The Rancher's Only Love

Chapter One

Jax Noble didn’t have time to deal with a trespasser.

He was already running flat out, and had way more to do than he wanted to deal with.

He, Rowdy and Dakota had so much work to do before they could move on to the next phase of getting their dude ranch up and running, and the last thing he wanted was to go creeping around the back forty of his own land trying to figure out what was going on.

And yet, here he was. Doing it.

“There is definitely someone here,” he sent a voice message to Rowdy and Dakota.

You armed? Rowdy texted back.

“With my left and right fist,” he said back.

He sighed and stopped the truck, right there in the middle of the road.

Three Brothers Ranch was remote. That was putting it mildly.

And that was the idea. What they were offering people was a chance to have a real wilderness experience.

They’d been working on accommodations that ranged from luxury to a real Oregon Trail experience for the last two years.

They had just about burned through the money they’d saved up for the place, to get it going, and of course, there were a few hiccups with the launch, so everything was feeling a bit spread thin.

But it was all happening. Probably. Most likely.

The trouble was, they were all a lot more used to life handing out hard knocks than prizes.

So the truth was, all three of them were waiting for the other cowboy boot to drop, every step of the way.

And last night, when Rowdy was pretty sure he spotted a tent set up when he was looking through binoculars to check out some of the mountain goats on the side of the hill at the back of beyond, Jax knew that he needed to check it out today.

And so, check it out he was.

There was a small tent. Very small. Red and dilapidated, one of the sides bowed in. It looked shabby—actually, that was a kind description. There was a cooking pot, and the remains of a campfire. And whoever had done this was damned lucky it wasn’t fire season, or he would’ve lost his temper.

Well, he was perilously close to losing his temper either way.

This just wasn’t the time. But then, it was really never the time to try him.

He’d been through enough. And now he was beginning his real life.

He’d spent years in the MMA fighting circuit, which was a ridiculous way to spend your time, and it had left him richer, but a little bit beaten up.

He, Rowdy and Dakota had all earned their fortune in different ways, and they had kept the promises they had made to each other about getting a ranch. A piece of land. About staying family.

They had been foster brothers, and then later had been moved into a group home together. They were the only consistent things in each other’s lives. And they decided that they were going to make a real life for each other. A real home. And so they’d done it.

Here in Clear Lake, Oregon. Out hundreds of miles from anything, a tiny town within view of the Idaho border surrounded by volcanic landscape, vast, barren mountains, glorious painted hills.

And apparently, trespassers.

He approached the tent slowly and without real trepidation. The truth was, he might’ve gotten out of the fighting game, but there wasn’t a single random person on the street he had to worry about beating him up. That wasn’t even realistic.

He was a champion. And he’d made his millions. Of course, they’d sunk millions into this place. All in the name of a dream and togetherness.

Maybe they were idiots. Yeah. As he approached the tent, he had to allow for the fact that they might be idiots.

“Hey there,” he said.

There was no response.

He paused and heard the sound of metal on rock. But he couldn’t see where it was coming from. The tent was pitched at the base of a large shale rock face. But for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out where the noise was coming from.

And then, he saw her.

The trespasser was a woman.

She popped her head up from behind some of the rocks, like a prairie dog. She had large glasses and straight brown hair. Then she grimaced, her eyes going wide when they saw him.

Her teeth were kind of large too.

The prairie dog comparison was apt.

“Oh.” She pushed her glasses back on her nose. “I’m so sorry. I really am very sorry.”

“This is private property, ma’am,” he said.

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. ”

“I think you were just trying to get away with sneaking around here.”

“I wasn’t. I was going to come and seek you out later today. Because I had determined that this was a good place for me to dig.”

“Are you all by yourself?”

“Yes. I prefer to work alone. I don’t like to have whole teams.”

“Got it.”

She was weird, and he had no idea if she was telling the truth. But then, he had no idea what reason she would have to lie. She didn’t look like anything other than what she was claiming to be. She looked, in fact, exactly like she had just stepped off the screen in a Jurassic Park movie.

Except, not as artfully styled.

Which was another indicator that she was probably on the up and up. This wasn’t paleontologist cosplay.

And she was offering him…money?

“How much is this grant?”

“Oh. It’s considerable.” She named a figure which about sent his eyebrows through the brim of his hat.

Well. They could do with an injection of cash. Until things got operational here, they were all investment and no revenue, and they’d spent a lot. A place this remote had to be self-contained to attract guests. Had to be all things to all people.

They were even getting an on-site store up and running through one of the local outfits—it had taken a lot of hard negotiation—but that wouldn’t be ready for another three weeks.

“I don’t want you camping out here,” he said.

They had some facilities that were ready to go, and he wasn’t comfortable leaving a small woman out here in the sun, with snakes and coyotes, cougars and who knew what the hell else. If she was going to pay, and handsomely at that, she might as well stay at the ranch.