Finding Her Billionaire Cowboy Mismatch (Billionaire Ranchers #7)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

The phone had been ringing since before the coffee finished brewing, and Elise Pollard had answered every line without spilling a drop.

She tucked the receiver against her shoulder and pulled the feed vendor’s invoice up on her screen. “No, Dale, the order shipped Tuesday. I’ve got the confirmation right in front of me.” She scrolled. “Forty bags of the alfalfa blend, not the timothy. Your warehouse pulled the wrong pallet.”

A pause on the line. Dale hated being wrong almost as much as he hated paperwork.

“I’ll send you a photo of the bill of lading,” she added, sweet as pie. “Save us both the headache.”

She had the email drafted before he finished sputtering. Send. Done.

The second line had been blinking the whole while. She caught it on her way to the filing cabinet.

“Hickory Hollow, this is Elise.”

The farrier, running behind, wanting to shove his Thursday appointments down the week. She had the schedule rearranged in her head before he finished apologizing. Friday morning for him, the vaccination clinic bumped to the afternoon, so two crews wouldn’t end up elbow to elbow in the same barn.

“You’re a lifesaver, Elise.”

“I’m an administrative assistant,” she said. “The lifesaving is part of the job.”

She hung up and turned to the real problem.

Robert Shipley ran Hickory Hollow with a big heart and a calendar that resembled a crime scene. He double-booked himself the way other men forgot anniversaries, regularly and without remorse.

Elise opened his schedule. There it was. The cattle buyer from Abilene and the equipment rep, both penciled into the same morning slot by Robert’s own hopeful hand.

She slid the demo to the afternoon, rang the rep’s office, and had the man’s assistant thanking her for the trouble. The pileup came apart before it ever happened, Robert two doors down and none the wiser.

He ambled out a minute later with his coffee, reading glasses lost somewhere in hair that hadn’t met a comb.

“Elise. Tell me I didn’t promise the Abilene fella a look at the south barn.”

“You promised him the south barn.”

“The one that flooded?”

“That one.” She passed him the folder he’d come hunting before he could ask for it. “So I steered him to the north barn instead, which is dry and happens to be the one you wanted to show off anyhow. Far as he’s concerned, it was your notion all along.”

Robert aimed his coffee at her the way a man does when he’s landed on a point. “This, right here, is why I keep you on.”

“You say that every Tuesday.” She hadn’t lifted her eyes from the screen. “It’s Tuesday.”

“Is it.” He tucked the folder under his arm, cheerful and thoroughly handled, and wandered off the way he’d come, glasses riding his head where he’d never think to look.

Some men wanted to actually be helped. Managed, so to speak. Robert had the good grace to enjoy it.

That was the job. Not the part written in the description. The other part. The smoothing over of a hundred small disasters before anyone above her had to think about them.

She liked it that way. A spreadsheet never thanked you, but it never let you down either. Numbers stayed where you put them. Schedules held if you held them. Work asked for everything and returned a kind of steadiness, and that struck Elise as a fair trade.

Her own desk ran the same way. Pens in the drawer, never the cup. The inbox tray empty by closing, every paper it had held routed somewhere it belonged. A woman could steady herself on a system that never argued. Folks argued. They changed the terms on you when you weren’t looking.

Brandon had taught her the lesson, though he’d never meant to.

She’d had his coffee order memorized and the exact excuse that would spring him from his cousin’s wedding.

Two years she’d spent organizing the man’s whole life.

His bills, his dentist appointments. She’d built him a budget and a future, all color-coded, and he’d let her.

Right up until the promotion came through and the chaos cleared.

He took one look at the tidy life she’d arranged for him, and he walked out on the woman who’d arranged it.

He’d packed in an afternoon.

She’d organized that too. Found the boxes. Taped them herself.

Folks at church had called it a shame. Elise had called the storage unit and locked in a good monthly rate. A person handled what was in front of her, and what was in front of her was a one-bedroom that wanted emptying.

The lesson stuck. Love all you want, she’d told herself in that bare apartment with the tape gun in her hand. Just never let yourself need.

So she poured it into Hickory Hollow instead. Robert and Kelly had taken her in as one of their own, and family didn’t pack up and leave the moment the spreadsheet was finished. They handed you another one.

And she took it gladly, every time. Kelly’s charity luncheons, the vendor disputes nobody else had the patience to untangle. A whole ranch’s worth of small needs, and not one of them the kind that could leave her standing in an empty room with a roll of tape.

The door opened without a knock.

Kelly Shipley breezed in with a travel mug and the particular brightness of a woman who wanted something and hadn’t settled on how to ask for it.

She set the mug down on the one clear corner of Elise’s desk, the corner Elise kept clear on purpose and Kelly claimed every single visit anyway.

“You are a marvel,” Kelly said. “I called the feed store this morning, and Dale practically wept your name.”

“Dale weeps easy.” Elise held her eyes on the screen. “It’s the alfalfa. He gets emotional.”

Kelly laughed and settled into the chair across the desk, in no hurry to be anywhere. That was its own warning sign. A Shipley with time to kill was a Shipley with a plan.

“You work yourself half to death,” Kelly said, swirling whatever was in the mug. “I keep telling Robert he ought to hand you a raise and a week at the lake.”

“Robert hands me a raise, I’ll have to go find a whole new personality to match it.”

Kelly grinned. “Heaven forbid.”

Then came the pause. Elise had worked beside this family long enough to chart their weather, and a Shipley pause meant one of them was winding up to a question.

“So.” Kelly turned her mug a quarter turn. “The joint barbecue. With Bolton Farms. You’re coming this year, aren’t you?”

Elise’s fingers stopped on the keys.

The barbecue meant a whole afternoon with nothing to run. No phones to mind, no clipboard to hide behind. Only Elise, holding a paper plate, with people free to look right at her.

The barbecue. Every summer the two ranches threw in together, a great sprawling affair with too much brisket and not enough shade, and every summer Elise found a reason the office couldn’t spare her.

“Somebody has to mind the phones,” she said.

“The phones can go to voicemail for one Saturday. It won’t kill the ranch.”

“That’s how empires fall, Kelly.”

Elise glanced up, the next deflection already loaded. But Kelly had moved on, mug lifted, her attention drifting to the bulletin board behind Elise’s head as though the subject had never come up at all.

“Did the caterer ever confirm the count? Annie’s convinced we lowballed the headcount last year and ran short on rolls. You remember the roll incident.”

The roll incident had nearly ended a marriage. Elise let the subject turn. Chasing it would take more out of her than it was worth, and Kelly with an agenda was a force best left to spend itself.

“I’ll confirm the count Monday,” Elise said. “And pad it. We are not reliving the rolls.”

“That’s why we keep you.” Kelly scooped the mug back up, rose, and lingered a moment longer than the conversation called for, weighing whether to add one more thing. Then she patted the doorframe and breezed out the way she’d come, victorious over a war Elise had never agreed to fight.

The door swung shut, and the office went quiet again.

Elise sat with the odd shape of the conversation. That barbecue question, dropped and abandoned so fast. Kelly tracked grudges across decades and headcounts across years. A question she let go that easy was a question she meant to come around to.

That woman never abandons anything.

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.