Her Cowboy Billionaire Boyfriend

by Liz Isaacson

  Raven snorted, but Becca ignored her. “You’re delusional.”

  “Why? Because I’ve been proven right once again? Men don’t stick around for long, and he’s one of the best men—” Her voice choked and she cut herself off.

  “You guys were great together. I’m sure he’s miserable too.” Raven covered Becca’s hand with one of her own. “It’s obvious you still love him.”

  Love him? Becca snorted and started laughing. “I’m not in love with him.” She was terribly lonely at night, that was for sure. She had no passion for this job. And she just wanted to eat her salad and go back to reading…whatever she was supposed to be reading.

  Raven stood. “Well, I have to get back to work, but I think you should call him.”

  He’d called her once, and she hadn’t even answered with a hello. Of course, he had yet to apologize for calling her one of the most annoying women on the planet, or insinuating that no one could like her for long.

  She tried to push the insults out of her mind, but they never went far. And today, as Raven patted her hand once more and left, the things Andrew had said—whether to get his general manager off his back or not—shouted through her mind.

  She pushed the chicken salad away, though it was one of her favorite foods. She had no appetite anymore, as Andrew seemed to infect every aspect of her life.

  She didn’t remember feeling this way after Jarom had broken up with her. Or anyone else for that matter, probably because none of those dates had ever really turned into a relationship.

  But Becca knew that everything had its opposite. Light and darkness. Pleasure and pain. She thought she’d known the opposite of joy was misery, but she hadn’t. Not until now.

  Now, she knew what true misery felt like, and she couldn't help but wonder if she’d experienced true joy when she was with Andrew. And now that she wasn’t….

  She reached for her phone and texted Raven. How do I just call him? What do I even say?

  You say, I love you. I’m sorry. Want to bring me dinner? Raven included a smiley face emoji with her text, and Becca wondered if she could just copy and paste her text into a new message for Andrew.

  “Becca?” Mayor Berry stood at her desk, and Becca jerked to attention, stumbling as she stood.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why didn’t we get notice about the SonarBot?”

  Confusion rushed through her. “What are you talking about?”

  He pointed to the television in the corner, which played constantly, the sound muted. The screen showed the SonarBot rumbling along the rocks, with the newscaster’s head in the top right corner. The captions, though delayed, got the message across just fine.

  “…this inauguration of the single most advanced piece of technology to come to the mining industry ever.”

  “Turn it up,” she said, navigating through the maze of desks. She reached the TV and dragged a chair underneath it, pressing the volume button so they could hear in real time.

  Andrew’s face came on the screen, and he wore a smile the size of Texas. It was so fake, Becca wanted to scoff in disgust, as she’d done before. But now she knew the man behind that false grin, knew how much it hurt him to put it on his face, and knew how tired it made him.

  “It’s a great day,” he said, as if he’d won a million dollars. “I can’t wait to see the SonarBot in action.” But he’d already seen it.

  The camera panned to include Graham, who wore a look of happiness and anxiety, and Becca wished she’d had more time to get to know Andrew’s family. She felt like she would’ve fit in great with them.

  The interviews continued, even as the Mayor’s office started getting dozens of phone calls.

  “I don’t know,” she said to Mayor Berry. “Andrew didn’t call you?”

  “No,” he said, his powerful features crunched in confusion. And anger. “He said—you said you guys would call.”

  “I don’t work there anymore.” Obviously. But she still wanted to stand by all her promises.

  “Where are they?” he asked an advisor who approached with a phone at each ear. “Can I make it in time?”

  “They’re way over in Douglas,” the man said. “I have the chopper pilot on the line. He says he can get us there in a couple of hours.”

  The Mayor looked at the television, frustration and fury on his face. “We won’t make it.” He turned away. “Get me Andrew Whittaker on the phone as soon as possible.” He stormed into his office and slammed the door. Becca flinched, feeling the reverberation all the way down in her stomach.

