Ted had never really regretted focusing on agriculture and animal husbandry throughout his education and ignoring things like history and geology. And he still didn’t exactly regret all the things he didn’t know, but he thought it would be fun to have Laura teach him what she knew. More than fun. But at the same time, it would have been nice to have half a clue what to expect, now that the bone he’d joked about for so long had turned out to be a real scientific discovery.

“How does she know it’s real?” Scott asked as he and Casey joined Ted and Roscoe for a family dinner that night.

“Are you kidding?” Casey told him. “Laura’s a total dinosaur nut. In fact, I’m surprised she became an engineer instead of a paleontologist.”

Ted’s brow inched up at his sister’s answer. At least until he remembered that, in fact, Casey had spent far more time hanging out with Laura in the last few months than he’d paid attention to.

“She’s traveled all over the world to various fossil sites,” Ted added, wondering if Casey knew that. “She’s been a part of digs on three continents.”

“Wow.” Scott straightened, pausing with his fork full of steak in mid-air. “I’ve worked with her for almost a year, and I didn’t know that.”

“How did you know it?” Casey asked, sending Ted a teasing wink.

“She told me the other day, at your engagement party.”

“Yeah, you told me you’d talked to her. I didn’t realize you’d talked to her.” Casey’s grin widened.

Ted wasn’t sure if he was in the mood to shut his sister’s needling down or to encourage her by admitting he was interested in Laura. That short circuit in his brain caused him to change the topic entirely. “She’s coming back tomorrow with her fossil excavating kit to dig a little deeper, literally and figuratively.”

“It’s not going to disturb the cattle, is it?” Roscoe asked.

“No, Dad, it’ll be fine.” At least, Ted hoped it’d be fine. “Laura said whatever is still underground could be a complete fossil, but it could also be just a few fragments.”

“Can you imagine if there really is a whole dinosaur under there?” Casey asked, digging in her mashed potatoes as if trying to uncover something. “Hello, little dinosaur. You in there?” When she uncovered a green bean that had slipped under the potatoes, she speared it and held it up with a laugh.

Ted chuckled along with her, the buzz in his chest hinting at just how exciting he found the whole thing. That in itself was odd. He had never gotten that excited about anything that wasn’t raising cattle, getting them to market, and managing the meager profits of the ranch. It was a shock, really. He hadn’t realized how narrow his existence had been until something came along to expand his horizons.

“What happens if it is a fossil?” Roscoe asked as Ted finished the last of his steak. “I don’t want any more trouble for the ranch if this is one of those things where the government comes in and seizes what’s ours.”

Ted shook his head. “Laura mentioned something, and then I looked it up online later, but in the U.S., if you discover a fossil on your property, that’s your fossil. Whoever owns the land owns the fossil.”

“That’s convenient,” Casey said, standing to carry her and Scott’s empty plates over to the counter. “The last thing I want is for anything else annoying to happen to this land.” She sent Scott a teasing look as she returned to the table to take Ted and Roscoe’s plates.

“Hey. I’m the best thing that’s happened to this ranch in ages,” Scott teased her right back. “Or don’t you like having your mortgage paid off?”

Casey didn’t have a ready answer. Instead she hmphed, then kissed him before taking her handful of plates to the counter. She returned to the table with a platter of brownies. “I’m pretty sure the ranch is safe now,” she said, “but what I’m more interested in is the fact that my big brother has a girlfriend.”

Roscoe’s brow inched up, and Scott leaned back in his chair with a laugh.

Ted laughed with him, but said, “I do not have a girlfriend.” Not that he wouldn’t have been perfectly happy for Laura to claim that title.

“Are you sure?” Casey narrowed her eyes at him. “Rumor has it that the two of you went out for ice cream after baseball practice the other day.”

Ted sighed and turned to Scott. “Don’t you just love living in a small town? If you sneeze in Haskell, five minutes later, everyone knows you have pneumonia.”

Scott chuckled as he reached for a brownie. “Yeah, but the two of you did look awfully cozy when you left the field.”

Did they? Ted selected his own brownie and took a bite, kind of liking the fact that people were pairing him and Laura already.

“The problem is,” he admitted after chewing his bite, “Laura doesn’t seem to want to put any sort of label on whatever it is between us.”

“What do you mean?” Casey frowned, defensive.

Ted shrugged. “I’ve asked her out twice now, and both times she said no.”

