Page 7 of Finding Her Billionaire Cowboy Mismatch

Home was a dozen quiet miles with the windows down and the radio off, the night air cool off the river bottoms and the road hers alone clear to the turnoff.

And if a face rode along with her down that dark stretch of county road, it wasn’t Kelly’s, and it wasn’t the seating chart’s.

It was a rude cowboy who’d handed her three words and a correction and hadn’t troubled himself with a fourth.

Except he’d slid her the rolls before she’d asked. He’d built a barbecue that ran slick as a clock and let her tear into it without lifting his voice. A rude man would have let her reach for those rolls instead of nudging them over, and corrected her after with relish. This one hadn’t.

She didn’t care for the math on that.

All evening she’d been certain she had the man pegged, and the pegs kept slipping loose. Quiet wasn’t the same creature as empty. She’d taken the one for the other because it asked less of her, and a woman who prided herself on reading folks at a glance had read this one twice and come away with two different men.

Stephen Garrett. She’d kept the name without meaning to, and that was the most aggravating part of the whole night.

CHAPTER FOUR

Elise had run the barbecue through her head eleven times since Saturday, and it came out the same on every pass.

She’d been set up.

Not romanced. Set up, the way you’d set a mousetrap, with a tidy square of cheese and a spring you never spotted till it had you by the tail.

The cheese had a name. Stephen Garrett. She didn’t care for cheese, and she cared less for being handled.

By Monday she’d built a whole case, and she was halfway through arguing it to the empty office when the door swung open and the accomplice strolled in.

“Morning, sunshine.” Kelly set a to-go cup on the clear corner of the desk and dropped into the chair across from her. “You ducked out of the barbecue early. I turned around and you were gone.”

“Funny thing about that.”

“What thing?”

“The seating chart.” Elise folded her hands on the desk, calm as a banker about to deny a loan. “Walk me through it again. The part about balancing the tables.”

Kelly’s face went smooth and bright, the look of a woman with nothing in the world to hide and decades of practice hiding it.

“I told you. You had all the talkers bunched on one end.”

“You sat me next to the one man in three counties who’s never strung four words together on purpose. Balancing, my foot. That’s stacking the deck.”

“Stephen?” Kelly pressed a hand to her chest. “I sat you by Stephen because he’s quiet and you’re not, and I figured you’d carry the table. A hostess thinks about flow.”

“Is that what we’re calling it.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Kelly.” Elise leaned in. “I built that chart and I scrutinized every name and position. Then when I reviewed it to make sure it still made sense, I was now seated right next to a bachelor. You don’t reshuffle two hundred people for flow. You do it to make a point.”

Kelly sipped her coffee, unbothered. “You’re awfully suspicious for a woman nobody’s chasing.”

“I’m suspicious because I can read a spreadsheet, and you’re a spreadsheet with a pony tail.”

A laugh got away from Kelly before she could catch it. Then she rearranged her face back into innocence.

“You wound me,” she said, not wounded in the least.

“I keep your books and I could price that wound to the penny.” Elise rolled her chair an inch.

“You’re no fun when you’re right.”