  Andrew had broken his promise. Why?

  Not only had he alienated the mayor of his own town, but he’d broken the trust he’d worked to achieve. And he’d made her look bad too.

  He has to have a good reason, she thought. But she couldn’t think of one. In fact, her brain could hardly come up with solutions at all.

  She pulled out her phone and called his office, knowing he wasn’t there. “Hello, Andrew Whittaker’s office,” Carla said.

  “Hello,” she said. “Is Andrew in?”

  “I’m afraid not.” Carla actually sounded sorry about it too. “May I take a message for him?”

  “This is Becca,” she said, almost adding “from the mayor’s office,” but she pulled those words back. “I’m wondering when he’ll be back in town.”

  “Oh, Becca.” Carla sounded a bit surprised. “He’s scheduled to be back the day after tomorrow.”

  “Thank you, Carla.”

  “Do you want to meet with him?”

  Desperately, Becca thought but again kept silent. “Mayor Berry would like to, but I’m still working on his availability.”

  “Well, let me know, hon. I—the office isn’t the same without you here.”

  Becca almost hung up, but something in Carla’s tone made her pause. “What do you mean? I was only there a few weeks.”

  “And Andrew calmed right down,” Carla said. “He’s back to the highly anxious man he was before you showed up.”

  “I’m sorry,” Becca said, wishing she didn’t apologize for things that weren’t her fault. “It was a tough job for me.”

  “I understand. Maybe we could still go to lunch?”

  “Sure, Carla. Anytime.” She did end the call then, and she wished she could go waltzing into the cafeteria at Springside and eat with Carla. She’d even wear heels if she had to.

  Her chest pinched, but she had one more phone call to make. He was obviously still busy, but he owed the mayor an explanation.

  She expected the call to go to his voicemail on the first ring, as he never kept his phone on when he was expecting to be on camera or speaking to a crowd. She stared at his face on the TV while she said, “Andrew, I’m looking at you while the SonarBot is gearing up to send a pulse into the rocks outside Douglas. Mayor Berry is wondering why he was not invited, and frankly, so am I. Please call me back at your earliest convenience.”

  She hung up, a smile on her face for the first time in weeks.

  Nineteen

  Andrew hadn’t listened to the message on his phone yet. It could be from one of three people, one of whom was Becca.

  She’d called.

  Why had she called?

  He sat in his own hotel room, the room service cart over in the corner, the food subpar at this tiny spot in Douglas. If Becca had been with him, he’d be in her room, probably a couple of pizza boxes on the table in front of them.

  He hadn’t told her about the first SonarBot expedition. He hadn’t told anyone, because he was barely functioning these days.

  It had been quite a fail anyway. Sure, the robot had sent its sonar pulses into the rocks, but it hadn’t detected any gas. So it was all quite anti-climatic. Sort of like sitting there in his room, wondering if the message would be from Carla, his mom, or Becca.

  They’d all called that afternoon.

  He hit the button to listen to his voicemail and learned he had three messages. His mother wanted to let him know that she’d
ended things with Admiral, and oh, Beau was hosting Thanksgiving dinner at his bachelor pad because of his new case.

  Andrew wasn’t sure what a case had to do with where Beau ate, but Andrew wasn’t going to argue. Celia would make all the food anyway, except maybe the pies his mother would be responsible for.

  Carla said, “Becca called, sir. I think you should call her when you get back.”

  He wanted to call her right now. If he did, would she tell him to get lost? Report him to the police for continuing contact with her when she’d asked him to stop?

  Her voice came on the message next, and his heart leapt around inside his chest like a frog. She sounded stern during the message, all until she said, “Please call me back at your earliest convenience.”

  Andrew almost sobbed as he started laughing. Sure, she was still mad at him, because he had promised Mayor Berry he’d have a front-row seat to the SonarBot’s first excursion. And Becca? Becca should be at his side. At work. At home. Always.

