Page 3 of Finding Her Billionaire Cowboy Mismatch

She filed it under Kelly being Kelly, and let it go.

The spreadsheet waited where she’d left it, every column squared, every total in its place. She padded the barbecue count by a dozen and bent over the numbers, the one corner of her life that stayed exactly where she put it.

A barbecue. With Bolton Farms. She had until Saturday to invent a reason the office couldn’t spare her, and Elise Pollard had never once come up short on reasons.

CHAPTER TWO

Stephen Garrett set the post and put out his hand, and Cody laid the tamping bar in it without being asked.

That was how the crew ran. A look, a tilt of the head, and the right tool turned up where Stephen wanted it. Three years he’d put in as a Bolton hand before Chad handed him the north line, head down and learning the country foot by foot. He’d run the crew for three years since, and built the thing the only way he knew would work. He showed up first, worked just as hard as his men, and was the last one to leave at the end of the day.

Words didn’t run the northern line. Work did.

They moved down the fence in the rhythm Stephen favored, steady and unhurried, splicing wire and reseating the posts the spring thaw had heaved loose. He called out little. “Brace there.” “Next one’s rotted clean through.” The men took care of the rest. Wes, barely a month on the crew, had quit glancing to the older hands for the nod of approval and started glancing to Stephen instead. That was its own kind of promotion, and the boy had earned it.

Wes wrestled a clip and lost the fight. “How do you make it look so easy?”

“Don’t fight it.” Stephen seated the clip in one motion. “Let the wire come to you. It’ll meet you halfway if you give it the room.”

Wes tried again. The clip snugged home clean.

“Huh.” The boy looked pleased with himself.

“Now do four hundred more.”

A grin cracked across Wes’s face, and he bent to it.

The worst of the postholes that morning struck a seam of caliche hard as a skillet. Stephen took that one. He always took that one. A crew lead who pointed at the bad ground and stepped wide of it didn’t lead anything for long.

Partway down the line, Maddox rode out from the home place and drew rein at the fence.

“Chad’s asking after the east gate. Hanging crooked since the storm.”

“I’ll have it rehung Friday.”

“Figured that’s what you’d say.” Maddox touched his hat and rode off, and the crew bent to the line again.

When they broke to water the horses, Stephen crossed the pasture to the truck for the wire stretcher.

The envelope was on the dash, where it had ridden for nine days. County return address, his name in the little window. He’d opened enough of those over the years to guess the rest without slitting this one. Property taxes on the inheritance, due, and climbing the way they climbed every year now that the new highway ran so near his back line.

He left it where it lay.

Earl Garrett had walked that home section every evening of his life, hands clasped behind him, reading the grass the way other men read the paper. He’d left Stephen the home place with its complete acreage and one instruction, given the winter before he passed. Keep it in Garrett hands, son. Don’t sell, and don’t let anybody buy you cheap.

Stephen meant to honor every word of it. The taxes he’d cover the way he covered everything, out of his own workman’s income, even if it meant a lean winter and a longer list of repairs he’d put off. A crew lead’s wages didn’t leave much slack, so he made the slack himself, the way his grandfather always had.

He’d been raised by a man who wore the same boots eleven years and called any dollar he hadn’t earned a loan against his own backbone. A man who leaned didn’t own a thing. He only rented it from whoever propped him up.

That was the one debt Stephen refused to carry.

What he had, he had in sweat. He’d set every straight run of fence on the property himself and grubbed the cedar out of the south pasture by hand. A bank couldn’t hand a man that, and neither could luck. You earned the right to call a place yours post by post, or you didn’t call it yours at all.

The crew coiled the last of the wire with the loose-jointed ease of men who’d put in a hard day and done it right. Cody slung his gloves over one shoulder.

“Burgers at the Wagon Wheel, boss. Whole crew’s headed over. Come on, it’s Wes’s first month. We’re buying.”

“Y’all earned it.” Stephen pushed his hat up. “Next time.”