By the time Saturday rolled around, Laura had given herself precisely sixteen pep-talks and twelve stern lectures on how she had no reason to be nervous about visiting the Flint ranch. Ted hadn’t asked her out there so he could ambush her with another date request. The visit was all about a rock sticking out of the ground. It could be anything or nothing. Ted was just taking advantage of her expertise. It was what friends did. Nothing more was implied. And getting ice cream with him after baseball practice was not a date.

Although, would it have been so bad if it was?

She silenced her rebellious thoughts with a grunt and gripped the steering wheel tighter as she turned off the main road and onto the Flint’s long, gravel driveway. She wasn’t Ted’s type, and he would only be disappointed if he pursued things. And she was loath to get attached to someone only to be crushed when she lost him. Again.

Images of Blake and his indomitable smile squeezed her chest and filled her with happy-sad. No, it was better to stick with her mission—investigate the bone.

The dinosaur bone.

She had almost talked herself around to facing the morning with professional detachment when Ted waved to her from the front porch of his family’s house. According to what Casey had once told her, the current Flint house was a reconstruction of the original homestead built by her ancestor Jarvis Flint’s adopted mother, Virginia Piedmont, in the 1860s. Part of it had been torn down in the 1920s, but since then, several additions had been added, giving the house a quirky combination of historic charm and modern sensibility.

But it wasn’t the house that snagged Laura’s attention as she parked next to a pair of old trucks and climbed out of her puny sedan. Ted was even more gorgeous than usual when he was in his element. He had on worn jeans and a faded t-shirt, both of which did amazing things to show off the hard, lean lines of his body. His tanned arms stood out in all their muscled glory as he strolled toward her, hands in his pockets. He must not have shaved that morning, but the shadow of stubble looked good on him. Really, really good. And to top it all off, he wore a beat up old cowboy hat that completed the picture he made with perfect style.

“Hey,” he said as he met her halfway across the gravel drive. “You made it.”

“Yep. I said I would.” She tried to smile, but was reasonably certain the expression that came to her face was a dorky smirk. Do not ask to see his bone, do not ask to see his bone, do not ask to see his bone, she chanted to herself.

“Do you want something to drink or a snack before we walk out there?” he asked. “I’ve got some iced tea in the fridge.”

Laura licked her lips at the mention of iced tea…then realized too late how that gesture might come off to Ted. “No, that’s okay,” she rushed to say.

“Maybe when we get back.” Ted shrugged. “It’s kind of a long walk out there and back.” He gestured toward a wide pasture that seemed to reach to the horizon, then began walking.

“Is it?” she asked, following.

“Kind of. Almost a mile.” He paused. “Do you ride? We could saddle up some horses and ride out that way and maybe beyond. I’ll show you the whole ranch if you’d like, tell you its history.”

“No, I don’t ride,” she blurted. Really, it might have been fun to learn. She’d been on a horse before at summer camps during her childhood and she’d enjoyed it. But riding around the ranch felt a little too cozy for her. She was here for business. That was all.

“I’ll have to teach you someday,” Ted went on, continuing their journey away from the house, past a stable, and out into the wilderness. “Unless you’re planning to stay holed up in town all the time, riding is an essential skill in these parts.”

Laura snorted. “‘In these parts.’ You sound like a real cowboy.”

“Technically, I’m a rancher. But I’ll accept cowboy in a pinch.” He grinned, sending her a look that was both sheepish and sexy as hell.

“Oh. Okay.” She laughed, definitely sounding like a dork. “Is that what you’ve always done? Ranching?”

“Yeah, pretty much.” He shrugged, smiled, and glanced around at the sprawling prairie around them. “This land has been in my family since forever. Working it, raising cattle and all, has been what I’ve known I’d do with my life since day one.”

“Huh.” She studied him as they walked.

“What?” he asked with a self-conscious, sideways look.

“Nothing.” She shook her head. “It’s just that I can’t imagine knowing what I was going to do with my life from the day I was born.”

“So you weren’t born a rocket scientist and dinosaur expert?” he teased.

She raised a hand. “Technically, I’m not a scientist. I’m more of an engineer. And no, I discovered my interest in rocket design after the Army reassigned me to a desk job post-injury. Remember?”

“Right.” He nodded. “And the dinosaurs?”

An old, hollow quiver passed through her heart. “That was more because of Blake.”

“Your brother who died?” he asked in a reverent hush.

