Masoud left Kelsie’s house feeling a little self-conscious about the wet shirt slung over his shoulder. But there really was no one around to see him walk back to his house, Leila happily trotting along beside him, so it didn’t really matter.

He hadn’t expected to run into his new neighbor on their morning walk, and although he’d admired her beauty the day before, he certainly hadn’t been prepared for the sizzle of attraction he felt around her.

Which had nothing to do with the fact that he’d taken off his shirt in her kitchen. He hadn’t thought before he’d acted; he just hadn’t wanted to drip water all over her kitchen floor.

Masoud sighed and Leila looked up at him.

He shook his head as he said, “I know, girl. Wouldn’t the board be delighted to see me now? The big, bad, sopping-wet, sink-fixing CEO.” Leila shook her ears at him and he laughed. “You’re not impressed either, are you?”

Back at his house, changed into a dry shirt, Masoud sat down at the computer and pulled up his project checklist. His assistant had sent him more of the county surveys last night; he made a note to stop by the courthouse later that day to talk with the county assessor. He needed additional information on who owned certain plots of land, and what that land was worth.

He and the board had already agreed to a project budget that included buying out Rancho Cordero. His lawyers and accountants were working on individual offers based on how much of the land was owned and what that land was used for.

It was possible that some of the townspeople might want to stay and keep running businesses there, although the actual locations of those shops and restaurants would probably need to be moved. It wouldn’t be a problem to hire miners to work the mine, but it would give him an advantage to be able to offer the workers access to amenities. But no one would be allowed to live within a certain distance of the mine; that area encompassed the entire limits of the town.

His first step was to dig a test site, something he’d chosen this house for. If he was correct, this part of town was built on an old dry lake bed. The lake had been gone for many hundreds of years when the town was built—in fact, the lake had probably been dry since long before Europeans came to this continent.

Lithium wasn’t a difficult mineral to mine, and it was incredibly valuable. But the process was disruptive to the local area, since multiple wells had to be dug, groundwater was pumped up through the wells, and then the mineral was separated and the water pumped back into the ground or left to evaporate.

There weren’t many towns in the county, and Rancho Cordero was the only one sitting more or less on top of the potential mine site. The next closest town was twenty miles away, and although Masoud expected to have to play nice with their town government as well, it would most likely be the place where the mine workers would live, so he didn’t expect it to be a problem.

His business partners hoped to build a processing facility here as well. That would be even more lucrative, since they wouldn’t have to pay to ship the raw mineral somewhere else to be turned into usable lithium. He already had several American and Canadian companies lined up for potential contracts to buy everything they could produce.

The state government was aware of his interest in building a mine in the area, as he’d already starting the permitting process, and had already agreed to smooth the process along, knowing the jobs it would bring to the state.

In any other place, he would have marched into the town and made the people who lived there an offer. It would have cost an insane amount of money, but given how much he potentially stood to make from the mine, it would have been worth it.

He was prepared to assert eminent domain if some of the town’s residents refused to accept his offer. The governor has assured him that as long as Masoud’s offer to the town was fair, his company would have the backing of the state government. That wasn’t his first choice; seizing the land instead of simply buying it would be a long, messy process. He’d rather overwhelm the town with an offer they wouldn’t want to refuse.

At the same time, he wasn’t sure how much lithium was actually there. And doing a normal mineral survey would tip his hand before he was ready, thus the stealth operation to gauge both the potential yield of the mine and the mood of the town. He would dig a small test well on his new property, and there was the state-owned land he’d been given permission to survey, as well.

It would take a few weeks to get a better idea of how much of the mineral the land actually held. In that time, he could also learn what incentives might tilt the town in favor of selling. The sheer amount of money should do it, but he was also prepared to offer other concessions to sweeten the deal. If town was going to have to sell and move, he was prepared to do whatever it took to make that happen.

But he hadn’t expected to find a sense of history in the place, or be charmed by the beauty of the land.

Or the beauty of his neighbor.

Kelsie obviously cared a great deal about her hometown. She loved her home and her clinic and was providing a much-needed service to the area. But with the money he was prepared to offer the townspeople, she could go anywhere and practice. She could open another clinic and maybe even move the sheep to another, bigger farm.

He shoved aside the doubts and focused on the positives. If the lithium was there, he could change the lives of the townspeople by offering them a chance to do better someplace else.