Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
The fence along the line between Bolton and Hickory Hollow had given out in three places over the winter, and somebody had to ride out and tell two crews how to mend it.
That somebody, it turned out, was Elise.
“You want me to coordinate a fence crew.” She set down her pen and gave Annie Bolton the flat look she saved for people inventing work. “I run an office. Wire isn’t my department.”
“You won’t string a thing. You’ll plan it.
” Annie had planted herself in the visitor’s chair as though she owned the lease on it, which, by marriage, she half did.
“Robert’s chasing that Abilene buyer all week, and our manager wrenched his shoulder hauling feed and can’t lift his arm past his ear.
The job needs a head on it. You’ve got the best one on either place. ”
“That’s a Bolton job. Why’s it landing on my desk?”
“Because it’s a both-of-us job, and both of us are short-handed, and you, sugar, are wasted in here fielding Dale’s weepy phone calls.
” Annie leaned in, warm and immovable. “Consider it a chance to learn something new. You can read a map and tell a cedar post from a hole in the ground. That’s the whole skill. ”
Elise studied her. Annie passed out chores the way other folks passed out compliments, but there was an extra wattage to her this morning, a brightness that didn’t quite match a stretch of downed wire.
“You’re mighty cheerful about a fence repair.”
“I’m cheerful about a sharp woman getting out of a stuffy office and into the sunshine.” Annie patted the corner of the desk. “Take the win, hon. Not everything’s a plot.”
A flicker crossed the edge of Elise’s attention and was gone before she could pin a name to it. A fence was down. Annie was Annie, sunny and meddlesome and slippery as a creek stone. There was nothing in it worth chasing.
Most likely.
Elise reached for her keys, and Annie was already on her feet, halfway to the door with that pleased-as-punch glide of hers.
“Materials list is on the seat of my truck,” Annie called over her shoulder. “Have fun, hon.”
And that was that.
Elise told herself it was a nuisance and not a kindness, and then she did the thing she always did with a nuisance. She made it hers.
Inside the hour she had a clean one-page plan, the kind she’d have wanted handed to her if she’d been the one in the dirt.
Three breaks marked on a sketch of the line.
Bolton’s crew on the north two, Hickory Hollow’s on the south one, materials split down the middle, a staging spot for the wire where both crews could reach it without fording the creek twice.
She printed two copies, since a plan nobody could read was only a daydream, and drove out to the line with the pages on the seat beside her.
She had the radio on and her window down and a flutter under her ribs she chose not to examine. A fence was a fence. She was a professional delivering a work plan. If her pulse had opinions about which crew waited on the far bank, her pulse could keep them to itself.
The work site sat where the two ranches met, a long run of fence threading the creek through a stand of mesquite. Both crews were out already, trucks nosed into the bar ditch, men moving in the unhurried way of folks with a full day ahead and no cause to rush it.
She found Hollis, the Hickory Hollow lead, pulling tools off the tailgate.
“Got marching orders for us?” he asked.
“Better. Got a map.” She handed him the page. “South break’s ours, the one by the leaning cottonwood. Bolton takes the two upstream. Wire’s staged at the gate so nobody’s hauling spools through the water.”
Hollis ran his eyes down it, brows climbing. “Annie’s got you doing this now?”
“Apparently I’m broadening my horizons.”
“Huh.” He pocketed the map. “Beats the way Bill used to bark it at us. This I can follow.” He whistled his men toward the south break and left her at the tailgate with nothing left to manage.
Hollis was a good hand, twenty years on the place, and he didn’t need her running his break for him.
None of them did. The plan was the help.
Once it was in his hand, her job was finished and her usefulness with it, which was the part of coordinating nobody warned a woman about.
You built the thing, you handed it off, and then you stood at the edge of the work you’d ordered with your hands gone empty.
Which freed her up for the thing she had no business doing.
She lingered.
She told herself a good coordinator stayed till the work took shape, that she was making sure the plan held. It was a thin lie, and she half believed it.
Across the creek, the Bolton crew had their stretch well in hand, and at the center of it, saying little, stood Stephen Garrett.
She’d had him filed wrong. The truth of it settled over her, there in the mesquite shade with her arms crossed.
At the barbecue she’d read his quiet as empty, a man with nothing upstairs and less to say. From here it read different.
He wasn’t slow. He was deliberate. He set each post and checked it true before he moved on, every motion carrying its reason, none of it spent for nothing. The men around him fell into his rhythm without a word passing.