She nodded, eager to change the subject. “Isn’t knowing what you’re going to do with your life from the time you are born a really old fashioned kind of thing?”

He must have sensed that she didn’t want to talk about Blake, because he launched right into, “Well, yeah, I guess. But it never bothered me. I love ranching. I ‘get’ cattle.”

“You get cattle?” She arched a brow, so tempted to make a joke.

“Don’t laugh. There’s a complex science to animal behavior. It helps to know all the ins and outs of your job.”

“True.” She nodded, conceding the point.

Ted glanced out at the land around them again before continuing with, “To tell you the truth, it’s been a harder job than I would have expected. At least, until recently.”

“Oh? How hard? And what changed recently?” She swayed closer to him as they walked. She was genuinely interested in the answer. Also genuinely interested in whatever brand of after shave he wore. She might have to write a thank you letter to the manufacturer.

Ted swiped his cowboy hat off his head, ran the back of his wrist across his forehead, then put his hat back on. “The beef market is tricky in the best of times. We’ve been in a bit of a market slump these last few years. There are a couple of big corporations that have been making it harder and harder for the little guys, like us, to get by. Even though we have an agreement to sell to a distributor.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?” In fact, Laura knew nothing about the cattle industry. Every bit of anxiety she had about Ted getting the wrong idea about whether or not they should be together vanished. She always did like learning about new things.

“It’s good,” he started, not sounding so sure, “but it also means that we’re stuck when it comes to negotiating prices. For a while there, the price we were getting per head wasn’t enough to cover expenses, especially the year we lost a chunk of the herd to a virus.”

“That sounds terrible.”

“It was,” he said in a grim voice. “But we recovered. And thanks to Scott, we’re in a really good place.”

Laura blinked. “Scott Martin? My boss?”

Ted grinned. “My future brother-in-law, you mean.”

His smile was contagious. “So what did Scott do?”

“He bought a corner of land from us,” Ted explained. “And while that drove Casey nuts at first, it meant that we were able to pay off the last of the mortgage.”

“That is a good thing.” Inside of her, she could feel the excitement radiating off Ted.

“More than you know,” he said. “After over twenty years of the bank owning most of our family’s land, as of two months ago, we own it all, fair and square, again.”

“That’s fantastic. I’m so happy for you guys.” And she was. There didn’t seem to be enough stories of the underdog winning these days. “Do you have any plans to expand or are you just going to keep doing things the way they’ve been done?”

“We’re not sure,” Ted said. “The industry is always changing, and there are all sorts of things we could do to keep up. They take capital, though, and just because we’ve paid off the mortgage doesn’t mean we suddenly have money growing on trees.”

“There aren’t a lot of trees out here,” Laura agreed with a grin.

“Nope. So unless something else comes along—and frankly, I don’t think we can expect another lucky windfall any time soon—it’s business as usual.”

He slowed down and came to a stop near a cluster of bushes. A thin stream wound its way through the mostly barren and scrubby landscape. Far up its course, a dozen or so cattle were drinking out of the stream. To Laura, who had grown up in fertile, Midwestern splendor, the entire area looked bleak and unvaried.

“Here we are,” Ted said, extending his arms to the side. “Welcome to the bone.”

Laura furrowed her brow in confusion and looked around. There wasn’t anything there. The bushes and the tiny stream, yes. Other than that, the ground around her held nothing but sandy, beige dirt, scrubby plants, and—

She gasped when she saw it protruding from the ground.

* * *

“No way.” Laura sucked in a breath and lunged toward the bone.

Ted felt a moment of uncertainty as she dropped to her knees, disregarding her clothes in a way he’d never seen a woman do, and brushed at the loose dirt around the bone.

“No way,” she repeated with even more emphasis.

“Do you think it’s something?” He stepped toward her and crouched by her side, staring at the bone.

She didn’t answer at first. She brushed away with her bare hands. And they were nice hands. Small, but with a sense of strength about them. And no silly manicures, like women seemed to be so into. The bone was the same as it always was—nothing but a long, dark rock, worn a bit by sun and wind.

“I’m not sure when I first noticed it,” he said as she brushed, going so far as to dig into the hard-packed dirt with her unmanicured nails. “It definitely wasn’t there when I was a kid playing out this way. Or rather, it probably was, but it wasn’t uncovered. Or maybe I just didn’t see it. I figure the wind and natural erosion have been working away at it for a while.

