Page 19 of Finding Her Billionaire Cowboy Mismatch

She had filing to do, a coffee to look forward to, and a fortress she was, after two years of bolting it shut, halfway to letting somebody knock at.

If a small voice at the back of her mind went on murmuring those two words, well. She had years of practice ignoring small voices. She’d built a whole life on it.

CHAPTER NINE

Stephen had never brought a soul out to the home place that wasn’t blood or hired.

It wasn’t a rule he’d set down in words. It was true the way the creek ran south and the gate stuck in wet weather. His grandmother had walked this ground, and his mother as a girl before the wreck took both his folks, and Earl every day of eighty-one years. The home section was thick with Garretts who weren’t there anymore. A man kept it to himself, or he risked somebody tracking mud through it.

He brought Elise.

He hadn’t planned to. He’d meant to drop her at her door after the drive and call it a night. But the turnoff came up on the county road, and his hands took the wheel left before his head got a vote, and then they were rattling up the caliche two-track with the dust rising behind them.

“This is it,” he said, and the words came out thin for the home place and the whole of a man’s heart. “Garrett ground.”

He cut the engine and braced for the thing people did. The polite noises, the helpful eye that totted up what a place wanted. His last boss before Bolton had toured the home section once and spent the entire walk telling Stephen where to set a metal building and how to lease the bottoms for hunting.

Elise did none of it.

She got out of the truck, walked a few steps into the grass, and stopped. Hands in her jacket pockets. Chin up. She took the place in the way you’d take in weather rolling across a far ridge, no comment, no plan to improve a single inch of it. She let it be what it was.

And that undid him.

He’d braced his whole life for the appraising look, the one that measured a thing by what it lacked. Teachers had given it to him, and bankers, and one or two women, the quiet arithmetic of folks totting up where he came up short. Elise looked at his grandfather’s land and added nothing, subtracted nothing. She let it be enough, and being enough was a thing nobody had offered Stephen Garrett in a long, long while.

He’d shown the place to nobody. Not the two or three women before her who hadn’t lasted past a season, nor the friends he held at arm’s length on purpose. The home section was the one thing he’d never put up for another person’s verdict, because a verdict was a crack, and a crack was where the leaving started. He’d learned that early and kept it close.

“Come on,” he said, once his voice would hold. “Want to show you a spot.”

They walked out across the field, through grass gone gold and hip-high, whispering where the wind moved through it. He talked as they went, more than he had in months. The low spot that flooded come spring. The fence line he and Earl had restrung the summer he turned fifteen. Elise put a question in here and there, good ones, the questions of a body who was listening and not waiting her turn to talk.

“You love it,” she said. Not surprised. Naming it.

“Only thing I ever have.” The words were out before he weighed them. “Land doesn’t ask you to be anything but steady. I can do steady.”

“You can do a sight more than steady, Stephen Garrett.”

He had no answer for that, so he kept walking, and his ears went hot.

The pond sat in a low fold of the land, a half-acre of still water ringed with cattail and one big live oak that had been old when Earl was young. A folding lawn chair stood under the oak, weathered gray, one armrest mended with baling wire.

“That was his chair. Grandad’s. He’d come down here most evenings with his journal and sit a spell. Said a man thought clearer with water in front of him.” Stephen looked at the empty chair, four years empty now. “Wrote everything in that book. Rainfall and calving dates, the price of feed the year it near broke him. Operations, he called it. But it was him on those pages. Every worry he had, every plan, set down where the water could hold it for him.”

He had sat at his grandfather’s boot more evenings than he could count, skipping rocks while the old man scratched in the journal and the bullfrogs tuned up. Earl wasn’t one for talk. But every so often he’d say a thing worth keeping, low, half to the water, and Stephen had carried those few sentences his whole life, rationed out the way you’d ration matches a long way from home.

“You still have it,” she said. Not a question.

“On my desk. I read a page some nights, when the house goes quiet. Closest I get to having the old man back.”

Elise didn’t reach for the easy thing, the I’m-sorry-for-your-loss most folks handed over to fill the hole. She let the old man have his silence, and the pond have its.

“He’d have run me off the place,” she said at last, light. “A woman with a clipboard, telling him his business.”

“He’d have liked you.” Stephen surprised himself with how sure it came. “Took him a year to warm to anybody. You’d have done it in an afternoon.”

She didn’t fill the quiet that followed. She let it be, same as she’d let the land be, and stood beside him while the evening settled gold on the water.

Stephen reached for her hand.