Page 28 of The Rancher’s One and Only

And they would find that he was compliant. They basically moved everything around. Goddammit. It didn’t make any sense that this was so difficult. It shouldn’t be. They deserved to have this run smoothly. They were giving the community something good, after all. Why did it have to be this goddamned dramatic?

But he did his best to keep his voice neutral, and he was pretty sure he did a good job.

He went up to the main barn, because he knew that Rowdy would be there with the horses.

“Inspection next week,” he said when he walked into the barn.

“Cool,” Rowdy said. “Can’t wait. Bureaucracy has become my very favorite thing.”

“Yeah. I know. But I think we have everything sorted out now, so it should all be fine.”

“Should be,” said Rowdy, “but I think you and I both know that that doesn’t mean it will be.”

“No.” They weren’t exactly optimists. And for good enough reason. Life was tricky and difficult at the best of times, and they’d seen more of the difficulty of it all than either of them ever cared to see again.

“Sometimes I feel like the community is just against us opening this,” Rowdy said.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Jax said. “We tried really hard to get to a point where we worked with everybody as best we could. Sure, there are some people who are going to resist the change, but it’s not everybody.”

“It just feels like it’s the people in charge.”

“Maybe if you hadn’t gotten a bad reputation around town,” Jax teased.

“Excuse me, I have behaved in a very pristine manner, partly because I knew we were going to have to come in here and do this, and I did not want to create drama.”

“I was kidding,” he said. “I know that you would never do anything to compromise any of this. And that you haven’t. I’m just giving you a hard time.”

“Yeah. I know that. It’s how you are. Fighting even when you don’t have to fight.”

Jax didn’t think that was true. But maybe it was. Maybe it was a little bit more than just giving him a hard time. But hell, he was pretty sure that velvet-gloved hostility was his love language.

“And how is our guest?”

“She’s good. She found some fossils.”

“You like her,” Rowdy said.

Jax frowned. “She’s interesting.”

“Yeah. But I’m kind of wondering if you’ve been in the middle of nowhere for too long, and you’re kind of into her.”

She was… Well, she was interesting. And he was pretty sure he would think that even if he wasn’t out in the middle of nowhere. “How many dinosaur scientists do you know?”

“Dinosaur scientist,” Rowdy said. “Is that the technical term?”

“I’m just saying, she’s a unique kind of person to me. Definitely not the kind of person that we run into every day.”

“Hey, we may run into all kinds of different people. And if she’s uncovering fossils, we may run into more and more dinosaur scientists.”

“Well, good. Since I’ve discovered a new niche interest.”

Rowdy cleared his throat. “Depending on how the interest expresses itself, fetish might be a more appropriate term.”

“Hey,” he said. He felt weirdly protective of Ernestine. And the idea of…that…though. She was such an interesting person. Curious. Pretty. He wished that he could get a better look at her figure, but in all honesty, what he had seen of it was appealing enough. But there was that sweetness. And he wasn’t sweet. As he and Rowdy had just discussed.

“What? Now you’re going to pretend that you’re above such things? Too bad for you, I’ve known you since you were thirteen. And I know you well enough to know when you’re interested.”

This, he supposed was the catch-22 of family. Because Rowdy did know him, and had seen his behavior over the years, good, bad and indifferent, knew him well enough to guess a whole lot of things. But he was wrong. At least, in this instance. She was an interesting creature that had shown up here, and he was fascinated by her. By how different she was from anyone and anything else he’d ever encountered.