Page 7 of The Rancher’s One and Only

“That is better than a tent in the dirt?”

“Yeah,” he said.

He turned to leave her. And he felt like, for the first time, it seemed like things were actually going his way. At least, Dr. Ernestine Martin would be busy and wouldn’t cause him any trouble.

If anything, she was a boon.

And a lifetime full of setbacks, he would take the boon.

Chapter Two

He was just so big. Ernestine couldn’t stop thinking about him. She only came up to his shoulder. He was so big it was nearly impractical. And yet, there was something endlessly appealing about it. It was one of those biological imperatives, she was sure. It made sense that often women were very attracted to very strong, very large men because they exemplified the traits of a protector and a provider. So, there was that. She was biologically predisposed to a fascination, the end.

She looked around the cabin. What she should have been focused on was this place. It was like something out of a dream or a cartoon. The kind of fantasy play she would’ve loved to see when she was a kid.

The entire place was fascinating. Maybe he seemed fascinating because of the context of it. That was entirely possible. She’d never been to a place like this before. She’d been to a lot of dry, dusty type environments, so she didn’t so much mean the environment as the ranch. She didn’t think she would be interested in that kind of thing. Though she should have known, anything new and novel was likely to find a trench in her brain to park, and marinate. It was just how she was wired. New information was gold in every fashion imaginable.

He was a real cowboy. He had rolled up on the dig site with his cowboy hat, his blue jeans and his boots, and she felt transported to some other time and place.

It had always been a contradiction in Ernestine’s personality that she loved to get lost in fictional worlds as much as she loved to learn facts. At least, her parents had found it contradictory. But then, they found everything about her contradictory. They still did. They tried; they really did.

But the truth was, her parents were the most boring people alive. That was maybe not fair, but she had spent more time with them than she had with other boring people. Her parents were interested in social status and the goings-on of the neighborhood. In small talk. The weather and the Joneses and how to keep up with them.

Ernestine could think of nothing she cared less about. Her two sisters were the same as their parents. They cared about clothes, and they cared about the minutiae of interpersonal relationships at school, at work and in their neighborhood. And Ernestine cared about concepts. Ideas. And characters in books, movies and TV shows. She wanted to sit down and think about the world-building and her favorite fantasy series, or the composition of extremely nice sedimentary rock.

It felt like a gap. Like her brain existed at two completely opposite ends of the spectrum, and nowhere in between.

It worked for her job. She could dig for fossils while listening to audiobooks. And life was pretty good. If lonely sometimes.

Though staying in this place might minimize the loneliness. She had been prepared to do all of this entirely by herself, but maybe she didn’t have to.

And maybe when she had days off, Jax could show her around the ranch. That would be very interesting.

She thought about Rowdy and Dakota. They were also extremely handsome. But she had a feeling she was experiencing first-sight bias. Jax was the one she’d seen first, and so he was the one she was the most fascinated by. The one who felt the most handsome to her.

She felt compelled to figure out where each of their faces sat along the lines of the golden ratio. That was kind of weird. Sometimes she was weird. At least she knew that now. When she was a kid, she didn’t. Because she could only experience life the way that she saw it, and when others didn’t experience it the same way, it was confusing and frustrating. She had a lot of friendships that lasted about a year, then ended abruptly when she made a comment that the friend deemed offensive.

And she always struggled with that.

Because why wouldn’t people want to know the truth? It seemed like something that would be useful. If you couldn’t see a situation clearly, wasn’t it a good thing when a friend could see it for you? But no. People always thought she was insensitive, which really hurt her feelings, because she was extremely sensitive. It was why she cared about people getting a new perspective. It was why she was trying to help in the first place. Because other people’s pain was so uncomfortable.

It was why she chose a job where she, by and large, got to work alone. She crept out of her basement office in the museum two days a week for junior programming and otherwise she was able to just do her own thing. That suited her just fine. Her days were filled with cataloguing things that needed cataloguing, working on displays; mainly, it was a lot of research, a lot of writing, and…grant writing. Lots and lots of grant writing. But that was where her direct form of communication was helpful. And that was the thing. Ernestine had figured out how to make qualities that people found irritating in her into assets. So there was no point in self-pity.

She looked around the beautiful glass cabin. At night, she was going to be able to see the stars. Oh, she really wished that she had brought her telescope. Because that would be fascinating, of course; looking outside here would’ve been amazing as well. It was just so dark, so far away from everything. She loved places like this. It was like there was finally space. Enough space around herself, enough space around her thoughts. Someday, she’d love to live somewhere like this. The idea that she could go out onto her vast expanse of property and dig for fossils at her leisure seemed like a crazy fantasy.

She looked at the time and sighed. She had to call her mother. It was her weekly FaceTime. Sometimes her dad joined.

Maybe she should be grateful for the fact that they wanted to speak to her on a regular schedule, particularly when they did find her mystifying and difficult. But the older she got, the more she found it difficult to be grateful for people who didn’t even seem interested in understanding her. To be fair, she wasn’t all that interested in understanding them.

She picked her phone up and dialed her mother.

It took a couple of seconds of ringing, and her mother’s face filled the screen.

“You got some sun today,” she said, first thing. Ernestine touched her cheeks. “I guess so.”

“Whereabouts are you?”

“Eastern Oregon. The middle of nowhere, frankly. I’m doing a dig.”