Chapter 19
Kelly's message arrived on a Monday morning while Ellie was in a stand-up meeting that had, entirely predictably, ceased to involve standing twenty minutes ago and was now seven engineers slumped around a conference table debating whether to refactor a codebase that everyone hated but nobody wanted to be responsible for rewriting.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket and she snuck a look under the table:
So I have a proposition for y'all and before you say anything just hear me out.
How do you feel about a weekend on the ranch?
Colt's around Friday night and Saturday morning but then he's got a thing with his boys in San Antonio and I could use the company.
It's beautiful out here right now, wildflowers everywhere, we've got a watering hole that's warm enough to swim in, and I promise the guest room is nicer than any hotel you've stayed in.
Come Friday after work, leave Sunday whenever. K x
Ellie stared at the message, rereading it twice, while around her the refactoring debate continued unabated. She could feel the smile forming before she could stop it… unfortunate, because a smile had no place in this discussion about legacy code.
She forwarded the message to Becca with a single added line: Thoughts? I’m keen if you are x
Becca's reply came within a minute, which hopefully meant she was between clients. Either that or she’d become deeply unprofessional, which Ellie strongly doubted:
Yes. Obviously yes. Tell her yes immediately before she changes her mind. x
Then a follow-up: Also I've never been on a ranch. Do I need cowboy boots? x
And another: What does one wear to be seduced on a ranch? Asking for a friend. x
Ellie laughed before she could stop herself, turning it into a sort of strangled cough as the engineers sat near her looked concerned. “Ticklish throat,” she managed to croak, before excusing herself to get some water.
Once she was out of the room she typed back:
I'll tell her yes. You don't need boots. Wear whatever you want, doubt you’ll be wearing it long x
She watched the three dots appear and disappear several times before finally:
You can't say things like that when I have a client in four minutes. I won’t be able to concentrate xx
Ellie pocketed her phone, grinning. This was going to be fun.
***
They left Austin on Friday late afternoon, Becca driving the rental SUV they'd picked up because their own car would have struggled on the unpaved roads Kelly had warned them about.
The city fell away quickly… suburbs giving way to strip malls, then open road, the landscape changing from urban sprawl to wide open vistas as they headed west into the hill country.
It was early April and the wildflowers were out, just as Kelly had promised.
Blues carpeted the verges in dense, impossible drifts mixed with bright oranges and yellows.
Ellie had lived in Texas for over a year now but she'd never seen the hill country in spring, and the sheer beauty of it was staggering.
"It's stunning," Becca said, slowing down as they rounded a bend and a whole multicoloured hillside came into view, the colour so saturated it looked like surely it had been photoshopped. "I had no idea."
"Kelly said the wildflowers are the best they've been in years."
"Kelly would say that. She's trying to sell us on the ranch lifestyle."
"Is it working?"
Becca glanced at her and smiled. "Ask me again Sunday."
Ellie’s heart beat just a little faster, the jealousy-arousal loop kicking in early.
They drove for another hour, the roads getting gradually narrower and quieter, the towns getting smaller.
This was rural Texas now and the places reflected it, a gas station with a convenience store, a feed store, a church, a bar.
The essentials, repeated at regular intervals.
The GPS took them off the highway onto a county road, then onto an unmarked road that was more gravel than asphalt, and then through a gate that had Kelly's name on a mailbox alongside a faded no-trespassing sign with a bullet hole in it.
"Charming," Ellie said.
"Texas," Becca replied, as if that explained everything. It kind of did.
The road wound through oak trees for a quarter mile before the house appeared, and when it did Ellie understood immediately why Kelly loved this place.
It was small as ranches went, but it sat within its landscape beautifully.
Made of stone and timber, single story with a wraparound porch, it looked like the sort of place where if you wanted you could simply sit and look at the view all day.
And the view deserved looking at… rolling hills dotted with trees and scrub, a paddock with horses grazing in the shade, and in the middle distance a cluster of trees and a glimmer of water that Ellie guessed was the watering hole that Kelly had mentioned.
The sky above it all somehow seemed enormous.