That brought a round of surprised snorts and confusion from everyone else at the table.

“That doesn’t seem right,” Casey muttered, picking walnuts off the top of her brownie.

Struck by a fit of inspiration, and the fact that Scott probably knew more about Laura than he did, he asked, “Has Laura ever mentioned anything about past boyfriends at work? Or about being interested in anyone?”

Scott furrowed his brow and took another bite of brownie. His thoughts turned to a shrug and a shake of his head. “Not that I can remember. She’s always either on task with the rocket propulsion system or going on about the latest dinosaur discoveries. Or things like TV and sports, like everyone talks about.”

“No mention of men at all though?” Ted had a hard time deciding if he liked that or if it didn’t bode well for him.

“None,” Scott said apologetically.

“What about when you’re hanging out with her?” he asked Casey.

“Not really.” Casey leaned back in her chair. “Huh. I never really thought about that. We’ve all been so busy talking about me and Scott and Melody and Will. Laura never mentions guys at all.”

“You don’t think she, uh, plays for the other team, do you?” The thought was downright horrific to Ted, for no reason other than that Laura being a lesbian would be an incredible loss to, well, him.

“No, she definitely likes men,” Scott said. “If she didn’t, I’m pretty sure she would have just come out with something like that the other day when we were all talking about the two of you.”

Ted jerked straighter. “You guys were talking about us?”

Scott sent him a sheepish smile. “Yeah, sorry about that. Natalie started it. But you’ll be happy to know just about the entire team encouraged Laura to go out with you.”

“And she still said no?” That made Ted feel about as small as the pebbles he and Laura had swept away from the bone.

“She thinks she’s undatable,” Scott confessed with the tone of a man who knew he was telling tales when he shouldn’t have been.

“Bullshit.” Ted hated to swear in front of his dad, but that was the only possible reaction to a statement like that. “She’s about as datable as they come. She’s smart and funny and interesting, and she’s pretty too, and not in that fake, glamorous way that I hate.”

“That’s what we all tried to tell her,” Scott said. “Who knows how a woman’s mind works?”

“I’m going to assume you mean that in a good way,” Casey said in a flat voice. “Otherwise, you’d be in serious trouble.”

Scott laughed, pink coming to his cheeks. “Sorry, babe. But don’t you think Laura is being ridiculous too?”

It was clearly a diversionary tactic to get Scott out of a world of hurt, but it worked. “Absolutely,” she said. “Any girl in their right mind would be happy to go out with my big brother.” She made the same kind of face at Ted as she had when they were kids roughhousing.

“So what’s the problem?” Roscoe asked. “Why won’t she go out with you?”

“I dunno, Dad.” Ted sighed. “She kind of implied she doesn’t deal well with surprise questions, but there has to be more to it than that.”

“You’ll figure it out.” Roscoe patted his arm across the corner of the table. “Don’t give up until you do.”

“I won’t, Dad, I won’t.”

He just hoped he’d be able to figure out the key to breaking Laura down sooner rather than later.

* * *

It was an amazing relief to Laura to make it over the initial weirdness of being around Ted. It helped that she had a mission in front of her. The fossil wasn’t going to excavate and discover itself. And even though Ted had insisted on helping her, all of the wriggly, anxious, sense of impending doom that being around a guy who was way out of her league gave her was gone. Well, almost gone. She still got a little hot in key places when she looked at him in his form-fitting jeans, t-shirt, and cowboy hat. But there was more to life than ogling sexy cowboys.

“Hold on, hold on!” She held out a hand and rushed over to where Ted was about to jam her shovel into the ground around the protruding bone.

“What, am I doing it wrong?” He took a half step back, regarding her with a mixture of curiosity and embarrassment.

“No, not exactly. I just want to make sure you keep at least six inches away from the fossil itself if you’re using a shovel.”

“Yes ma’am.” Ted’s face lit up with a smile. “I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.”

Was that flirting? That definitely felt like flirting. Then again, Ted didn’t know what he was doing, and he was looking to her to tell him. All things considered, she kind of liked that.

“Since we don’t know what’s under there, be careful,” she said. “But not too careful or else we’ll be here all day.”

“Okay,” Ted laughed. “Like this?” He held the shovel poised above the ground, waited for her nod, then brought the pointed end of the shovel-head down on the hard-packed earth.

