Stranded with the Cowboy Billionaire

by Elana Johnson

  And the biggest problem was—he had no idea.

  Sighing, he turned away from the windows and the glorious view and flipped open his laptop. It took several seconds to start up, and then dozens and dozens of chimes filled the air.

  “Holy starfish,” he said, very aware he’d just used Ivy’s expletive. He turned down the volume as the notifications kept coming and coming and coming.

  “What is going on?” He clicked and read, trying to figure out where all the noises were coming from. When he did, he sat down heavily in the chair in front of the desk.

  There were well over two hundred messages in his chatbox now, the one he’d set up to use for the ad. He hadn’t gotten any of them before, but they were definitely there now. He leaned forward, looking for the timestamps. Many, many of them came in before Ivy’s had.

  How had he not seen these?

  “Maybe the idea wasn’t crazy,” he said to the empty apartment. But the way his heart felt full of ashes testified that it definitely was. After all, what had he achieved?

  “Nothing.” He closed the laptop, the sharp click of it so satisfying. He really felt like he hadn’t accomplished much—except maybe losing his heart to a pretty blonde woman who used octopi as a way to express her awe.

  A day passed, and then two. He got new keys for his apartment. Henley got his car out of storage. He bought his own groceries, picked up a new cell phone, and called someone about fixing the yacht.

  With everything going on in his personal life and around the island, he didn’t worry too much that he hadn’t seen Ivy. She needed time to do all of those things too, and there were still some parts of the island in complete disarray.

  Whole communities had been washed away. The small cottages on the beach had been hit particularly hard, and Mason decided to go down to one and volunteer. Tons of debris needed to be hauled away, and the rebuilding had already begun for some people lucky enough to have family and friends to help.

  Mason wondered what he would do if his house was wiped off the face of the Earth. He had no family here, and in fact, no one in his family had even known about the storm and where he’d been.

  He hadn’t spent a lot of time exploring the island, but when he turned where a volunteer told him to, he saw three signs someone had leaned up against a tree trunk. All of the branches had lost their fronds, and the tree reminded him of a skeleton.

  Sandy Shores.

  Tropical Paradise.

  Twin Palms.

  “Twin Palms,” he said, his heartbeat accelerating. He parked and got out, glancing around for where the Twin Palms beach cottages were. He’d looked here when he’d first moved to the island.

  Ivy lived here.

  He hurried over to the blue tent that had been set up for volunteers. “Do you need help in Twin Palms today?” he asked.

  “Uh, let me see,” the woman behind the table said. “Twin Palms is almost cleared.” She shook her head. “They’re only pulling the bigger things out now. Going to turn it into a beach dog park.”

  “What?” he asked. “What about the homes?”

  “Everything was destroyed in Twin Palms,” she said, looking at him oddly. “You didn’t know?”

  He wanted to bark at her, ask her why he should know that. Instead, he spun away from the volunteer booth, almost desperate to find Ivy now. Of course, she wasn’t standing there. Turning back to the woman, he asked, “Do you know where the residents went?”

  “Most are staying with family or at the Sweet Breeze Resort,” she said. “They put up anyone who didn’t have a home.”

  Ivy had plenty of family on the island. Mason just needed to find them.

  “Do you happen to know the McLaughlin’s?” he asked.

  The woman’s face lit up. “Sure. The girls who all got stranded and fell in love?” She sighed. “Makes you want to get on a boat and just hope something happens, right?” She giggled like being stranded on an island would be a picnic.

  Mason had thought that too, once.

  He forced a laugh out of his mouth. “Right. So…do you know them?”

  “Sure, I mean, I know of them.” She pointed to something on someone’s clipboard, her attention diverted for a moment.

  “Where could I find them?” Mason asked, trying to school his voice into being kind. He sort of succeeded.

  “Well, the one, she married the owner of Explore Getaway Bay. And another one…I don’t know what happened to her. But another is marrying the quarterback of the Orcas in a few months. Her name is Orchid. I remember, because Orchid sounds a lot like Orcas.” The woman beamed at him, and Mason smiled right on back.

