Page 23 of Finding Her Billionaire Cowboy Mismatch

She told herself that twice on the drive and did not believe it the once.

The county rolled past the window the way it always did, the fence lines and the turnoff to the Mercer place, and none of it sat the same as it had that morning. A whole secret had been riding these roads the entire time, and the man who kissed her on a pond bank and called the quiet between them the best part had never breathed a word of it.

Her desk had a way of settling her. She had the county appraisal district pulled up before she had the deposit logged, before she had any earthly business in it, and she typed the name into the search box the way she ran every other thing in her life, one field at a time.

Garrett, Earl R. Garrett, Stephen.

The records loaded in plain gray rows, no drama to them at all. Acreage in one column. Valuations in the next.

She read the acreage twice. Then she reached for the calculator she kept for invoices and added the parcels, because the figure on the screen ran past what her head would hold on its own.

Thousands of acres. Not the modest home place he had let her take for the whole of it. Thousands, in Earl’s name and now in his, a block of ground a person could lose a whole day driving across.

And under all of it, the part the men at the store had chewed on. The mineral estate. A valuation that ran the row clean off the edge of the screen.

She did what she always did with a figure she distrusted, and checked it against a second source. The clerk’s deed index told the same story in older ink, parcel on parcel deeded down from Earl to the grandson he raised. No error to chase. No decimal out of its column. The records were tidy, and they were cruel in how tidy they were.

Other women might have let it lie. Elise had never once let a thing lie. Show her a number that did not sit right and she would run it through every ledger in the county till it confessed. The talent had made her the woman three bosses could not do without. Tonight it had taken the one good secret she had not gone digging for and laid it bare on her desk in gray rows.

She set the calculator down and let the cursor blink.

The man packed his own lunch. Cheese and bread in waxed paper, an apple gone soft by noon. He wore the same boots into what looked like at least their twelfth winter. He drove a work truck with a door that stuck in the cold and a bench seat worn through to the foam. He had told her, plain as the day, that he would frame his grandmother’s addition himself, pay day by pay day, when the season let up.

He had the money to hire the whole thing built tomorrow, ten times over, and pay it out in cash.

She had bragged on him to Kelly. The thrifty cowboy who darned his own work gloves and split his own firewood. She had called it character, a man with nothing to prove and no use for show.

And every lean, careful thing of it had been a choice, not a need. He could have cleared his whole life with a single signature. He had picked the worn boots and the wage-by-wage patience instead, and let the county and her right along with it take the going-without for the truth of him.

She put both hands flat on the desk. The anger came in slow, and from an odd corner, and not at the money. The money was his. A man could sit on a fortune and pack a cheese sandwich and answer to no one for it.

It was the not telling.

They had sat on his tailgate and traded the true things. She had given him Brandon, the taped boxes, the worst of herself. Called it even.

And he had handed her two hundred acres and a dog named Pete and left the rest of the map folded in his pocket.

There would be a reason. Had to be. Men kept money quiet for reasons that made good sense to them. Pride, or a long memory of folks who turned friendly the minute they caught the smell of it. A reason was not the same as getting the information from his own mouth.

She had spent her life as the one people handed their messes to and trusted with the keys. She balanced Robert’s books and screened his calls and rented her own ex a storage unit, for Pete’s sake.

Stephen had let her hold his grandfather and his grief and a grave under the live oak, and kept the vault door shut.

Brandon had used her for everything he needed. Stephen had not used her for one single thing. He had let her up to his door and not a step past, and a person could starve on a porch that nice.

What does a woman have to be, to get a man to tell her what was really going on?

Her ex had brought out her anger and made her doubt everything. She questioned everyone—including herself and her own instincts.

She would not drive out to Bolton and throw a county’s worth of acres in his face. That was not her way, and a part of her was not ready to be that angry at him yet.

She wanted, more than she wanted the answer, to be the woman that man would trust with the truth of him. That was the whole trouble of it. The hurt and the wanting had set up housekeeping in one room, and neither showed a sign of leaving.

She squared the deposit slips and logged the numbers she had come in to log, her hands running the familiar columns while the rest of her sat with the one that would not balance.

She had thought a great many things lately. Chief among them, that she was done being the woman who ran a man’s life from the outside while he kept the inside under lock.

CHAPTER TWELVE