Nothing felt right. For days. Laura got off easy at first, since everyone wanted to hear how the meeting had gone instead of asking her about her love life. And she’d only had to tell the story about defeating the Bonnevilles about nine times…in that first day.

“Yeah, they were pretty pissed,” she explained to Natalie, Linus, and Jogi in the breakroom as she poured herself a much-needed mug of coffee late that afternoon. “You could tell that their lawyer was annoyed that the old letters even existed.”

“And they’re just willing to let it drop?” Linus asked, unable to wipe the smile off his face. He was enjoying Laura’s story more than anyone else. Probably because his family was one of the ones that went back five generations in Haskell and had had run-ins with the Bonnevilles before.

Laura shrugged. “They had to. With evidence like that, they didn’t have a leg to stand on.” She sipped her coffee, contemplating adding more sugar.

“I bet Sandy loved that,” Jogi said, half to himself.

Laura’s gaze zipped to him over the rim of her coffee mug. She was glad she had it in front of her face to hide her smile. “Yeah, she was thrilled.”

She paused, tickled by the extra sparkle in Jogi’s smile. Sandy and Jogi, eh? Talk about people who didn’t seem like a good match. Sandy was the height of sophistication, and Jogi was… Well, Jogi was Jogi, goofy grin, close-cropped beard, IT obsession, and all.

“You should have seen the way Sandy went after Richard Bonneville when he insinuated that he was going to try to take over the board of trustees of the bank,” she went on, wondering if she could gauge how Jogi felt about Sandy.

“Oh yeah?” His dark eyebrows inched up.

“She really let him have it,” Laura said. “She meant business. It was almost as if she were begging him to try her to see what she was capable of.”

An impressed, lop-sided smile spread across Jogi’s face, and his eyes lost their focus for a second. Laura was worried that he’d gone a little too far into his imagination when his phone rang. He snapped out of whatever fantasy distracted him and answered the phone.

“Hello? Yeah. Yep. I’ll be right there.” He tapped his phone, put it back in his pocket, and started for the door. “Great story, Laura. Great—” He bumped into the doorway before he could finish. With a final thumbs-up, he rushed out on whatever errand had called him.

“Can you imagine that guy with Sandy?” Linus laughed. He shook his head as he too left the room.

“Yeah,” Natalie added as she too headed out, “but we weren’t so sure about you and Ted at first, and look how perfect you two are for each other.”

Laura was left standing there with a mug of coffee and a throat too tight to drink it. Natalie didn’t know she and Ted had broken up. So much for perfection.

And yet, the thought wouldn’t dislodge itself from Laura’s mind. Did people actually think that she and Ted were good together? The only people she’d heard opinions from so far were folks around Haskell who she didn’t know all that well. The people who did know her seemed to think all was right with a world that included Laura and Ted, sittin’ in a tree. And here she’d gone and cut off the K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

The knowledge that she’d been wrong—wrong to put herself down, wrong to walk out on Ted, and wrong not to put things to right immediately after the meeting—stayed with her that night, through the next day, and beyond. Every few minutes, she found herself picking up her cell phone to see if there’d been any texts from Ted. Every hour or so she started a few texts of her own, only to backspace the crap out of them and shove her phone in a drawer. Especially the ones she started writing after eleven at night. What right did she have to insert herself back into Ted’s life when she was the one who had loused things up so royally?

Thinking of the words “insert” and “Ted” in the same sentence didn’t help her peace of mind at all either. She suffered through two nights, remembering all of the beautiful things he had taught her. On the one hand, she shouldn’t have kept herself so closed off for all those years. On the other, waiting for sex until Ted came along was kind of awesome. But not when she lay awake, tossing and turning with the twin miseries of aching for him and knowing it was her own damn fault there was nothing she could do about it.

By the time she got home from work on Wednesday, things had reached a point where if she didn’t find some sort of massive, tangible way to distract herself from the gnawing guilt of the way things had ended with Ted, she would probably end up driving out to the Flint ranch and doing something stupid…like begging him to take her back.

“I suck at relationships,” she told one of Blake’s larger model dinosaurs as she took him down from his shelf. “This is why I didn’t want to get into one in the first place.”

She put the triceratops on the table along with the other models she was moving in order to clean. Good old Topsy stared back at her, teeth bared like he was laughing at her.

“You would have done the same thing if a guy as wonderful as Ted was suddenly interested in you too.” She turned back to the shelf, then stopped, facing the triceratops again. “Not that you’re gay, mind you. I don’t really know if you’re a boy or a girl. Blake never told me.”

Because, of course, Blake would have known. As good as she was, Blake had known everything there was to know about dinosaurs by the end. Somehow, he would have known whether old Topsy was male or female.

She turned back to the shelf, her arms suddenly ten times heavier than they’d been seconds before. Blake would have made a top-rate paleontologist. He’d been reading a college-level textbook about raptors the day he died. Or at least holding the book with his eyes closed, each breath becoming shorter than the last. It was so unfair.

