“Been there, I guess?”
“Oh, yes. I had friends in both places,” she said. “We used to visit, before they settled down.”
“No inclination to get married?”
“If you’re proposing, sorry, but, no,” she said languidly, just to needle him. “I’m not nearly old enough to give up nightlife for diapers and formula.”
Some nightlife, she was thinking privately. The latest paperback romance and a glass of ginger ale.
He made a gruff sound in his throat.
“What do ranchers do for entertainment?” she wondered aloud.
“Sit up all night with dangerously pregnant heifers and pray for daylight and a good vet.”
“Why would that worry you? You’re just going to eat them, after all.”
“Are you nuts?” he exclaimed. “We don’t run a cow-calf operation. All our stock is purebred Santa Gertrudis, and we pamper our stock.”
Her dad did have a cow-calf operation. She knew it in and out, but she wasn’t about to admit that.
“I see,” she said slowly. “Why is a pregnant heifer so important?”
“It’s a first-time mother. If there are complications, like a breech birth, we have to have the vet.”
“Can’t you just use a, what do you call it, a calf-pull?” she blurted out, having caught herself from betraying intimate knowledge of ranching just in time.
“Too risky,” he said. “We invest a lot of time and love into our livestock. We raised most of our heifers, and bulls, from babies.” He smiled to himself. “The bulls follow us around like dogs. Amazes people who don’t know anything about livestock.”
“That’s not in books,” she pointed out.
“It’s not,” he agreed. “Some things you only learn from experience.”
She was thinking,you got that right. Painful experience, at that.
“What do you do when you’re not trying to steal cattle?”he asked. “And by the way, just in case you’re not from Texas, cattle rustling here can land you in prison until you have gray hair. You might actually get a lesser sentence for murder.”
“Thanks for the tip,” she said.
“Are you?” he added.
“Am I what?”
“From Texas,” he asked.
“Nope.”
“Back East?”
She laughed. “From Wyoming originally. But not anymore. I live back East. I’m only down here working on a big real estate sale with a couple of colleagues. They dropped me off at what they thought was the ranch property I had on my list. It wasn’t.”
“Real estate?” he asked.
“Yes. I have a license and everything.”
“Including a handgun,” he pointed out.
She sighed. “These days, a woman alone can be in a lot of trouble if she can’t protect herself. I don’t take chances.”
