Page 28 of Finding Her Billionaire Cowboy Mismatch

“Honey.” Annie steered her off by the elbow. “It’s a barbecue, not a payroll run. Go get your own bowl before this pack of wolves scarf it all up.”

The pudding earned every word of its reputation. Elise won the last clean scrape a half-step ahead of the last two in line, who reeled as though she’d picked their pockets.

“Twenty years I’ve waited on that pan,” Hollis moaned.

“You snooze, you lose.” She patted his arm. “I’ll let you smell the spoon.”

“Cold,” Hollis said. “Ice cold,” and wandered off to console himself with a third helping of brisket.

Dadgum, but the stuff was good. Cool and sweet, the vanilla wafers gone tender at the edges, and for one whole minute the sorry business of the past two weeks lifted clean off her shoulders.

Somebody set a speaker on the porch rail, and a fiddle tune spilled out over the yard, and that was the end of anybody sitting down. Kelly caught Elise by both hands and hauled her into the cleared grass where the women had a loose, laughing knot of a dance going, no partners and no rules, a dozen of them kicking up dust to a two-step nobody was doing right.

The fiddle slid into a faster tune and the knot of women whooped. Elise tipped her head up and gave the music her feet, and Kelly two-stepped past her with an invisible partner and dipped him with a flourish, dust rising gold in the lantern light around a dozen pairs of boots.

She let go of herself, spun Kelly and got spun in return and did a truly regrettable thing with her hips that sent the whole knot into shrieks. Her hair came loose of its pins. She left it. For one bright stretch she was not the woman who squared the napkins. She was a girl at a dance with grass stains coming and her face gone sore from grinning.

Kelly kept hollering for a conga line that never quite formed. Annie attempted a step her grandmother used to do and got the whole row going the wrong way at once. The thing was a beautiful disaster, and Elise was laughing too hard to mind that her careful evening had come apart at every seam.

At one point a toddler wandered into the women’s knot and Elise scooped him up and spun him till he howled with joy, then handed him off to his mama and curtsied to a smattering of applause. Her cheeks ached, her feet hurt in the good way, and she had not thought about a single ledger in a solid hour.

A hand closed over her elbow, warm and certain, and turned her out of the knot before her grin had time to drop.

Stephen stood there in a clean shirt with his hat in his hand. The sight of him stopped the music in her, even with the fiddle still sawing away.

“Dance with me,” he said. Not quite a question.

She gave him a smile with no give in it at all. “I’m good right where I am. Thank you.”

His hand came off her arm. The fiddle sawed on, and the dance kept spinning around them, and the two of them stood dead center of it not moving an inch.

“Then maybe we ought to talk,” he said, low, meant for her and nobody else.

She held his eyes a beat. Talking had a price, and she could read the bill from clear over here. But she’d never been a woman who walked off and left a thing half-done. She nodded once and set her bowl on the rail.

He led her out past the string lights, past the coolers and the little kids chasing fireflies, to the far edge of the yard where the music thinned to a thread and the dark came up cool off the pasture, and there he stopped and turned to face her.

She waited, and gave him nothing to read, no help, no easy place to set down the hard thing he’d hauled her out here to put. He’d find his footing or he wouldn’t.

He turned the brim of his hat in his hands. A long moment passed with nothing in it but crickets.

“I’ve been doing some thinking,” he said. “About us. How fast it all came on. And then the other matter came to light, and the two of them landed so close together in time.”

“Go on,” she said. Flat.

“You and me getting close. And you, learning what you learned about the land.” He worked the hat. “A man marks the timing of a thing, is all. I’m not thinking anything negative about you. Only saying I marked the time.”

“That’s a whole lot of words,” she said, “to dance around calling me a gold digger.”

“I never said that.” Quick. Too quick.

“You didn’t have to. Walking me out to a dark field to talk about my timing said it plain enough.” He had no answer for that. The hat went around in his hands another turn.

“Elise.” He took a step toward her. “I’m only being honest with you. That’s what this is.”

“No. Honest would have been telling me about the land on that tailgate.” She held her ground. “This is you hunting for a reason to be right about people.”

There it was, wrapped up careful so he’d never have to own its true shape. He’d lined the days up on his workbench the way he lined up everything, her warming to him on the one side and her learning the truth on the other, and he’d settled it that the one had bought the other.