The dirt cracked and crumbled. The shovel didn’t sink very far, though.

“Oh boy.” Laura sighed and crouched to dig away the loosened dirt with her hands. At least she’d put gloves on this time. There was a chance Ted wouldn’t think she was a total mess, like he probably had the other day. “Looks like it’s going to be super fun digging through this stuff.” She loaded her words with sarcasm.

“It hasn’t rained in a while. Plus, the dirt is always sort of hard out here,” he said, and she was fairly certain he mumbled, “Like other things.”

Laura’s cheeks flared hot. Innuendo. Did she like that? Yeah, she kind of liked it. When it was directed at other people. Great, now I’m going to silently make everything into a boner joke.

“Well,” she said aloud. “There’s nothing for it but to get in there and hammer away until we’re satisfied.”

Ugh. Was she flirting now too? Bad, Laura, bad.

She peeked up at Ted to find he’d covered his mouth with one gloved hand to hide what she hoped was a grin and not a grimace of disgust. But no, his eyes were shining with mirth. Which may or may not have been a good thing.

“I’ll start over on this side, and you keep going there.” She pushed herself to stand and stepped over to the other side of the bone. There. No innuendo in that.

They set to work, and mercifully, Ted didn’t try to crack any more jokes or slip in any more teasing sideways looks. He stabbed the ground with his shovel while she dropped to her knees and chipped at the hard-packed dirt with her spade. They worked in silence for several minutes, breaking up the dirt around the fossil.

It didn’t take long for Laura to clear away more of the leg bone, enough to tell that it was exceptionally well-preserved with minimal crumbling. After fifteen minutes of intense, focused digging, she came across a second rock-hard shape.

“I think there’s another bone here,” she told Ted, perking up.

“Where?” He left the spot where he was digging and came around to kneel next to her. The heat of his body next to hers was noticeable over and above the heat of the afternoon.

“Right here, see?” She dug and brushed away loosened dirt and tufts of rugged grass. Ted reached into the hole she’d created and pulled away dirt too. “Can you feel it?”

His hands bumped and brushed against hers as they worked to clear the new part of the fossil. In the back of her mind, Laura registered the intimacy of the gesture, but her excitement at what they might find was too big for her to bother with her hint of self-consciousness.

Their hands continued to bump and twine. “I do feel it,” Ted said.

Laura peeked sideways at him, but where she expected to find him winking at her or finding some other way to embarrass the heck out of her, he wore a genuine expression of interest in what they were doing.

“Should I shift over to this side to dig?” he asked.

Laura bit her lip, staring at the slightly rounded lump they’d managed to uncover. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Great. Just tell me where to dig and how much force to use.”

“Right here.” She patted the ground near to the hole she’d already started. “And not too hard.”

They went back to work, again in relative silence. The ground was reluctant to give way, even with Ted shoveling where Laura directed him. It wasn’t the soft, moist soil she had grown up with, that was for sure. Wyoming dirt was as stubborn as the people who lived on it. It was worth it, though. Within another twenty minutes, they had cleared the ground around the second part of the fossil. It was definitely a hip bone. That gave them a femur and a bit of pelvis. There was still too much dirt to see the ball joint properly, but the more they worked, the more confident she was that it was there.

“Do you think it’s a T-Rex?” Ted asked as they moved on to clear the ground on the side where she hoped to find vertebrae or a tail.

She laughed. “I doubt it. T-Rex get all the glory, but we’re far more likely to find a much smaller raptor, or even more likely, a plant-eater. See?” She brushed more dirt away from the side of the pelvic bone. “Way too small to be a T-Rex.”

“That’s small?” Ted paused in his digging to lean against his shovel and catch his breath. “It’s way bigger than a cow pelvis.”

She glanced up at him in surprise. Short-lived surprise. “Yeah, I guess you would have experience with animal bones,” she reasoned aloud. “What with growing up on the ranch and all.”

“Yet another advantage of being raised around cattle,” he said, wiping his brow, then getting back to digging. “I learned a lot about animals.”

She wanted to have something to say to that, but she just didn’t. The only thing to do was to work on.

At least until Ted let out a heavy, impatient breath and said, “Okay, you’ve got to tell me. How did you really get so interested in dinosaurs? I know you said it had something to do with your brother who died, so if you don’t want to talk about it, I’ll understand. But I’d really like to know.”