  He’d wanted to invite her to do everything with him since the tour ended three weeks ago. But she’d made it very clear she wasn’t interested. Could she still be interested? He listened to her message again, definitely detecting a note of playfulness in her last sentence.

  Graham’s admonition from last week still rang in Andrew’s ears, but he didn’t know how to show up at Becca’s unannounced and talk to her.

  But she had asked him to call her. Could he simply do that? Would it really be that easy?

  He touched the phone icon and pulled up her name. Another tap and the phone started opening a connection. Maybe it would be this easy.

  Her line rang and rang, and she didn’t answer. “Hey,” he said to her messages. “It’s my earliest convenience, and I’m returning your call. I’ll be honest and say I completely forgot about letting Mayor Berry know about the SonarBot.”

  He paused. He forgot, because she had been handling all those details.

  “And I miss you. I’ll be back in town in a couple of days. Maybe we can get together then?”

  He had so much more to say, but he didn’t want to fill her voicemail with desperate pleas for her to give him another chance. So he finished with, “All right. Talk to you later,” and hung up, hoping later came sooner than three weeks without talking to her.

  Twenty minutes later, he was still staring at the TV, no idea which channel he’d even put it on. His phone rang, and he glanced down, his eyesight a bit blurry.

  But he still saw Becca’s name and hurried to answer the call. “Hey,” he said, trying not to breathe her name out like he was in love with her.

  All at once, he realized he was in love with her.

  He’d never had a chance to ask her about his father, and he didn’t even care. He loved her.

  His heart started pounding and he pulled in a tight breath. “Hello?”

  “Hey,” she said. “Sorry, I was outside bringing in all the cat bowls. Or dog bowls. Raccoon bowls.” She blew out her breath as if she’d been running a marathon. “It’s snowing pretty hard. I left my phone inside. You called?”

  “You called me. I was just returning at my earliest convenience.”

  A beat of silence passed, and then she said, “Mayor Berry was pretty angry. Have you talked to him?”

  “No.” Andrew sighed. “I’ll call him.”

  “His advisor should’ve called and left a message.”

  “Well, he didn’t.” Was she accusing him of something? He had three messages after the SonarBot had failed to find any natural gas. None of them had been from the mayor’s advisor. “Aren’t you the mayor’s advisor?”

  “In a way,” she said evasively, which meant, in Becca-speak, no. Andrew wondered what she was doing there, but he was smart enough not to ask.

  “I told him I’d find out why you didn’t bother to call him to witness the first SonarBot expedition.”

  Andrew pinched the bridge of his nose, foolishness filling him from top to bottom. She hadn’t called because she missed him and wanted to hear his voice. She’d called because it was her job to call. The joke had just been…what? A joke, perhaps.

  “I didn’t read your notes,” he said, going for the truth. “I dropped the ball. I forgot.”

  “When’s the next one?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Did you watch the whole thing?”

  She coughed, a fake sound he’d heard many times when she was about to admit something she wasn’t proud of. He imagined her lifting her chin too. “No.”

  “Well, it was a fail,” he said. “So tell him not to get all bent out of shape. Graham’s going to do some tweaks and run some tests, and we’ll do another live excursion. I won’t forget to invite him.”

  Or you, he wanted to add but kept way down deep in his gut.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He hated this diplomatic game they were playing. He knew the rules, knew the outcome, and he hated it.

  “Well, thanks for calling.”

  “Did you listen to my message?” he asked.

  “No, I just saw you called.”

  So she hadn’t heard him admit that he missed her. Hadn’t listened to him ask her out again when he got back to town. Maybe he could convince her to delete it without listening, just to save some pride.

  “It just said I forgot. You can delete it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay,” he echoed. But neither one of them hung up. On her end of the line, a dog barked and she exclaimed, “Oh!” and said, “I have to go, Andrew. I’ll call you later.”

  A second later, the line was dead. Closed. She was gone.

