Page 16 of Finding Her Billionaire Cowboy Mismatch

“Let ‘em.” The word came easier than he meant it.

She studied him a beat, and whatever she turned up there, she didn’t look away from it.

Off at the edge of things, two figures had drifted onto the Hickory Hollow porch and gone conspicuously busy with nothing at all.

He didn’t have to look straight at them to place who they were. Annie’s laugh carried across the yard. Kelly’s bright head swung their way and swung off again a touch too quick.

Not today.

Whatever the pair were angling to add to their collection, Stephen wasn’t of a mind to hand it over. He shifted on the tailgate, easy, no fuss in it, and set his shoulder between the porch and Elise, so anybody squinting from that distance got a view of flannel to study and not one thing more.

He’d grown up the object of a small town’s idle talk, the orphan Earl Garrett took in, and he’d learned young to give the nosy a closed face and an empty yard to chew on. The skill returned quick.

Some matters were between two people and the open afternoon, and wanted no audience.

Elise caught the move. Of course she did. The woman caught everything.

“Subtle,” she said.

“Never claimed to be.”

“They’ve been at this a while now.” Not quite a question.

“Reckon so.”

“Does it bother you?”

He weighed it. The honest answer and the careful one weren’t the same, and she’d earned the honest one.

“Not the part that’s you,” he said.

She didn’t answer with words. She let it settle there between them, warm as the long afternoon, and for a good while neither one moved to end it.

He could count on one hand the people he’d let this near the truth of him. Most he’d walled off out of habit, before they got close enough to matter. This one had walked up to the wall, leaned against it, and started talking, and he’d handed her bricks without once meaning to.

Stephen had spent the whole of his life keeping a careful foot of daylight between himself and the wanting of things. The gap on that tailgate had narrowed to a hand’s width, and he hadn’t closed it on purpose, and he was in no hurry at all to set it right.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Stephen Garrett called on a Tuesday, which was its own small event, since the man treated telephones the way other folks treated wasp nests.

“Pollard,” she answered, out of office habit.

“It’s Stephen.” A pause, the kind she’d come to read as him lining up his words. “Was thinking you might want to get a coffee. In town. Sometime.”

Elise opened her mouth to recite the reasons she shouldn’t.

“Sure,” she said instead. “Saturday.”

The reasons could form a committee and file a grievance later.

“Not a date,” he added, quick. “Just coffee.”

“Two people and two cups,” she said. “I expect I’ll survive it.”

And that, somehow, was that.

She set the phone down and stared at it a moment, as though it might explain itself. She had said yes. Out loud. To coffee. With the same cowboy she’d spent a whole supper running down to Kelly not three weeks gone. Her own consistency had filed for divorce.