She moved another couple of models from the shelf to the table, only realizing her eyes were watery with tears when she put them down. Blake would have been furious with her for letting Ted slip away.

He has a major fossil site on his property, the voice in her head argued—the voice that always sounded like Blake, like he was still there with her after all. How could you just let him go when there could be anything waiting there for you to dig it up?

“Yeah, but what about all the other stuff that got dug up?” she told him. “What about this sucky feeling of missing someone and being alone?”

It’s a risk you should have taken, Blake told her…she told herself. She wasn’t really sure which it was anymore.

She cleared her throat and continued moving dinosaur models, then wiped the shelf down with a damp rag. The problem with keeping all of Blake’s dinosaurs was that they needed a heck of a lot of maintenance so that they didn’t turn into dust magnets. But then, as she was learning, just about everything in life that was worth keeping needed maintenance.

You know you’re strong enough to get on with life when you lose someone, that voice started up again as she put the models back on the shelf. And you know that your life is infinitely richer for having him in it, even if he is gone now.

“But that’s just the point,” she argued with herself as she moved Topsy back into his spot. “I blew it. Ted is gone. Even if you’re right and I should do the whole embracing life thing because Blake never could, that doesn’t mean I’ll get a second chance.”

Oh, really?

She had no clue where her last thought came from, but an instant later, there was a tap at her living room window. Which was odd, considering her apartment was on the second floor. She frowned. The tap came again. Confused, she glanced over her shoulder at the window.

Ted was there, framed from the chest up in one of the panes. Laura blinked hard and did a double-take. She had to be hallucinating. But no, Ted waved and motioned for her to come to the window. Laura continued to stare at him, slack-jawed, for a few more seconds before shaking herself.

She rushed to the window and threw the bottom half up, letting in a blast of hot, summer air.

“What the heck are you doing?” She poked her head out the window far enough to see that Ted had set a ladder up against the side of the building, its top resting against the sill. The hardware store downstairs probably wasn’t too happy about that. Unless Ted’s antics were some sort of advertisement.

“Hi,” Ted said, leaning against the window frame. “I thought I’d come by and see if you want to grab some ice cream.”

Laura gaped at him. “Are you insane?”

He at least had the good sense to look down at the ladder he was standing on. “Yeah, Dad said I should probably just use the door, but I wanted to make one of those grand, romantic gestures.”

A sizzle shot down Laura’s spine, leaving her numb in its wake. “Excuse me, what kind of gesture?” she managed to wheeze out.

Ted smiled. Not just any smile, a warm, teasing smile. A forgiving smile. “You heard me. Here.”

He leaned back, reaching into his pockets. Laura’s breath caught in her throat at the thought of him tumbling backwards. She’d hung from rock faces on rickety scaffolding a time or two herself, but that paled in comparison to the anxiety of watching him search the pockets of his blazer—wait, he was wearing a blazer as he climbed a ladder to talk to her through her living room window?

He pulled a series of small-to-medium sized rocks from the pockets of his blazer and lined them up on the window frame. Laura frowned at them, her mouth half open in shock and bafflement. When she spotted the delicate imprint of fossil ferns in the rocks, her mouth snapped shut, and a warm flush filled her, starting with her cheeks.

“These are—”

“Fossilized flowers,” he cut her off, then shrugged. “Well, sort of. That’s why it took me so long to pull this ridiculous stunt.”

Laura picked up one of the rocks to get a closer look. It wasn’t the biggest or most grandiose fossil fern she’d ever seen, but the leaves were all there, etched in stone over millions of years. “What do you mean it took you so long?” Her voice was high and breathy.

“I wanted to talk to you as soon as Sandy was done with you the other day,” he said, causing Laura’s heart to skip a beat. A few beats. “But Dad said it would be best to wait. He thought that if I ambushed you right after the meeting like that, you’d, well, okay, he thought you’d get scared and back off even more.”

Laura glanced from the fossils to him, mouth and lips working, but no words coming out.

Ted studied her expression for a few seconds, winced, and went on. “I actually wanted to come talk to you a lot earlier than that,” he said as if admitting it would make her disappear in a puff of smoke. “But again, Dad said I needed to give it some time, needed to let you breathe, think.”

“Um…I…oh.” At the moment, as far as she was concerned, she could neither breathe nor think.

“I have something else for you too,” he said, reaching into the inside pocket of his blazer. This time he took out a plain envelope and handed it to her. Laura didn’t realize how much she was shaking until she nearly fumbled the hand-off. “This is the other thing that took a couple days to put together.

She blinked at the envelope, then at Ted. The envelope wasn’t sealed, so she opened it. It contained an official-looking letter on fancy paper.

“Sandy helped us put this together, but you are not allowed to let that worry you for a single second, do you understand?” he scolded her, a spark of mischief in his eyes.

“Sandy is after Jogi,” she said before reading the letter. “She yelled at me after the meeting and told me that if I let her come between you and me, she’d buy me bad lipstick.”

Ted froze for half a second, then burst into laughter. “What?”

