Life After Wife (Three Magic Words Trilogy, #3)(24)

“You’ve thought about this a lot, haven’t you?”

He shrugged. “I’m making this my home. I want to do well.”

She remembered what Tandy had said at the lunch after the funeral. She’d been right—Elijah had come home, just like she had. No matter how mean or cantankerous she got, he wasn’t leaving. That meant accepting the fact that she had a new business partner. It also meant she’d have to stay on her toes and be alert, or he’d gradually take over the ranch anyway, and she’d just be a name on the deed.

“Is that all?” she asked again.

“Just one more minor detail. We will stand united at the front door to greet each guest. It’ll only take an hour or so and will say thank you in a special way. You got a problem with that?”

She shook her head. “We can’t circulate among the buyers and friends if we are stuck at the front door, so yes, I do have a big problem with that.”

“There will be plenty of time for circulating and talking to the people. After the first hour, we’ll make the rounds together. And we’ll meet each person for sure if we are at the door.”

“That looks like we are a couple,” she said.

“No, it looks like we are partners,” he argued. “If we danced every dance together and I looked down into your eyes with ‘I want to kiss you’ written all over my face, that would make us a couple, God forbid.”

She bristled. “Why ‘God forbid’?”

“God forbid because there would be a murder. One of us would be dead. The other would be in jail, and the ranch would be sold on the auction block to some big corporation that would bulldoze the house down and grow wheat to send to a third-world country,” he said.

“So what’s my job in all this?” She ignored the statement about murder because it was the gospel truth and couldn’t be added to or taken away from.

“Call in the crew to start cleaning. I suppose you and Gus have already discussed that, haven’t you?” Elijah asked.

“Of course,” she lied. “If that’s the end of the conversation, I’m going out to the barn to take a look around. Unless you want to tell me how to fix my hair and what to wear to the shindig?”

He grinned.

She was amazed at how it softened his angular face. “What?”

“I reckon you’ll wear jeans and a fancy shirt. After all, it’s a western-type barn party, not a black-tie dinner at the Waldorf.”

Had he been to such an affair? She wouldn’t have asked, even if it meant the difference between visiting with Lucifer or the angels on Judgment Day, but suddenly she wanted to know more about the Elijah who wasn’t a soldier, who wasn’t as stubborn as a Missouri mule, and who was a very handsome, well-organized man.

He rolled up the plans.

She headed to the barn, hoping that Gus was there and he’d already hired help to start the cleanup process. If not, she was in big trouble with her new “partner.” She made quote marks with her fingers before she put a hand on the yard fence and hopped over it with the agility of a cougar. She found Gus sitting in the smallest John Deere tractor about to start it up to move it out of the barn.

“Hey, Miz Sophie,” he waved.

She motioned for him to get out of the cab and kept walking toward him, keeping an eye over her shoulder the whole time. Hopefully, Elijah was making his cancellation calls to the Dallas caterer or pretending to do so. She wouldn’t put it past him to have never called one at all. That way he could concede a small point to her without losing anything he wanted.

“How many men we got coming for cleanup this afternoon?” she asked.

“Regular crew. I called them last week and set it up,” Gus said.

“Can you get four or five more? Pay them extra if you have to. We’re doing a little more this year. Caterers will be here the whole time starting tomorrow morning, and they need a place to set up earlier than the day after the sale.”

Gus rubbed his chin. “Well, Rick’s son would be glad for the work, and he’s got a nephew that just got laid off over at the plant in Abilene, and I bet he’d know a few men who’d be glad for some extra work. Pay ’em in cash?”

“That’s right, at the end of each day. See if they can come on in right after lunch. And you supervise when they get here. They can do the heavy stuff,” she said.

Gus was a man of few words normally and didn’t get into anyone’s business. He’d been on the ranch for years and knew every square inch of it.

“Miz Sophie, who is my boss? You or Mr. Elijah? I ain’t got no beef with either one of you, but I need to know who to listen to.” He removed his old straw hat and ran his fingers through hair that had more gray than black. His face was a study in weathered wrinkles.

For the first time in all the years she’d known him, his eyes looked worried.

“We both are. If I tell you something and he says different, just come talk to me, and we’ll work it out among the three of us. I tried to buy him out. I’ve tried to run him out. Nothing works, so I guess we are partners until one of us dies of pure old stubbornness,” she said with a smile.

Gus slapped his old straw hat into shape and resettled it on his head. “How do you feel about that?”

“Don’t matter how I feel. It’s the way it is. He won’t sell to me, and I ain’t budgin’. Been thinkin’ about putting a trailer on the back corner of the property. Back in that pecan grove,” she said.