  “Thank you,” he said, tipping his cowboy hat and making a beeline for his car. Orchid McLaughlin. Not married yet.

  She shouldn’t be too hard to find, not for someone like Mason, with unlimited resources and time.

  And if he couldn’t do it, he’d ask Henley to help him. That man could find a pinhead in the sand.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “You’re not going to work again?” Orchid paused by the front door when she realized Ivy was still on the couch, in her pajamas.

  “No,” Ivy said, not much more of an explanation in her. Orchid had been so amazing to let her bunk with Tesla, and Ivy had been helping out with her niece in the afternoons before Orchid got off work.

  She’d given up her job at the boutique, and with everything that had happened since she’d returned to Getaway Bay, she couldn’t face going back there and trying to get her position back.

  Not yet, anyway.

  “Are you okay?” Orchid asked, coming closer and leaning over the way their mother had done when the girls were sick. She stroked Ivy’s hair off her forehead and tucked it behind her ear.

  “Fine.” Ivy smiled up at her. “Now go on. You’ll be late. I’ll get Tesla and have dinner on the table when you get home.”

  “Maine’s taking us to dinner tonight,” Orchid said. “End-of-year banquet for the Orcas. You don’t need to cook.”

  “Okay.” Ivy sat up as her sister walked back to the door. She waved at Tesla and Orchid as they left, and then she frowned at the closed door. The silence.

  She’d gotten a new phone the day after returning on the helicopter. She’d been staying with Orchid ever since, because her cottage was literally a pile of sticks spread from where it had once stood to various places around the world.

  Three beach communities had basically been wiped out. Twin Palms had gotten hit the worst, but Ivy thought that was simply because it was the oldest. The other places had been built with better materials to withstand high winds and rain.

  She’d told her tale to her family, and Tesla had taken the stage to tell Ivy all about staying at Sweet Breeze during the hurricane. “It was so weird,” her niece had said. “The hurricane hit at like eleven o’clock in the morning, but it was really dark.”

  Ivy had just let her talk, enjoying the air conditioning, the hot chocolate Iris made for her, and the soft bed she’d been able to sleep in.

  But now, she wanted her own place.

  “Gotta get a job,” she muttered to herself. If she wanted to be able to pay rent, she’d have to work.

  She showered and headed out, glad she was able to get her car back easily from Mason. In fact, she hadn’t even spoken to him. Eden had marched down to the apartment building where he lived and spoken to Henley herself. Ivy had the car twenty minutes later, and her sister had filled it up with gas for her.

  She spent the day filling out applications on her phone for a few places around the island, eating tacos in the shade, and watching the waves relentlessly roll ashore. She should go help in the communities that had been devastated by the storm, but she didn’t have the heart.

  Last year, after the tsunami that had wiped out Orchid’s cruise ship, she and Maine had gotten right to work in the affected areas of the island. But Ivy wasn’t as good as Orchid, and she knew it.

  At this point, though, even a pedicure or a new pair
of shoes wouldn’t cheer her up.

  She wanted to see Mason. Explain everything to him and find out if the connection she’d felt with him out on Long Bar Island could endure here in Getaway Bay.

  She knew where he lived, but short of going down there and loitering outside his building, she didn’t know how to contact him.

  Her phone chimed, and a message came in from Tidal Cleaning, a play on words for Total Cleaning. We’d love to speak with you. When are you available?

  Ivy didn’t really want to be a maid, but she thought of sharing her room with a nine-year-old and typed out a quick, Great. I’m available any time. That totally made her sound desperate, but she didn’t care.

  At this point, she was desperate.

  We’re over at the clean-up going on in the beach communities. You want to come over?

  No, Ivy did not want to go over there. But she knew Twin Palms was mostly cleaned up now. A map for a new dog park had even been circulating on the community’s social media page.