“It’s…never mind.” Her eyes had just scanned the first line of the letter.

“We the undersigned, Roscoe J. Flint, Theodore R. Flint, and Casey M. Flint, do hereby convey partial ownership amounting to fifty percent of all fossil discoveries made on the property known as the Flint ranch to Laura E. Kincade.”

The letter went on to specify that Laura was to have a say in any decisions that would be made about selling the fossil that had already been discovered and any other fossils that might be discovered at a later date. She had to read it twice to be sure she wasn’t dreaming. Even then, she wasn’t sure.

“You’re giving me half of the fossil?” she squeaked out at last.

“Yep.” Ted smiled as though he’d picked a daisy for her in a field.

“Ted,” she hissed. “That could be millions of dollars. You can’t just climb up to my window and give me millions of dollars.”

“I didn’t.” He went on smiling as he leaned in closer. “I gave you millions of dollars and some fossil flowers.”

“You….” She wanted to smack him with the letter and push his ladder back. She also wanted to lunge out the window and throw her arms around him, kissing him within an inch of his life. Needless to say, no one had ever done anything even remotely like that for her before. “Are you really sure?”

“Absolutely.” He nodded. “I talked it over with Dad and Casey, and they agree. If it weren’t for you, we never would have known what we have. And—” He stopped himself, glancing down for a moment before lifting his head and meeting her eyes. “And I just hope that you realize what you have too.

“I’m not saying I’m the perfect man or God’s gift to women or anything, but I love you, Laura.”

Her throat closed up all over again, and tears stung at her eyes once more. Ugh, tears again, she laughed at herself, trying to blink them away. She couldn’t look away from Ted, even as teardrops plopped onto her cheeks.

“I know that you’re nervous about getting into a relationship because you’ve lost someone you love before,” Ted went on. “I feel like I’ve told you a million times that you’re the only girl for me and that I’m not going anywhere, but you still don’t believe me.” He rolled his eyes, but it was with humor and affection. “That’s why I refuse to accept that we’re broken up. I mean—” He rushed to add, holding up his hands. “—if that’s what you truly want, I’ll respect that and back off. The thing is, I don’t believe that’s what you really want.”

“It’s not,” she whispered.

Ted blinked and shook his head. “Excuse me?” She’d genuinely surprised him.

“I don’t really want to be broken up with you,” she confessed in a tiny voice, half hoping he hadn’t heard her.

“Say that again?” He’d definitely heard. His mouth spread into a slow smile, and the glow of affection radiating from him blossomed.

“I said that I don’t want to be broken up from you, Theodore R. Flint.” She was so filled with joy that she giggled. “What does the ‘R’ stand for anyhow?” She glanced down at the letter.

“Roscoe, of course,” he said.

She looked up at him. “Aw, that’s so sweet! You’ve got your dad’s name.”

“I do. I guess he figured that was one way to force some smarts into me.”

“What, by giving you his name?”

“By forcing me to remember him and his advice any time I have to sign a check or an official document, like a deed to the dinosaurs or a loan or, I dunno, a marriage certificate or something.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Laura leaned back, standing straight, which put her several inches above Ted’s eye level. “Slow down there, cowboy.”

“I didn’t say it had to be our marriage certificate,” he teased her. “Casey wants me to witness her and Scott’s marriage, okay? Geez, calm down.”

She snorted out a giggle. Calming down was the last thing she was going to do. Somehow, miraculously, she’d gotten a second chance. Stupid as she was, the Universe was giving her another shot with Ted. There was a fair chance she’d mess this one up too, but behind all of her doubt loomed a much bigger, more powerful hope. Ted loved her. He would help her get to where she needed to be.

“I think you’re kind of wonderful, Theodore Roscoe Flint,” she said, leaning toward him again. “I think, maybe, just possibly, there’s a chance—” She lowered her voice more and more with each word until she ended on a whisper. “—that I might just love you enough to admit I’m finally ready for a relationship.”

“Good.” He winked and swayed forward.

Their lips came close to meeting before Laura pulled back and gasped, “Wait! I don’t want to kiss you when you’re balanced on a ladder.”

“Good point.” Ted inched back.

Laura grinned. “Why don’t you climb down and come inside by the door, like a normal person.”

“Are we normal people?” he asked, arching a brow.

“No.” Laura laughed. “But come inside the normal way anyhow. That way I won’t have to worry about you breaking something when I kiss you. Well,” she added with a mischievous eyebrow wiggle. “At least not that way.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Ted said, dipping below the level of her window as he scurried down the ladder.

Laura gathered up her fossil flowers and moved them to the table. She skipped back to shut the window, then danced across the room to the door, ready to jump into Ted’s arms once he came up. The only thing that could possibly have made her happier was that she was pretty sure she still had some PSF brand condoms in her bedside table. She might have been a hopeless nerdy girl, but there was at least one awesome cowboy out there who loved her. All it took was one, and she was pretty sure that she would love him with all her heart for the rest of her life.