Page 20 of Finding Her Billionaire Cowboy Mismatch

He did it unhurried, giving her every chance to draw away, the way you’d offer a palm to a horse that had cause not to trust hands. She didn’t draw away. Her fingers came into his, warm and sure, and closed.

That was the whole of it for a moment. Two people and a pond and a dead man’s chair, and her hand in his as though it had always belonged there.

Then she turned to him, and he turned to her, and there wasn’t a thing left to do about it.

He kissed her.

It was soft and unhurried and a long while coming. Her free hand found the front of his shirt and held on. He cupped her jaw as gentle as he’d handle a day-old foal, and she leaned in instead of away, and the wanting he’d kept on a short rope his whole grown life let out a little slack.

When they parted, he kept his brow near hers and said nothing, on account of there being no words that wouldn’t cheapen it.

“Well,” she said.

“Um, yeah,” he said.

She leaned her head against his shoulder, and he stood there in the going light holding a woman at his grandfather’s pond, and the strangeness and the rightness of it kept him quiet a good long while. He’d half expected to want to bolt, the way he always wanted to bolt when a thing got close enough to lose. The want to bolt didn’t come. What came was a settledness, rare as rain in August, the sense of a man planted exactly where he was meant to stand.

Stephen had spent his whole life with his future nailed flat and square. The land and the work and the promise, the whole of it walked alone because that was the only way he trusted it done. He’d called that certainty. Standing here with Elise’s hand in his, he had another word for it. A cage.

For the space of one kiss on a pond bank, the bars had swung open.

The future wasn’t a thing already settled and waiting on him to grind it out. It was a door standing open, a woman on the other side of it, and a whole unmapped country past her shoulder. He didn’t have it mapped. He had property he could walk blind and a stack of bills he couldn’t, and somewhere in the gap between those two facts sat every reason this was a fool thing to want.

He’d spent years certain a woman with her life squared would take one look at his and keep driving. The argument he’d built long ago and polished till it shone, every reason a sensible woman would steer clear. Standing on the bank with her shoulder warm against his, the argument had nothing left to say for itself. She’d come, and stayed, and let his grandfather’s pond be enough, and maybe she’d let him be enough too.

Not one of the reasons could reach him here. The pond didn’t care about his bank balance, and neither, near as he could tell, did she.

That wanting was new. It scared him some. He let it stand anyway.

CHAPTER TEN

The teasing started at the feed shed.

Hollis got to her before she had the clipboard out of the truck, leaning on the doorframe with the grin of a man who had saved it up all morning.

“Word is you’ve been keeping company with a Bolton man,” he said.

“I keep company with a clipboard,” Elise said. “Move.”

He moved. He whistled, though, the whole time she counted the mineral tubs, which told her the news had crossed both ranches and unpacked its bags for the season.

By afternoon Cody had it. So did Wes, and once Wes got hold of a thing he carried it straight to Midge, and Midge handed it to anybody who came through the Bolton kitchen hungry. Annie did the most damage, and she did it kindly. She reported that Stephen had shaved twice in one week, which traveled to the caterer, then to her sister at the bank, who said it to Elise’s face while counting out the ranch deposit. By the weekend the woman at the hardware counter asked after “her cowboy” as though Elise had ordered him out of a catalog.

Elise had spent years as the one who ran other people’s information. Being the information was a different chair to sit in.

She did not hate it as much as she had braced to.

Robert was the worst of them, and he never said a word.

She set the Henderson invoice and the Abilene buyer’s callback slip on his desk, and he took them over the top of his reading glasses with a look that had a whole paragraph in it.

“Don’t,” she said.

“I didn’t say a thing.”

“You were going to.”

“I was going to ask whether the buyer wants the spring lot or the fall.” He laid the slip down with great care. “Spring, I’d guess. That’s why I keep you.”