Page 8 of The Rancher’s One and Only

“Oh. That sounds nice.”

“What’s happening?” She could hear her dad’s voice coming from just out of the frame.

“She’s on a dig.”

“Oh.” Her dad’s face popped into the frame. “Good for you.”

“Thank you.”

“Your father’s golf swing has really improved. He’s going to be in a tournament with other retired dentists.”

And that was when the conversation turned entirely toward things Ernestine didn’t care about. But she had gotten very good at smiling and nodding the entire time people talked about such things. “What is it you’re looking for exactly?” her mom asked.

She always found these kinds of questions uncomfortable. Because she wanted to talk about it. She wanted to talk about it, though, in detail that she knew no one else would be interested in. She wanted to get deep and granular into why the fossil beds out here were so important, and why they held information that mattered. She wanted to talk about the time period, about the ancient mammals that always took a back seat to dinosaurs as far as public interest, and how recent discoveries that had preserved footprints and even some hair were drawing the scientific community closer to filling in evolutionary gaps.

But she knew they were asking, not on that level. And it made her not want to talk about it at all, because it was just…unsatisfying.

Think about how you would explain it to kids at the museum.

Well. The truth was, if she was going to explain it to kids at the museum, she would do it in detail. So, she would make the details as sensational and gross as possible, because kids did seem to enjoy that. She liked teaching kids. Especially the ones that came to the museum for the purpose of learning. Because no one in her life had been excited that she wanted to learn, she took it as her solemn duty to make the kids that came into the museum feel appreciated for being inquisitive and curious.

“Fossils,” she said.

“Well. That’s… You do like that.”

“I do,” she said.

Then her mother spent another fifteen minutes telling her everything there was to know about her sister Violet’s wedding plans, and her sister Abigail’s bid to be on the HOA. And Ernestine was antsy to get off for dinner. Which she felt she managed to do in a very polite way, and was feeling self-congratulatory as she heated up her instant meal. It was nice to be able to use a stovetop and not have to cook it over a fire. She also decided to take it to her bed, which was beautiful, and ironically made her feel closer to the outdoors than the tent had.

She opened up her laptop and put on a cherished sitcom. She liked to watch the same characters over and over sometimes because it was comforting. No matter how much life changed, no matter how much she felt like she was being left behind sometimes, those people and places never changed. They were always there for her.

She thought about Jax again. Who was an entirely new person, and was all the more fascinating for it. More like a fossil than a fictional man. Because he was something that she wanted to learn about. Not something she just wanted to become familiar with.

She hadn’t met very many men who were that physically distracting. There had been a man she’d been on a dig with back in college, and he’d been that same distracting sort of handsome, and it had been difficult for her to think as deeply about the work as she wanted to when he was around. He’d also been married, and she definitely would never pursue a married man.

It was absolutely outside her moral code. But he thought there was something else going on…

The disappointment of that—of the moment he’d tried to kiss her—and said that she had been sending hints… That was something that she hadn’t really gotten over.

It’d been five years since then, but she had no idea how she was supposed to know she was sending signals if she was really sure that she wasn’t. Or maybe she had been, because she was attracted to him. So maybe it was her fault. Whatever, she had decided it was much easier to just keep blinders on.

And for someone who really liked to learn things, leaving that part of life unexplored was unsatisfying sometimes.

But it kept her safe.

People just felt too dangerous sometimes.

Like Dr. Haley Boesch and her stolen dig site.

Jax might not understand what bone wars were, but she did. All too well. If she thought too much about it, she was going to get angry, and then she was going to spend all night obsessing about it. Then, she was going to have to stop herself from marching over to that stolen dig site and telling Haley it was entirely wrong of her to have done this. Because her taking that spot was based on her stealing Ernestine’s research.

There were plenty of people who thought that doing whatever they had to do to get ahead was all right. But Ernestine would just never be okay with that. What was the point if it wasn’t your own discovery? What was the point if it wasn’t your own research? She had a brain for a reason. It was to figure things like this out. To explore these sorts of things.

That kind of laziness was just something she couldn’t tolerate. The lack of integrity. That had always been another big schism she had found existed between herself and the people around her.

A lot of people just wanted the things. Ernestine cared about how she got them.

She turned her focus back to her laptop, watched her show and finished eating dinner. And when she lay back and looked up at the stars through the glass ceiling, she thought that just maybe her integrity had been rewarded.