  I can be there in ten minutes, she said, though it was really more like two. She sighed as she got behind the wheel of her car and made the short drive. She parked in the dirt lot indicated by the volunteer in the orange vest, and she slicked her palms down her shorts as she walked toward the blue tent where the volunteers gathered to get assignments.

  “I’m looking for June Iverson,” she said without looking at the people there. “She…texted me.” She bent to sign her name on the clipboard.

  “June’s over in Tropical,” the man said, and Ivy’s heart did a full-stop. The pen scratched on the paper. She lifted her eyes to that pair she had memorized.

  So dark. So mesmerizing. So perfect.

  “Mason?” He wasn’t wearing the cowboy hat, but he still had a commanding charisma around him that dared her to defy him.

  “Ivy.” A smile bloomed across his face, though she couldn’t fathom why. He glanced at the other person under the tent. A woman. “I’ll be back in a sec, Trish.” He stepped out of the tent and indicated that Ivy should walk with him.

  “How are you?”

  “How am I?” she repeated. “My house got blown off the planet. How would you be?”

  Mason’s hand slipped into hers, but she pulled away. “You know what? I thought I wanted to see you. Explain everything to you. But I don’t. I’m….”

  Embarrassed.

  But she couldn’t say the word. What she knew was she didn’t belong with him. He was everything she wasn’t, right down to the freaking leather shoes he wore to work on the beach.

  “Ivy,” he said. “I’m sorry it took me a few days to get to you. I found where Orchid lives, and I was going to come by tonight.”

  “Please, don’t.”

  “Why not?” He reached for her again. “I know you just said that stuff on the island because you didn’t want to tell Justin about us.” His eyebrows went up. “Right?”

  “I mean, I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “I don’t think we’re a match, Mase.” Even as she said his nickname, she felt like she was lying.

  “Why not?”

  “Just because I was the only one who applied doesn’t make us soul mates.”

  He looked at the ground and nodded. “All right. Fine. But what if you weren’t the only one who applied?”

  Confusion raced through Ivy. “You said I was the only one.”

  “The only one that came through. For some reason, all the others didn’t.”

  “How many others?”

  “A couple hundred.”

  For some reason, the number punched Ivy in the gut. Here she’d thought she was special. But Mason literally had hundreds to choose from. Or he would have, if the messages had come through. Was he lying?

  She squinted at him, as if that would help her know.

  “Look,” he said with a sigh. “I don’t know where I belong. I felt like I should leave Texas, so I did. I came here, and being here felt wrong. I bought that island, and concocted this crazy scenario, and you actually did it.” He chuckled, but she wasn’t sure he’d said anything funny.

  In fact, it sounded like he’d called her crazy.

  “And I still don’t know where I should be,” he said. “But when I think of you, I’m calm, and I think maybe…I belong with you.”

  Ivy’s heart warmed at the thought, but her brain screeched out a warning. “Maybe you should figure that out,” she said, tipping up onto her toes and touching his collar. “Because I’ll give you my whole heart, Mason Martin, and I don’t want it back crushed.”

  She fell back a step. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go see June about a job. I’m homeless and unemployed. Some of us have to work to make ends meet.”

  Mason grabbed her hand, and surprise pulled through her as he tugged her back. “Marry me,” he said. “You’ll have a home, and you won’t have to work.”

  She burst out laughing. “Marry you? You really are crazy.” She searched his face, and he certainly looked sane. She shook her hand out of his, fear rising through her chest.

  All she’d ever wanted was a man to love her. Cherish her. Take care of her. Why was it now scaring her to death?

  “I’m not marrying you.”

  “Right now? Or ever?” Mason pulled his phone from his back pocket. “If you give me your number, I’ll ask you out properly.” He took a step closer and leaned down, breaking the bubble of her personal space. “I’ll show you we belong together.”

  “You just said you don’t even know where you belong.” Ivy held her ground, though. Didn’t back up. Didn’t even want to. The ground felt like it might vanish beneath her feet at any moment, and still she didn’t move.