Laura rocked back in surprised. “You’re really interested?”

“Yeah,” he said with a sound that was equal parts laughter and exasperation.

“Oh.” She blinked, shrugged, and went back to digging and clearing dirt. It would be far easier to tell the story if she didn’t have to look at him while doing it. “So I mentioned Blake died of leukemia, right?” she began.

“You did.” Ted returned to shoveling as well, which made it almost okay to tell the story. She might not even cry.

She focused on the strain of her muscles as she dug. “It was tough, you know?”

“I can imagine.”

“The whole family went through his illness and treatment.”

“Like Mom,” Ted nearly whispered.

Laura paused to glance up at him, sending him a look of solidarity. Yeah, he knew.

“Do you have any other siblings?” he asked on when she stayed silent.

Laura shook her head and went back to work. “No, it was just me and Blake, Mom and Dad.”

“Shit,” he whispered. “That makes it worse.”

“Yeah.” She took a moment to swallow her emotion. She had a story to tell, after all, and it was about dinosaurs, not grief. “Well, Blake loved dinosaurs. That was the thing that he focused on through the whole chemotherapy ordeal. We read books about dinosaurs and visited natural history museums when he was well enough and all that. We even started a correspondence with this top-tier paleontologist, Dr. Cheryl Ashford from UC Berkley. And every time he had to go through some sort of treatment, he’d get a toy dinosaur as a reward. As the collection grew bigger, we would play with them all the time.”

“That’s…” Ted let out a breath. “I don’t know what that is.”

“Oh, it was really special,” she said, unable to look up and meet his eyes as old grief seeped out from the part of her heart where it lived. “Blake and I were less than two years apart in age. I was older. We did a lot together. I was with him for the best and the worst of it.” And the worst had been more terrible than she wanted to remember. More terrible than she wanted to repeat.

She took a deep breath, rolled her shoulders, focused on uncovering the fossil in front of her, and went on. “After Blake died, I kept all of his toys and things. I lined the toy dinos up in my room as a tribute to him. Most girls my age had posters of boy bands and stuff, but I had shelves and shelves of Blake’s menagerie.”

“Wow.”

Laura ventured a look up at Ted. His eyes were focused on the ground he was digging, but she could see how deeply her story had affected him.

“Yep.” She sighed, closing her eyes to send her love to her brother, wherever he was. When she opened them and took a cleansing breath, she said, “I kept in touch with Dr. Ashford too. One thing led to another, and all that reading and research I did as a way to keep Blake close to me turned out to be really interesting. I started doing more in-depth research than me and Blake ever did. I took some college courses in paleontology, spent a summer helping Dr. Ashford with her research, and before I knew it, that was my focus while earning my associates degree. I did some internships out here in the West and other places. Then I joined the Army.”

“And got interested in rockets,” Ted finished the thought.

She chuckled. “Yeah. But in my defense, there are far more jobs available and more money to be made as an aerospace engineer than there is as a dinosaur hunter. It was a strategic move, designed to stop me from being homeless and living off of ramen noodles.”

“Practicality.” Ted nodded. “I like that. I like it a lot.”

As if someone had flipped a switch, Laura was back to feeling self-conscious again. He didn’t mean he liked it, did he? Liked her? “Um, well, oh, okay,” she fumbled.

Ted laughed and shook his head. “One of these days, you’re going to have to get used to the idea that you’re an interesting and attractive woman, Laura Kincade.”

“Who, me?” she joked by rote, heartrate speeding up.

Ted stopped shoveling for a moment and sent her a flat stare. “Am I going to have to organize a self-esteem intervention?”

“It’s not self-esteem,” she insisted, face burning. She chipped away at the fossil with her spade even harder. “I just know who I am and who I’m not.”

Ted hummed in doubt and stabbed his shovel into the hole he was digging.

“Don’t ‘hmm’ me like that.” She rocked back on her haunches and pointed her spade at him. “I know what I’m talking about.”

He cleared his throat, but still didn’t say anything.

“Stop it,” she said, brushing even faster at the fossil with the side of her spade. Fast enough to be careless. That was never a good thing.

“Stop what?” Ted teased her.

“Well, teasing me for one.”

He chuckled. A second later, he stopped and stood straighter. “Okay, I’ll stop teasing you if you agree to go out to dinner with me.”

