Page 2 of The Rancher’s One and Only

He was genuinely taken aback by the fact that it was a woman. He hadn’t expected that. He didn’t know quite what to do with it. He didn’t want to scare her. It was weird how the potential gender of the interloper changed the whole way that he wanted to handle it.

He would’ve wanted to intimidate a dude hiding out on his property. The last thing he ever wanted to do was intimidate a woman.

He had a difficult relationship with his own violence. It had protected him; he’d learned to hone it and turn it into a moneymaker.

He also knew it was his father’s blood running through his veins.

His father, who’d never hesitated to use his fists on a woman, and Jax wasn’t that and never would be.

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I was going to come and find… Are you the owner?”

“I am,” he said.

“Good,” she said. Then she stood up, revealing that she was wearing a very baggy button-up top, tucked into a pair of olive green shorts. “My name is Ernestine Martin. And I’m with the Oregon Museum of Natural History and Science.”

“You’re with the museum. Do you have it stashed in the tent?”

She looked at him like he was ridiculous. “No. I work for the museum.”

“Yeah. I got that.”

“Oh. Then why did you ask if I had the museum with me?”

“Never mind. Can you just tell me what you’re doing here?”

“I am in the middle of a bone war the likes of which have not been seen since the Gilded Age.”

He was beginning to wonder if he had hit his head. Or if maybe he was having heatstroke. And was just hallucinating. Because he didn’t understand a single thing that came out of her mouth. Not a bit of it.

“A bone war?”

“Yes. Colloquially speaking. It’s really not bones that I’m after. But I was all set up to do an investigative dig at the fossil beds, and then, I discovered that she got there before me.”

“Who did?”

“Haley Boesch.”

She said that, like, he should have any idea who that was.

“I’m sorry, I’m not following this at all. What does someone being at the fossil beds have to do with you camping on my property?”

“I have a grant. I have a grant to come out here and dig for a month. And it’s quite a lot of money. But I have to produce what I hypothesize I can produce. The trouble is, apparently, Haley Boesch got a grant to dig in the fossil beds as well. And it’s not big enough for the both of us. Moreover, I don’t want to be taking the leftovers of her scientific findings.”

“I’m so confused.”

“My name is Dr. Ernestine Martin. And I am a paleontologist. I work for the Oregon Museum of Natural History and Science, and I have a grant to come and search this area for some very rare mammalian fossils and footprints of said mammals. I had a whole idea based on migration patterns of where those might be. But she got there first. This is the only other place based on my projections that I think I might be able to find those same things. And so I wanted to do a little bit of a preview before I talked to you.”

“Ma’am, I am trying to open up a guest ranch. And I can’t have someone random scrabbling around here.”

“Well, I was going to stay in a hotel. And I was going to use the money from my grant to pay for it. But I can camp in a tent, and I could give you some of my grant money.”

He paused. “For what?”

“In exchange for letting me dig. Here.”

“You want to dig up my ranch?”

“Not exactly. I want to specifically focus on a lot of these sedimentary rock shelves, which is where I think I’m going to find the most in the way of fossils. If I can get footprints… Primarily, Oregon was home to prehistoric mammals. And some of the fossils that have been found in this area have unlocked the keys to stages of the evolutionary chain that we couldn’t quite pin down before. I very badly want to be part of that. In fact, I actually think that your ranch is a better place to dig. But because it’s private property, I wasn’t going to attempt it.”