  “Your number?”

  “I don’t have it memorized.”

  “Then give me your phone.”

  Stupidly, because his nearness and his cologne did things to her mind to make it slow, she handed him her phone. He typed something on it, and a moment later, his phone dinged. “Got it. Good luck with the interview, Ivy.”

  With that, he walked back to the blue tent, leaving Ivy to wonder what in the world had just happened.

  “He proposed to you?” Iris dropped the plate she’d been washing in the sink, creating an ear-splitting clatter that had Ivy shying away from the kitchen. “Where? When? What did he say?”

  “It was so unromantic,” Ivy said. “Right on the beach where all the debris was. And it was like he grabbed my hand and shouted it at me.”

  Iris wiped her hands deliberately on a towel. “I’m just going to ask you this one time, twinnie.” She lifted her eyes to Ivy’s. “Are you in love with him?”

  “No,” Ivy said with a scoff. She sobered as she flopped onto the couch. “I mean, maybe I liked him a lot out on the island. But we’re not out there anymore, are we? I’m not just going to marry some dude I met three weeks ago.”

  “Mm hmm,” Iris said. “The rest of us did.”

  “Not true. Eden dated Holden way before she met him on Bald Mountain Cliffs.”

  “Are you going to go out with him?”

  “You know what?” Ivy asked. “If he asks me, yes, I’ll go out with him.”

  “So you do like him.”

  “Of course I like him” Ivy said while rolling her eyes. “He’s handsome, and smart, and rich. But he’s more than that too.” She gazed at nothing as Iris went back to the dishes in the sink. “He doesn’t mind that I like to shop. And he doesn’t care how many pairs of shoes I have, which for the record, is two, now that all of my stuff is gone. He doesn’t mind that I talk a lot.”

  “Honey, you should’ve said yes.” Iris laughed, and Justin came inside, bringing the scent of grilled meat with him.

  “Time to eat,” he said. “Hey, baby.” He stepped over to Iris and wrapped her in those muscled arms.

  She squealed and giggled before saying, “Justin, we’re not alone.”

  “Oh, hey, Ivy,” he said without letting go of Iris. “Staying for dinner?”


  “I was here when you went outside to grill,” she said in a deadpan. “So yeah.”

  “Is she sleeping over?” he asked in a stage whisper, a teasing grin on his face.

  “No,” Iris said. “She found a new place today.”

  “And a job,” Ivy said, heaving herself off the couch to join them in the kitchen. “So there.” She picked up a plate and started slathering mayonnaise and mustard on her hamburger bun.

  Her phone chimed, and she took it out of her pocket and set it on the counter so she could read the text and prepare her dinner. Her heart began pounding. She couldn’t read fast enough.

  “And a date,” she said, and Iris stepped over to her.

  Another squeal filled the air, this time as both twins joined their voices together.

  Iris grabbed the phone before Ivy even knew what was happening. “Yes,” she dictated as she typed. “I’d love to go out with you, Mason.”

  “Iris,” Ivy said. “Not love. Just say sure, when?”

  “Sure, when?” Iris barley looked at her before she focused back on the phone. “Nope, that doesn’t work.”

  “I thought you liked Mason,” Justin said, cracking an egg into a hot pan, which resulted in a hiss. “Was there any question of you two going out?”

  “Yes,” Ivy said. “He’s…honestly, I’m not sure what he is. He doesn’t even know what he wants or where he belongs.”

  “Sent,” Iris said, and Ivy’s stomach dropped to the ground. No way it had taken that long to type sure, when?

  “That’s easy, Ivy,” Justin said. “You tell him he belongs with you.”

  That was the second time that day someone had said that to her. She didn’t know what to make of it, but happiness filled her when another chime came from her phone.

  “Right,” she said sarcastically. “Then he’d be here eating your food, too.”

  She picked up her phone and saw Iris had sent the I’d love to go out with you text.

  Great, Mason had messaged back. What are you doing right now?