Page 23 of The Way to a Cowboy's Heart

Shay snorted, then bit her lip. “Didn’t you say you… uh, had to send someone a text… or something?”

He scowled at the two of them as he plopped the third potato in the pot of water. “Yeah. I did as a matter of fact. So, if ya’ll will excuse me?”

Shay gestured grandly at the doorway to the living room. He sent her a withering smile.

“Text,” she mouthed with a wink and a thumbs-up.

“You’re ridiculous,” he mouthed back.

“I know.” She grinned like she’d just beaten him at Battleship or something equally inane. “But you know you love me anyway.”

He did. He absolutely did.

*

Three weeks later,Emily sat in the outer office of Carruthers, Steele, and Baker waiting for her meeting with the junior partner who’d called her in. She was wearing a killer navy Dolce and Gabbana suit, and the three-inch heel of her left foot was involuntarily beating out a staccato rhythm on the polished marble floor. She pressed her hand to her knee to stop it and took a deep breath, smoothing out her pencil skirt.

Stephen Swanker, said junior partner, had been with the firm going on ten years and had hiring power of lowly, entry-level employees when the partners were otherwise occupied. That wasn’t her. However, she was hoping he could intercede for her in a meeting with the higher-ups.

They’d met two years earlier at a conference and they’d hit it off, platonically speaking—he was there with his boyfriend—and now, two and a half months after her firm fell off a cliff and she fell into the proverbial land of the unemployed, she was desperate enough to try to hit Swanker up for a favor.

Her phone dinged and she dug it out of her purse. It was a text. From Liam.

A small smile lifted her mouth. He was in the strange habit of texting her exactly when she needed to hear from him. It was never long. A few words. Or a photograph. That’s what it was now. A sunrise. Against an incredibly beautiful, craggy mountain and, hidden in the center of the photo, two wild-looking pure white goats clinging to the side of the mountain on a rocky cliff.

Was that even a real photograph? Was it AI? Or did places like that really exist where he was? While England was beautiful and green most of the year outside of London, with rolling hillsides and diminutive stone walls etching the countryside, there was nothing like… likethisthere. She’d never even seen such a thing in person. Not even the rolling, ancient Adirondacks could compare.

Her phone dinged again, and his text came up again.

Him:“Morning. Hope you’re having a goat day.”

Emily snorted out loud, then clapped a hand to her mouth. The receptionist, ever serious, frowned in her direction.

Emily pulled a straight face and pointed her phone at her left foot, snapping a photo of her new red heels, attached it to a text and typed,“It’s a bit of this situation just now.”

She hit send.

Him:“Stop it.”

He added a smoke coming out of his ears emoji. She had trained him in emojis.

That was so like him to make her laugh when she desperately needed one. He’d been sending her little bits like this for the past two months since they said goodbye. Not every day. Just now and then. She’d sent him some, too. A battle of the two locales in photographs. Her last one was an odd angle of the statue at the ice-skating rink at Rockefeller Center, taken at dusk. She was quite proud of it, to be honest. Their back and forth had actually inspired her to look at the city anew, and to get her phone’s camera out as she walked.

And she’d think about him as she did. About that one kiss in front of her place. She’d wonder if he meant it the way she remembered it. Or if it had been a simple goodbye. But then he’d called her. He’d said he was rounding up cattle before a storm and she could hear them mooing in the background. He’d said he just wanted to say hello. So, not goodbye. Hello. They’d talked until he got them all to the barn and then he had to go. For a long time after, as she walked along Columbus Avenue, she wondered what that call meant.

They’d talked several times since then. Often at night when she was making herself dinner or curled up on her couch, and he was putting either the cows or himself to bed where he was. Once they’d talked for hours like that, seemingly about nothing. But neither of them wanted to be the first to hang up. Maybe they just had a long-distance friendship going. Which would be fine if her stomach didn’t take a tumble whenever she talked to him or thought about him. Of his beautiful eyes and the feel of his lips on hers. No, she was interested in more than friendship with him. But maybe her memory was playing tricks.

“Ms. Quinn?” the receptionist called, indicating Swanker standing at the open door of his smallish office.

He smiled broadly and gestured to her to come in. “Emily. How good to see you again.”

“Hello, Stephen. Thanks for seeing me.”

A slight man, though tall, Swanker’s wispy blond hair barely covered the balding pate at the back of his head, evident when he turned to take a seat behind his desk. He had a woman’s graceful hands: thin, long fingered, and delicate. But she knew he was ambitious as hell and had worked hard to get where he was in the company. Appearances could be deceiving.

“Of course, of course. When was the last time? Chicago, was it?”

“I think so, yes. It’s been a while.”

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