Page 16 of The Rancher’s One and Only

“Well,” he said, as they rolled down the sun-faded road and into the very small town of Clear Lake, “here it is.”

Chapter Five

Clear Lake wasn’t the most remote town she’d ever done any work in, but there was something about it. It was quaint, cute and she could see that it might be able to have tourist appeal, but there was also something very utilitarian and specific about it. Combined with the fact that it was essentially in the middle of nothing, it wasn’t a mystery why this place wasn’t exactly slammed with visitors.

She was interested in it.

Historically, though, her interest in something didn’t speak to the interest of the masses.

Jax was extremely interesting.

She felt awful about his mom. And embarrassed that she’d asked. But once she asked, she felt like she had to keep going. Build the whole picture. She hated when she did things like that, though. When she asked these blunt questions, and the answers were weird and sad, and she felt like she might’ve hurt them by making them think about those answers.

Of course, there was no way she could’ve known. But maybe that was why other people weren’t so nosy with a person that quickly.

She kind of wanted to apologize to him. But he didn’t seem like the kind of person who would be overly interested in an apology.

He was very stoic. But he’d been kind when answering her questions. He was very kind. Men like him weren’t usually quite that nice. He was extremely masculine; he had that hard energy about him. She would assume, based on appearance, that he would be more stoic and taciturn. In some ways, she supposed he was, but there was also a sort of openness to him. Charming.

Charm didn’t usually get to her. But maybe she wasn’t used to talking to men who were charming and that attractive. He was attractive. Just objectively. If a person were to scientifically measure his face, he would be measured as attractive.

Ernestine liked to deal in facts. And the facts of his handsomeness were impossible to dispute.

But then, generally speaking she found handsome men to be inaccessible, boring and not worth the time.

Not so with him.

“Is the grocery store in town going to be upset if you have supplies on your land?” She had noticed that there was a store building on the property, though it wasn’t open yet, the shelves still empty.

“No. Because we are actually going to have them manage it as a second location. We did a lot of that kind of thing when we decided to build this year. How to use existing companies, how not to step on people’s toes. There’s a motel in town, and we just had to come to the conclusion that we were catering to two very different audiences. I don’t know that they are happy with our presence, but they’ve accepted it. We’re looking into doing some dining on-site as well, and we’re talking to a couple of the local restaurants about it. About having rotational nights where they serve our guests with their chefs and their menus. One of the women that owns a diner in town is actually a pretty decorated chef, so the opportunity for her to get in there and do some more gourmet cooking really appeals.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you.”

“I suppose, but it’s also a matter of survival. You don’t want the locals to hate you.”

“A lot of people don’t care about things like that—look at Haley. I understand that what she’s doing is immediately expedient for her, but she is damaging connections. If she ever wanted to come work at the museum, I would say that she had stolen work from me.”

“But don’t you think the man that’s passing her information would simply vouch for her?”

“Oh, absolutely, but at my museum I’m one of the most important people. So when you’re doing what this person is doing and operating outside the framework, that doesn’t matter. But it will matter when he needs my framework. Do you understand?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I do. So, you’re a big deal at your museum?”

This kind of thing always got her in trouble. She wasn’t good at genuflecting, wasn’t good at bowing and scraping just because somebody thought they were important, and she was very clear-eyed about the position she occupied in the industry. A lot of people didn’t like it.

But he was asking, and she didn’t see any point in minimizing. “Yes. Frankly, because I’m young, and there’s a lot of time that they’re going to be able to get out of me in my research. But also, I’ve established a lot of programs that really appeal to kids, which has brought a lot of people into the museum. A lot of my research, my displays, bring in the traffic that they need. Funding. Everybody’s research needs funding. And I’ve been able to help them get that. So, that’s pretty much been essential in making them bulletproof. But of course, Haley is at her own museum.”

“Got it.”

And he didn’t seem to think that she should minimize. That she should be more humble. She hated that. There was no reason to be humble when you were good at what you did. There was no reason that telling the truth should be seen as getting above yourself.

She hated that women were expected to walk around with false modesty while men were often a lot freer to shout about their achievements. And she especially hated it in her industry, where people liked to pretend that they were extra enlightened, all while running around reinforcing the exact same structures that you saw everywhere else.

Funny that this man, this cowboy—who she knew many people would stereotype as being old-fashioned—didn’t seem to have as much of an issue with it as professorial academic types did.

“What made you start to suspect that there was espionage going on in the museum?”

“This isn’t the first time she’s shown up where I wanted to dig. And like I said, she’s better at the social component, so she’s extremely good at greasing the wheels, and getting everything to move a lot quicker. She makes it look like she’s ahead of me, and I know she isn’t. There’s always something that’s too on the nose in her research. She’s plagiarizing me. Essentially. Not in her published paperwork, but when she’s writing grants. I actually couldn’t get one a year ago because she had gotten one for a very similar line of inquiry prior, and it devalued my research. Then she went and found fossils of a primordial possum, and I was going to find those fossils. I knew where we would find them, and I knew that they would close the gap in our understanding of that species.”