  Andrew let his hand holding his phone fall to his lap. How was he going to survive the holidays without her?

  Thanksgiving morning found him in the kitchen with Celia, adding chopped celery, onions, and carrots to a pan sizzling with butter.

  “Stir those around.” She handed him a wooden spoon.

  “I’m going to burn them,” he said.

  “Just stir them.” She returned to the huge loaf of bread she’d made a few days ago and refused to let him have even one slice. She used a large knife to cut the loaf into cubes for the stuffing, and then she stepped back over to him with a small, glass bowl in her hand. “Add this.”

  He dumped in the spices and went back to stirring. She’d confronted him last night and practically demanded he get up and help her this morning. She’d said, “You can’t hide out in that bedroom forever.”

  “I’m not hiding,” he’d said. “There isn’t anyone to hide from here.”

  She’d made a grumpy noise and said, “Seven o’clock. We’re starting the stuffing. Then we’ll make a chocolate pie, the yams, and prepare the creamed corn. We have to leave at eleven to get to Beau’s and get everything hot again.”

  He’d watched her march away, down the hall and up the stairs to the room she slept in when she stayed at the lodge.

  The scent of sage and garlic wafted up from the pan, and Andrew kept the wooden spoon moving so he didn’t char anything.

  Celia took over once the vegetables were soft and a bit see-through. She mixed in some chicken stock and added the panfull of ingredients to the big bowl of bread cubes. The stuffing got smashed in a pan and put in the oven, and she turned to him.

  “Want to separate eggs or peel yams?”

  “Peel yams.” He felt sure his clumsy fingers would break the yolk of an egg if he tried to separate it from its white. She set him in front of the sink, which was filled with the knobbly, brown-skinned yams. He started peeling, his bicep muscle complaining after one yam had been skinned.

  But he kept on, because Celia wasn’t pestering him with questions and he wanted to contribute to the family meal somehow. By eleven, he’d showered and shaved and pulled his sedan right up into the circle drive at the lodge. It was covered, and Mother Nature had decided that snow on Thanksgiving would be beneficial.

  With the backseat full of food, he got behind the wheel and waited for Br
ee to come out with another bag of ice. Celia was following them in her car, and foot by foot, mile by mile, they made it down the canyon and into town.

  Beau’s house had a long driveway that he’d obviously been out to shovel already that day. Andrew pulled up as far as he could, because at least three other cars would need to fit. Celia parked beside him, and the three of them got all the food inside.

  It was warm in Beau’s house, and Andrew gave his younger brother a big hug. “Thanks for hosting,” he said. “This place looks great.”

  “That’s because of Deirdre.” Beau nodded to someone behind Andrew, and Andrew turned to see a gloriously radiant woman standing there. She was nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs, if the way her lip trembled and how she wound her hands around themselves indicated anything.

  “My brother, Andrew,” Beau said, approaching her with caution. Andrew had no idea what was going on. His mom had said something about a case, but this didn’t seem like that. This was…babysitting.

  “Andrew, this is Deirdre. She’s a client of mine that needed somewhere to be for a little while.” Beau, ever the lawyer, spoke in riddles and vague undertones Andrew used to want to figure out. Today, though, he simply shook Deirdre’s hand and introduced Celia and Bree.

  “Put us to work, Celia,” he said, and she did. Beau and Deirdre set the table, and Andrew noticed them with their heads bent together, talking, more than once.

  He put the yams and stuffing in the oven to warm again, and Bree started slicing the celery and cucumbers they’d brought from the lodge. Celia made gravy from the drippings of the turkey that Beau had roasted that morning, and then she put together a ranch dip to go with the veggie tray Bree had finished.

  With only minutes until lunchtime, Graham and his family arrived, followed by their mother and Eli, Meg, and Stockton.

  The atmosphere was vibrant and celebratory. Andrew gripped Eli’s shoulders tight and said, “How’s California?” He hadn’t thought he’d missed his younger brother quite so much, but he had.