“What?” She twisted to face him. “No.”

“Suit yourself.” He shrugged and went back to digging. “I gave you a way out of it, but I guess this means I’ll just have to keep poking fun at you.”

“That hardly seems fair,” she grumbled. Although the entire conversation was doing funny things to her insides. Her low down insides. Holy crap, you aren’t flirting back at him, are you? She definitely wasn’t supposed to be doing that.

“Just say you’ll go out with me, and it will all be over. If not?” He tilted his head to the side as he tossed a shovelful of dirt to the side. “I’m going to have to keep telling you how fascinating you are, how everything you say makes me think, in a good way, how your eyes remind me of a clear, blue, winter sky, and how sexy you look when you’re covered with dirt.”

“I’m not—” Laura squeaked, unable to finish.

“What, covered with dirt? Or sexy? Because I’ve got news for you, you’re both.” He laughed.

“No one is sexy when they’re covered with dirt,” she insisted. Although Ted wasn’t too shabby with a fine layer of the stuff dusting him now.

“That’s so far from being true that I—”

He stopped suddenly, his entire expression changing. Laura knew why as soon as she heard the chink of his shovel hitting something that wasn’t dirt. It was a sound she knew well. Instantly, her pulse raced.

“What is it?” She pushed away from the hole she’d been digging, scurrying toward Ted, her spade in one hand.

Ted dropped to his knees as she reached him, and side-by-side they dug with their hands at the ground he’d loosened. Once again, the distracting dance of their hands bumping and overlapping threatened to pull Laura away from what was important. She refused to let it, though. She refused to feel anything as their shoulders brushed together and as she leaned heavily into him at one point when she lost her balance.

“Whoa,” she gasped as they pushed aside enough dirt to reveal what Ted had hit. “Oh my gosh!”

“What?” Ted dug twice as fast, uncovering the dull, dark fossil. “What is it?”

“It’s….” Laura bit her lip, digging a little more before she felt comfortable floating the theory that had instantly come to her. “It’s another pelvic bone.”

Ted’s brow inched up, but he didn’t know the half of it. Or at least the half of what it could be. “Two dinosaurs?”

“Two is better than one,” she said.

As soon as she was certain of what she was seeing, she rocked back and sat with a thump in the dirt. She glanced to the pelvis and femur she’d already started to uncover, then to the one Ted had just discovered. They were close together. That could mean all sorts of things. It could be a family group, or it could be something else. Either way, her instincts told her they were on to something special.

“Should we keep digging?” Ted asked. His focus was entirely on the fossils once more.

“Yeah,” Laura said, slowly. “We definitely should. But I’m starting to think we might also want to call in a professional to take a look at this.”

Ted shifted to sit by her side, his handsome features made somehow more charming by the surprise they now displayed. “Is there such a thing as a professional dinosaur identifier?”

“Uh, yeah, they’re called paleontologists.” She elbowed him in the arm.

“Right.” He nudged her back. “And I suppose you know a bunch of them.”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

Ted laughed. “Do you have them on speed-dial?”

“I thought you weren’t going to tease me anymore.” She arched a brow at him.

“Only if you agree to go out with me.” He winked at her.

“Okay.” She sighed, trying and failing to ignore the rush of bantering with him.

He brightened up like the sky after a storm. “Really? You’ll go out with me?”

“No! All right, I guess that means you’re going to tease me,” she said with a smirk. That smirk quickly turned sheepish. “Because yes, I do actually have a couple of paleontologists on speed-dial.”

Ted laughed out loud. He rocked back with the gesture, and as he did, he lost his balance. He grabbed Laura for support. She had to hold onto him to keep herself from tumbling over too. Her heart was already tumbled enough as it was.

Ted didn’t seem to notice. He righted himself, but kept his body way too close to hers. “All right,” he said with a shrug, picking up a handful of dirt and letting it sift through his fingers. “Call one of your paleontologist friends and have them come out.”

“I’ll call Dr. Ashford. Although she’ll probably kill me for not calling to catch up with her sooner,” she said. “In the meantime, we can keep digging.”

“Of course we can keep digging.” He nodded, sending her a look that went beyond teasing. It was sultry, borderline seductive. “I know one thing at least.”

“What?” Her voice threatened to give out.

He nodded to the piles of dirt and holes they’d made, but his eyes stayed locked to hers. “We’ve really got something here.”