He never raised his voice, never pointed twice. A tilt of his head sent a man for the stretcher. A flat hand held another off a section not ready for him. He ran a crew the way she ran an office, by staying three steps ahead and making the whole of it look effortless.
One post in the south stretch fought him, the hole gone to gumbo from the creek.
A younger man would have forced it, or cussed it.
Stephen knelt, worked the muck out with his hands, and set the post by hand and eye, standing it true while the boy beside him still reached for the bar.
No fuss, no show, the job done right the once.
When he did speak, it landed. A word to the youngest hand, and the boy fixed his grip. A nod to another, and the two of them lifted a roll of wire in time. He chose his words the way a careful man counts coins, and spent every one on purpose.
The youngest hand put her in mind of herself at that age, all eagerness and no patience, forever three moves ahead of his own hands.
Stephen never shamed him for it. He’d step in, reset the boy’s grip, and step out again, and the lesson landed without a single hard word.
She’d had bosses who taught by humiliation and bosses who taught by example, and she’d have crawled over glass for the second kind.
His voice carried across the creek now and again, too low for the words but easy in its weight, and once whatever he said set the whole crew laughing, the youngest hand loudest of them all. A man the men laughed with, not at. She filed that away too.
That was the thing she’d missed at the barbecue. Not empty. Economical. The man didn’t waste motion or breath, and the not-wasting was a competence all its own, the kind she’d spent her whole life building and almost nobody bothered to credit.
And then there was the rest of him.
He’d shed his outer shirt in the heat, down to a plain tee gone dark at the spine, and when he hauled a run of wire taut, the muscle along his shoulders and arms pulled and corded with the work.
Elise’s mouth went dry.
She looked away, on principle, and looked back inside of five seconds.
Well. That’s unfortunate.
There was no honest word for the warmth climbing her neck but the plain one, and Elise prided herself on honesty.
She had a crush. On Stephen Garrett. The full, ridiculous, note-passing article. At her age. Over a cowboy. The kind of crush that made a grown woman reckless, the kind she’d outlawed by ordinance years ago.
The admission near made her laugh. She’d spent a whole supper deciding the man was a dud, and here she stood a week later, gone soft over the flex of his shoulders and the way he gentled a green colt of a ranch hand without lifting his voice.
In her defense, he was easy to look at and easier to respect, and a woman would have to be embalmed to miss the pull of the pair together.
It wasn’t a crime to look. She told herself so, firmly, in the voice she used on panicking brides. Looking was free, and it didn’t cost a soul a thing. It was the wanting that ran up a tab, and she’d settled that tab once already, in full, with interest.
So why wouldn’t she. He was capable and kind in that gruff, sideways way that never once asked thanks for it.
This was the part where she should shut this down. Crushes were how it always started. A flutter and a flush, and then the slow handing-over of the keys, and you woke up one morning in an empty apartment with a roll of packing tape.
She had the shape of this memorized. She’d walked it before, eyes wide open, dead certain that time was the different one. The fluttering never allowed a warning to sound.
She was so deep in the wreck of her own good sense that she nearly missed the moment he caught her.
Across the creek, Stephen had gone still, a fence stretcher idle in one hand, and he was looking right at her looking at him.
Caught red-handed, cataloging the man the way a buyer eyes a horse at auction.
Heat flooded her face. She braced for the knowing look, the thing a handsome man trots out when he catches a woman staring.
It didn’t come.
What came instead undid her a little. Stephen ducked his head, and the corner of his mouth went up, shy as a boy. Color came up his own weathered neck.
Then he straightened, touched two fingers to his hat brim, and tipped it to her. Barely. Enough.
And Lord help her, Elise smiled back.
Her guard, the one she’d laid brick by brick out of the rubble of the last time, the one she’d sworn no man would ever get behind again, stood three-quarters down and sinking fast. She’d spent two years and one bad ending learning to want nothing she couldn’t supply herself.
It had taken a man in a damp tee shirt and a shy tip of the hat the better part of one afternoon to pick the lock.
The unfairness of it would have made her laugh, if any part of this were funny.
She picked up her clipboard, mostly to give her hands a job, and made herself turn toward her truck before she did anything sillier, such as wave.
There was no reason to stay. She had a desk full of Monday waiting and a long drive to get to it. A sensible woman would have been gone already, plan delivered, conscience clear.
She stayed another ten minutes anyway.