“It’s definitely a bone and not just a rock,” Laura said, talking to herself as much as to him. “Probably a femur. Look, this part here is the knee joint.” She stopped picking and brushing away the dirt around the exposed part of the bone and ran her hands along the flat, dry dirt on either side of the bone. “The rest of it could be here, just under the surface. There could be a hip bone here—” She touched a part of the ground about a yard from the exposed bone. “—and maybe a tibia, fibula, or foot bones here.” She rocked in the other direction, laying a hand reverently over the ground in the other direction. Then she settled back on her haunches, letting out a long breath. “There’s a chance the whole thing could be under there.”

“So, you think it’s really a dinosaur fossil?” He took his hat off and ran a hand through his hair.

“Yeah,” she answered with enthusiasm. A second later, she tempered that enthusiasm with, “Of course, this could be all there is of it. It’s far, far more common to find fragments of bones than it is to find complete skeletons. In fact, even partial skeletons are ridiculously rare.”

“But it’s definitely a fossil.”

She turned her head to face him at last. Her smile was so giddy it sent bolts of lightning straight to his gut. “Oh yeah.”

“You’re kidding.” He let out a laugh and tossed his hat aside, switching from a crouch to kneeling and digging at the bone with his hands. “Let’s uncover it to see what we’ve got.”

“Wait, wait, wait!” She reached out to stop him, grabbing his wrists and pulling his hands back. Her touch was firm and her fingers strong. And clearly, she had no idea what a touch like that did to him. “There’s a right way to dig up fossils and a wrong way.”

“Really?” his mouth twitched to a wry grin. She was speaking to him like a teacher now. He kinda liked that too.

“Yeah.” She shifted her weight to kneel beside him, then she bent over and brushed gently against the dirt surrounding the rock. “Since you never know what you’re about to uncover, you have to tread lightly. Or dig lightly in this case.”

“Like this?” He reached down, positioning his hands near hers, and imitated her feather-light strokes.

“Yeah, like that.”

They swept at the dirt in silence for a few seconds. It wasn’t as hard as it looked. In fact, the kind of gentle touch that digging out a fossil required reminded him a heck of a lot of the way he liked to stroke a woman’s body when he was making love. He wouldn’t have minded stroking Laura like that at all.

Heat infused him. He debated whether to do something about it, from touching Laura’s hand to outright kissing her, when she charged on with, “Of course, you don’t have to work like this all the time. Once you establish what you’re dealing with, you can be a little rougher in how you do it.”

His dick jerked with the images of doing it a little rougher that came to his mind. He had to shift his position to keep his reaction on the down-low, and remind himself that Laura had turned him down for a date twice now. “Gotcha,” he said, voice harsher than it should have been.

They worked in silence for another minute before Laura blew out a breath and said, “I really, really think we have something here.”

“So do I,” Ted said before he could think better of it. He grinned at Laura, blood pumping hard.

“Do you think—” She stopped dead as she glanced up at him. Her face pinched into a surprised expression, and she blushed. “What’s that look for?”

“Nothing.” Nothing except the fact that he wanted to roll her to her back right there in the dirt and kiss her until she begged him for more bad bone jokes.

She continued to stare at him for a few minutes, eyes narrowed, before shaking her head and taking a breath. “What I was going to say was, do you think it’d be okay if I came back tomorrow with my excavation kit?”

“Yes,” Ted answered instantly, then blinked. “Wait, an excavation kit? What does that involve?”

She pushed herself to her feet and stood. He stood with her, hoping the evidence of what she did to him wasn’t too stupidly noticeable.

“It’s a couple of small shovels, a set of brushes, a pick or two. Oh, and my fossil books.”

“Oh.” He laughed fitting his hat back on his head. “I thought you were talking about a backhoe or something.”

She laughed with him. “No, no, nothing nearly that grand. Just hand tools.”

“Then you’re absolutely welcome to come back. I can’t wait to see what you uncover.” And if she was going to be around him and the ranch for any length of time, he couldn’t wait to see if he would be able to break her down and get her to say yes to dinner.

“This is so exciting,” she said with a squeal that almost had him squealing as well. “People wonder why I like fossils so much, but this is it. This is the reason right here. You get just a little hint, but you’ve got no idea what’s really under there. Most of the fun is making that discovery, figuring out exactly what’s under the surface.”

“I can absolutely identify with that,” Ted agreed with a laugh. He had a feeling his summer had just taken a turn for the better. He was all about excavating Laura Kincade to find out what was underneath her surface—literally and figuratively.