Not just Austin-enormous, which was impressive enough already, but hill-country-enormous: a dome of yellows and oranges stretching to every horizon as the sun started to dip, studded with fluffy white clouds, and when Ellie stepped out of the car and took a breath of the warm, fresh air it felt like her first real breath in months.
"You found us!” Kelly appeared from around the side of the house, barefoot, wearing cut-off shorts and a tank top, her hair pulled back under a baseball cap.
She looked like a different person from the woman they'd met both times before, less polished, less put-together, more genuine.
The ranch version of Kelly was sun-browned and relaxed, radiating contentment.
She hugged Becca first, a hug that lingered and tripped the jealousy switch in Ellie, but then she hugged Ellie for even longer, warm and tight, and the look she gave her was thrilling… like she was welcoming a co-conspirator.
"The drive ok?" Kelly asked, taking their bag without being asked.
"Gorgeous," Becca said, looking around. "Kelly, this place is incredible."
"Wait until you see it in full daylight tomorrow. It'll ruin every other view for you forever." She started walking towards the porch. "Come meet Colt. He's been looking forward to this almost as much as me."
"Almost?" Ellie said.
Kelly grinned over her shoulder. "He's excited to meet you, but he doesn't get to sleep with your wife, so I reckon I've got the edge."
***
Colt appeared on the porch as they walked up, four freshly opened ice cold beers in hand as a welcome.
He was tall enough that both Becca and Ellie needed to tilt their heads slightly to look up at him, and Kelly alongside him looked small even though she was a similar height to both of them.
Ellie could see why she’d chosen him: tall, broad-shouldered and lean, sandy-haired, handsome in the clean-cut, sun-weathered way that Texan men seemed to specialise in.
He had the sort of face that looked like it had been assembled from a kit labelled reliable, or maybe capable…
strong jaw, honest eyes, a smile that started slow and ended wide.
"Ellie, Becca," he said, shaking their hands in turn. His grip was firm but not performatively so, and his voice had the slow, easy drawl that Ellie was learning to associate with people who'd grown up in this part of the world. "Welcome to our place. Kelly's been talking about y'all for weeks."
"All good things," Kelly added, handing out the beers.
"Well yeah, she's hardly going to tell me the bad stuff in advance, is she?
" He grinned at Kelly, who swatted his arm, and the dynamic between them was immediately, visibly solid.
Theirs was the sort of easy, teasing affection that only came from years of genuine compatibility.
They weren't performing their relationship. They were just in it.
Colt gave them the tour while Kelly took their bag to the spare room.
The house was modest but well-kept: two bedrooms, an open-plan kitchen and living area, and a main bathroom that had clearly been recently renovated.
The guest room was at the far end, separated from Kelly and Colt's room by the living area, with its own small bathroom and a window that looked out towards the watering hole.
The bed was a generous queen with white linen that looked fresh, and there were wildflowers in a jar on the nightstand.
"Kelly did the flowers," Colt said. He shrugged. “I wanted to put out some jerky and a six-pack but apparently that's not how you welcome civilised guests."
"We’d have liked it either way," Ellie said. "The flowers are nice too though."
They ended up on the porch as the evening light started to fade, the four of them spread across the wooden chairs and the porch rail, beers in hand, and the conversation flowed much more naturally than Ellie had expected.
She'd been nervous about meeting Colt, not because she expected hostility but rather because this was all inherently socially awkward. This was the man whose girlfriend she’d watched her wife have a lot of very hot sex with.
There wasn't a Hallmark card for that particular relationship.
But Colt made it easy, so did Kelly, and within half an hour Ellie felt like she’d known him for years.
He talked about the ranch and the small cattle operation they ran alongside his horse breeding, enough to keep them busy but not so much that it consumed their lives.
He’d grown up nearby on a bigger ranch that his parents still ran, but him and Kelly had wanted their own place to build from scratch.
"Kelly's the smart one," he said, tipping his beer towards her. "The real estate brain. She found this place, saw what it could be, negotiated the owner down to a price we could actually afford. I just mend fences and feed animals."
"He's being modest," Kelly said. "He designed the house renovations, he built half the fences himself, and he's the best horseman in the county. His daddy breeds horses," she added to Ellie and Becca. "Colt grew up on a horse before he could walk."