.

Across the creek, Stephen had gone still, a fence stretcher idle in one hand, and he was looking right at her looking at him.

Caught red-handed, cataloging the man the way a buyer eyes a horse at auction.

Heat flooded her face. She braced for the knowing look, the thing a handsome man trots out when he catches a woman staring.

It didn’t come.

What came instead undid her a little. Stephen ducked his head, and the corner of his mouth went up, shy as a boy. Color came up his own weathered neck.

Then he straightened, touched two fingers to his hat brim, and tipped it to her. Barely. Enough.

And Lord help her, Elise smiled back.

Her guard, the one she’d laid brick by brick out of the rubble of the last time, the one she’d sworn no man would ever get behind again, stood three-quarters down and sinking fast. She’d spent two years and one bad ending learning to want nothing she couldn’t supply herself. It had taken a man in a damp tee shirt and a shy tip of the hat the better part of one afternoon to pick the lock. The unfairness of it would have made her laugh, if any part of this were funny.

She picked up her clipboard, mostly to give her hands a job, and made herself turn toward her truck before she did anything sillier, such as wave.

There was no reason to stay. She had a desk full of Monday waiting and a long drive to get to it. A sensible woman would have been gone already, plan delivered, conscience clear.

She stayed another ten minutes anyway.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Stephen hauled the last of the leftover wire over to Hickory Hollow himself, on account of nobody else having the time and the spools being Bolton’s to return.

He found Elise Pollard at war with a gate.

The equipment-yard gate had been sagging on its hinge since who could say when, and she had both hands on the top rail, hauling it up and shoving it toward the latch post, and the thing wasn’t having it. The dropped hinge had lowered the gate a good two inches. She could lift, or she could push. She couldn’t do both and work the latch besides.

She’d jammed a flat rock under it to take the weight, and the rock had skidded out twice. A third go was loading up behind her eyes, the particular fury of a competent person beaten by a dumb object. Stephen had lost that fight to enough gates of his own to grant her the sympathy.

She didn’t ask for help. He’d have bet a week’s pay she wouldn’t.

So he didn’t offer.

He set the brake and pulled the spare hinge pin from the door pocket. A man who hauled enough gates learned to carry one.

Lifting the gate off her hands the way you’d take a tray from a tired waitress, he set the rail on his knee and drove the worn pin out with the new one in two taps of the wrench. The hinge rose, the gate swung true, and the latch caught clean as a key turning.

He stepped back and let it hang there, square and easy.

Elise swung it on the new pin and latched it, then swung it again, the way she tested everything.

“You carry a spare pin for somebody else’s gate.”

“I haul gates. Carry a pin or two for it.”

“Course you do.”

“Thank you,” she said.

That was all. No speech, no rush to paper over the silence the way most folks did. Stephen liked her the better for it than he had any right to.